AUSTRALIA
Times of Israel

BY AMANDA BORSCHEL-DAN February 16, 2015

Intimidation, bullying, public persecution, excommunication from the Jewish community and slanderous comments on social media. These are only a few tactics used on the Waks family, in which three of the sons were the victims — not perpetrators — of child sex abuse.

For the past two weeks in Australia, the global Jewish community was rocked by what it heard during public hearings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Melbourne. Dramatic testimony by victims of child sex abuse, their families and those who worked for the Jewish institutions that covered up the abuse led international media headlines.

Since 2011, abuse survivor Manny Waks has spearheaded the efforts to break the unofficial code of silence that bound and gagged his former community, the Chabad-affiliated Yeshivah Centre Melbourne. He founded, and is the former head…