AUSTRALIA
The Australian
FEBRUARY 05, 2015
Pia Akerman
Reporter
Melbourne
ONE of Australia’s leading Orthodox rabbis has admitted asking his son to contact a convicted pedophile to confirm whether a conversation they had while the paedophile was molesting at a Jewish school in Sydney included a confession.
Rabbi Pinchus Feldman, head of the Chabad movement in NSW, today told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that he had wanted to “refresh” his memory about the conversation, before providing his evidence.
Counsel assisting the commission Maria Gerace told the hearing in Melbourne that Rabbi Feldman’s son, Rabbi Eli Feldman, had contacted Daniel Hayman last September asking for details of a conversation with his father which Hayman had described to police after being arrested for child sex offences.
Hayman pleaded guilty in May to indecently assaulting a child under his authority at a camp run by the Yeshiva centre in Bondi.
Asked if he had requested his son to contact Hayman on his behalf, Rabbi Pinchus Feldman said: “You can say so … to refresh my memory if there was something that I didn’t recall.”
A copy of Hayman’s interview with police shows he told detectives he had spoken with Rabbi Boruch Lesches around the time he was abused the victim in the late 1980s, and Rabbi Lesches told him to “stay away” from young boys.
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