AUSTRALIA
The Age
February 1, 2013
Barney Zwartz
A LEADING rabbi who compared child sex abuse to diarrhoea – ”it’s embarrassing but nobody’s business” – will be sued in Jewish courts by a victim advocacy group that wants him to stand down.
In a lecture posted on YouTube but later removed, Rabbi Manis Friedman says that not reciting a blessing after eating cake is worse than being sexually abused, that victims learn ”an important lesson” from abuse, and suggests victims ”are not that damaged, cut it out”.
Rabbi Friedman is an emissary at large from the Chabad Lubavitch headquarters in New York, and has been generally regarded as a serious and moderate figure in the Orthodox movement. That movement, and particularly its Melbourne Yeshivah centre, has been embroiled in child sex abuse controversies.
Manny Waks, an abuse victim at Yeshivah himself in the 1980s and founder of the Tzedek advocacy group for Jewish abuse survivors, said on Thursday he had launched lawsuits against Rabbi Friedman in the Jewish court or Beth Din in Sydney and Crown Heights in Brooklyn, New York. The courts would decide which of them had jurisdiction.
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