A lawyer for 19 former students at Yeshiva University High School for Boys filed a federal lawsuit Monday claiming that two former rabbis there carried out hundreds of acts of sexual abuse during the 1970s and 80s, and that the university’s leaders covered it up.

According to a 148-page complaint lodged in Federal District Court in White Plains, the abuse included one case, in 1980, of a rabbi who sodomized a 16-year-old student with a toothbrush in his dormitory room in Upper Manhattan. Another boy claims a different rabbi abused him at least 30 times, in his office and the school’s halls, between 1978 and 1982, the lawsuit says.

The lawyer, Kevin T. Mulhearn, said that the depth of the abuse, which the plaintiffs claim occurred between 1969 and 1989, did not come to light until The Jewish Daily Forward published articles about it beginning in December. The lawsuit, echoing The Forward’s reporting, said administrators of Yeshiva University, which runs the high school, brushed off complaints about the two rabbis for years, and after they left the school, the university did not notify their future employers about the complaints. One of the men, Rabbi George Finkelstein, went on to work at a Jewish day school near Miami for several years.

“Their abuse should have been avoided with a bare minimum of responsibility and compassion for the children in their charge,” Mr. Mulhearn said in an interview on Monday.