AUSTRALIA
The Guardin
Melissa Davey
@MelissaLDavey
Wednesday 4 February 2015
A senior religious figure within the orthodox Jewish community, rabbi Baruch Lesches, told a child sex abuse victim that “the proper, clever thing to do” about the abuse “would be to let it go”.
The victim, identified only as AVB, told the royal commission into institutional responses to child sex abuse about that Lesches also told him that if he spoke up about the Yeshiva Centre Sydney and Melbourne staff who had abused him, he would ruin their lives.
Lesches said: “If you are going to do something to them at a certain stage in their life, you are destroying their whole life and their children and therefore, this is like something ridiculous.”
The conversation happened in 2011 when, as an adult, AVB phoned Lesches to confront him about what he knew about the extent of the abuse that had occurred within the orthodox Yeshivah community.
Lesches told AVB he had confronted a known abuser, former Yeshivah Centre Bondi director Daniel Hayman, about his abuse of children several times, but had never gone to the police.
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