AUSTRALIA
The Jerusalem Post
According to Manny Waks, the halachic concepts of mesira and Loshon hora serve to deter victims from reporting their experiences.
“The abuse first occurred at Yeshivah Centre – inside the synagogue itself during the Jewish festival of Shavuot,” Manny Waks recalled, testifying about his molestation at the hands of employees of a Jewish school in Melbourne before Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on Monday.
“I went upstairs to the women’s section of the synagogue to rest for a while on one of the wooden benches. [Zev] Serebryanski followed me up there, sat on the bench beside me and started stroking me on my clothes – initially on my thighs and eventually my groin area.”
The former Chabad hasid, who was eleven years old at the time when the abuse began in 1998, was molested on at least two other occasions, he said.
Waks recounted suffering verbal abuse at the hands of classmates after disclosing the abuse to a friend. The youngsters called him a homosexual, as “in many segments of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community who conflate homosexuality with paedophilia,” he explained.
A year later, he would again be molested, this time by a school guard cum martial arts instructor named Shmuel David Cyprys, including, on one occasion, at the mikvah.
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