AUSTRALIA
The Australian Jewish News
The Australian Jewish community has just witnessed one of its darkest weeks.
I have covered child abuse in the Jewish community for several years but even I didn’t understand the extent of the cover-ups, the lies, the ignorance and ridiculous actions of Rabbis in our community.
It’s time for us, as a community, to wake up and smell the roses.
* There are dozens of victims of child abuse in our community.
* Victims considered suicide, became addicted to drugs and some will never recover.
* Many victims have never, and probably will never, come forward.
* Victims came forward to Rabbis in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1980s.
* Sometime, Rabbis did nothing.
* Sometime, Rabbis tried to “fix” child sexual abusers.
* And every time, Rabbis didn’t tell the police.
And in Sydney, which has been the focus of most of this week it was worse:
* One rabbi thought a victim was joking when he came forward.
* Another rabbi placed a young girl in the home of convicted child sexual abuser Daniel ‘Gug’ Hayman and then told her she was lying when she claimed she was sexually assaulted.
* At one time an entire group of victims came forward to a rabbi, and was ignored.
* Yeshiva spiritual leader Rabbi Pinchus Feldman did not tell police they knew alleged child sexual abusers were planing to leave the country because Rabbi Feldman “did not know there was any such obligation”.
* Rabbi Pinchus Feldman now accepts that his right-hand-man, Rabbi Baruch Lesches, knew of abuse allegations, but didn’t tell him.
* The head of Yeshiva’s Rabbinic School, Rabbi Yossi Feldman, did not know it was a crime for a teacher to touch the genitals of a child in 2002.
* Rabbi Yossi Feldman, at the age of 33, didn’t understand mandatory reporting laws when he was the director of a company that had a school.
* As recently as 2011 Rabbi Yossi Feldman said you “must” go to rabbis to report abuse instead of the police.
* As recently as 2011 Rabbi Yossi Feldman urged the rabbis not to call on victims to go the police because it would hurt his “friend”, and now convicted child sexual abuser, David Cyprys.
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