AUSTRALIA
The Daily Beast
Emily Shire
Aided by a communal pressure to not go to secular authorities, some Orthodox Jewish boys in Australia say their sexual abuse has gone unpunished for years.
It is as disgusting as it is ironic that the mikveh—the ritual baths where Jews and converts to Judaism immerse to purify themselves—was one of the places Manny Waks says he was sexually abused as an Orthodox Jewish teenager in Melbourne. According to him, Shmuel David Cyprys, the head of security at Yeshivah Centre—the school Waks attended—instructed him to go to the mikveh with him in 1990.
“During the abuse I became very dizzy and told him that I needed to get out of the water. I went over to the drying area and sat down on the floor. Cyprys came over to me and continued what he had been doing in the bath,” Waks remembered. “I remember feeling very dizzy to the point where I blacked out briefly. Soon after I got up, dressed myself and walked home.”
Waks shared this account last week at the start of the Australia Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse. The Jewish community is hardly the only group that the Australian government is probing. It has, however, warranted two weeks of specific scrutiny as more people like Waks, who kept their abuse hidden for decades after their rabbis allegedly failed to respond, have decided to go public for the entire Jewish community and the country to hear their stories.
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