The chairman of the Judaic Religious Association of Belarus, Yury Dorn, has gone on trial for alleged bribe-taking.
Yury Dorn was arrested in March for allegedly accepting $13,000 for arranging the lease of non-residential property owned by his association.
On the first day of trial on December 10, prosecutors said that Dorn is also charged with tax evasion, forgery, abuse of office, and the illegal destruction of documents. Dorn has also been accused of illegally disassembling a historic building in western Belarus and exporting it to the United States.
The building belonged to The Hafetz Haim, a leader of the Jewish community of Poland and Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
It took two hours for the prosecutor to read out the official charges.
