AUSTRALIA
The Guardian
Melissa Davey
@MelissaLDavey
Wednesday 4 February 2015
An orthodox Jewish religious leader said he “forgot” about a boy who called him to say he had been sexually abused at the Yeshivah Centre in Sydney because he thought it must be a prank – a judgment he said he came to “profoundly regret”.
Rabbi Moshe Gutnick, a senior judge of the Sydney Beth Din rabbinical court, now worked with victims of child sexual abuse and encouraged them to go to police without fear, he told the royal commission into institutional responses into child sex abuse on Wednesday.
Gutnick said he received the phone call in 1987, when he was a teacher at the orthodox Yeshivah Centre Bondi, and it was the first time he had heard of sexual abuse there.
Gutnick said he first spoke to an “older boy” who told him he had a “younger boy” with him who had something to tell him.
“He then put the younger male on the phone and [he] told me he had been sexually abused by Daniel Robert Hayman, ‘Gug’,” Gutnick said.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.