Jailed judge asks for a masseuse - The Jewish Chronicle

Disgraced former judge Marcus Einfeld, who began his three-year jail sentence for perjury last week, started life in prison as he means to go on — by requesting a masseuse and a psychologist. Marcus Einfeld also asked for his cell door to be left open at night because he would be too hot. The judge was jailed for at least two years last week for lying under oath to avoid paying a £35 speeding fine in 2006. The New South Wales Corrective Services are unlikely to agree to Einfeld’s demands, but have allowed him a television in his cell. Einfeld has incensed members of his Sydney synagogue by dragging the shul into his dramatic fall from grace. Despite being refused access by the board of the Great Synagogue, TV cameras filmed an interview inside the sanctuary at the behest of the former judge on the eve of his sentencing. Einfeld, 70, apparently leaned on the choir master to allow the TV crew inside the shul while he, his son and other choristers sang Hebrew hymns. The one-hour documentary on the former high-flying lawyer was aired on Monday, forcing an irate Rosalind Fischl, the shul’s president, to apologise to congregants for the “breach of policy”, saying in an email that the TV crew filmed “without prior knowledge or consent of anyone on the board of management or the administrative staff”. During the documentary, Einfeld was filmed in the back seat of a car, apparently without a seat-belt, prompting NSW police to issue a statement saying they will be “reviewing footage to determine what action if any may be taken”. Meanwhile, in an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald this week, barrister Charles Waterstreet, a longtime associate of Einfeld, asked: “Has there ever been a more pernicious avalanche of bile and hate by the press directed at a man who spent the previous 70 years of his life attempting to build a better Australia, a better world? A less circumspect man than myself might have written that he is not the first Jew they have crucified.”