How a rabbi got caught up in a Belgian spy scandal

(JTA)—Moshe Aryeh Friedman may be mild-mannered, but the Antwerp rabbi certainly has a knack for publicity.

An anti-Zionist activist from New York, Friedman, 47, has been accused—falsely, he has said—of denying the Holocaust during a 2006 conference organized by then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran.

He has since repeatedly riled the Jewish community of the Belgian city where he has lived with his family since 2011.

In 2013, Friedman got a judge to force a Jewish school for girls to admit two of his boys—a blow directed at a congregation that treats him like a pariah.

This year...