he State Department of Health's No. 2 official violated the state ethics law by repeatedly accepting gifts and meals from two Brooklyn rabbis who were seeking access to other health officials in the Pataki administration, the State Ethics Commission said yesterday.

The commission said that Dennis P. Whalen, a 26-year state employee who is the Health Department's executive deputy commissioner, admitted that he had met with Rabbi Joseph Goldberger and Rabbi Joseph Menczer about two dozen times between 1996 and 1999, and that he had accepted gifts from them. The commission said that those gifts included two tickets to a Yankees baseball game, four Brooks Brothers shirts, a Mont Blanc pen and several meals.

At the same time, the commission said, Mr. Whalen "facilitated" meetings for the two rabbis, who had helped to raise an estimated $500,000 for George E. Pataki during his 1994 gubernatorial campaign, with other state health officials and various health care providers. The New York Times reported last year that the two rabbis were involved in several health-related ventures at the time, and were representing nursing homes with business pending before the Health Department, which regulates the health care industry.

Yesterday evening, the Health Department said in a statement that Mr. Whalen, who served as the agency's acting commissioner for several months in 1999, had been fined one week's salary; he earns $138,000 a year. The agency also said he had been ordered to reimburse "those from whom he accepted gifts as a disciplinary measure."

The statement added, "Mr. Whalen has been an exemplary employee, who came forward voluntarily and acknowledged a lapse in judgment in this case."

According to the Ethics Commission, Mr. Whalen attended a presentation on state ethics in late January 2000. The next day, it said, he "paid each rabbi $100 in an effort to offset some of the cost of the meals." It added, however, that the worth of those meals could not be determined because there are no existing receipts. In addition, it said, Mr. Whalen admitted to investigators that he had accepted gifts from the rabbis, and had declined to accept other gifts: three shirts and two pairs of earrings.

Walter C. Ayres, the spokesman for the Ethics Commission, said that the ethics law prohibits a state employee from accepting gifts from people who are lobbying or doing business with the agency for which the employee works. In cases where the gifts are worth less than $75, he said, the commission refers the matter to the head of the agency for whom the state employee works.

Yesterday's actions were the latest in a series of setbacks for the Health Department.

Last week, the Health Department announced that a senior official, Charles F. Murphy, had been suspended without pay for securing a job for his wife at a company that did business with his office. Another senior health official, Joseph Chiseri, was dismissed last year for belatedly reporting to his superiors that he had been offered cash by a businessman who had applications before the department to expand his adult day care operations.

That businessman, Lawrence Friedman, pleaded guilty earlier this year to charges that he had bilked the state in an elaborate Medicaid fraud scheme, and agreed to return $48 million.

Meanwhile, the state inspector general's office, which referred the Whalen and Murphy cases to the Ethics Commission, is continuing its inquiry into operations at the Health Department. Stephen Del Giacco, a spokesman for the inspector general, Roslynn R. Mauskopf, declined to discuss any details last night of that investigation, including where Rabbi Goldberger and Rabbi Menczer figure in the inquiry.

The two rabbis are members of a small Hasidic group in Brooklyn called the Pupa, which provided Mr. Pataki with critical support during his 1994 campaign. After Mr. Pataki's election, the two men became so ubiquitous at the Capitol lobbying officials, handing out gifts, and winning particular access to the Health Department that they became known as the Two Josephs.

But their access waned in later years, and aides to Governor Pataki said last year that the administration had forwarded information involving the two men to state investigators. A spokesman for Mr. Pataki did not return a telephone call seeking comment yesterday afternoon.