Jewish Leader Says Rabbis Will Report Abuse

Sky News
February 12, 2015

http://www.skynews.com.au/news/national/2015/02/12/jewish-leader-says-rabbis-will-report-abuse.html

A senior Australian rabbi doesn't think any of his peers these days would fail to tell police about reports of child sex abuse.

Rabbi Mordechai Gutnick has told a royal commission into child sexual abuse he never felt there was a religious, or Jewish community, barrier to reporting sex abuse cases to authorities.

His fellow rabbis today would agree with this view, but this was not always the case, he said.

'I cannot think of a rabbi, that I know of, that would not agree with this policy of reporting any such things to police and acting correctly and properly with the victims of abuse,' Rabbi Gutnick told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on Thursday.

'That's me personally - 40 years ago, there might have been rabbis who didn't have that view.'

Rabbi Gutnick has been a rabbi since the 1970s, and is president of the Rabbinical Council of Victoria.

The commission is examining the response of Jewish colleges in Melbourne and Sydney to the sexual abuse of several students by men attached to the schools in the 1980s and 1990s.

Victims have told the commission they felt silenced by the Jewish principal of 'mesirah', which in essence says a Jew should not dob in another Jew to a non-Jewish authority.

They have spoken of being shunned by the Jewish community after revealing their experiences.

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