AUSTRALIA
The JC
By Dan Goldberg, February 12, 2015
An inquiry into a child sex abuse scandal that engulfed two Australian Chabad institutions in the 1980s and 1990s has been suffused with acrimony and accusations, tragedy and trauma.
In an email to one of the victims that was read out at the hearing last week, Rabbi Moshe Gutnick, from Sydney, said: “I’m prepared to say that Rabbi [Boruch] Lesches lied when he said that he didn’t know about the abuse.”
Lesches, who now lives in the US, was a senior official at Chabad’s headquarters in Sydney at the time of the abuse. It is understood he will not appear before the commission despite attempts by Australian officials to bring him in.
“People say that everything that will come out is a hilul hashem (desecration of God’s name) — I say the hilul hashem is if it doesn’t come out,” Rabbi Gutnick wrote. “These guys are all bastards. They all have blood on their hands.”
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