Australian Jews distraught over Chabad sex abuse hearings

By Dan Goldberg
Haaretz
February 10, 2015

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/.premium-1.641733

SYDNEY, Australia – A week from hell. That’s how dark these past seven days have been for the Australian Jewish community. The hearings at the Royal Commission into the child sexual abuse scandal have been suffused with acrimony and accusations, tragedy and trauma.

Unsurprisingly, the damning testimonies and explosive admissions have fuelled a barrage of bad publicity – in print, on radio, TV and online, where details of the sordid scandal are being streamed live.

The government-sponsored commission is probing how leaders of Melbourne’s Yeshivah Centre and its Sydney counterpart responded to multiple claims of sexual abuse at both Chabad institutions in the 1980s and 1990s. David Cyprys and David Kramer, former employees at Yeshivah in Melbourne, were convicted and jailed in 2013; Daniel “Gug” Hayman, a one-time director of Sydney’s Yeshiva, was convicted in 2014 with a suspended sentence.

If you missed the first week of the two-week commission, here are the horrific headlines, and the fallout:

• Rabbi Moshe Gutnick, a Chabad rabbi in Sydney who has campaigned for the victims, accused a senior rabbi at Yeshiva in Sydney in the 1980s of being a liar and described those involved as “bastards” with “blood on their hands.”

“I’m prepared to say that Rabbi [Boruch] Lesches lied when he said that he didn’t know about the abuse,” Gutnick told the commission last week. Lesches, who now lives in America, was a senior official at Chabad’s headquarters in Sydney at the time of the abuse. It is understood he will not appear before the commission despite attempts by Australian officials to bring him in.