AUSTRALIA
Haaretz (Israel)
The wife of the chief Chabad rabbi in Sydney has apologized for offending a child sex abuse victim on the eve of Yom Kippur.
On Monday, Pnina Feldman said she regretted the email she had sent three days earlier to Manny Waks, who went public with his story of child sex abuse in the Jewish community, stressing she had written a “private” email to Waks.
Waks, an advocate for child sex abuse victims, released Feldman’s email to the media.
Feldman sent the email after receiving a request to support a petition calling on two senior Chabad leaders in Melbourne to resign from their positions over the child sex abuse scandal that embroiled Chabad’s Yeshivah College in the 1980s and 1990s.
“In my robust and emotional email I employed offensive language which I remorsefully regret and unreservedly apologize for,” she wrote. “I agree with all efforts to prosecute pedophiles but take issue with some aspects of Manny’s crusade against Melbourne Yeshivah.”
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