AUSTRALIA
The Guardian
Melissa Davey
@MelissaLDavey
Sunday 8 February 2015
A senior leader within Victoria’s Jewish community – who is also principal of one of the state’s top schools – has called for head rabbis within the orthodox Yeshivah community to resign.
Rabbi James Kennard made the comments as two of the most senior figures within the current Yeshivah administration, Don Wolf and Rabbi Avrohom Glick, prepare to face the royal commission into institutional responses into child sex abuse this week.
The hearings before Melbourne’s county court are placing the Orthodox Jewish Yeshivah centres and colleges in Sydney and Melbourne under scrutiny for the first time since the commission began its work in 2013.
Kennard, who is principal of Mount Scopus Memorial College, said child sex abuse had been covered up and ignored by senior Yeshivah leaders for too long, and that coming out to condemn the abuse and urge victims to go to police was no longer enough.
“While anyone who held a position of leadership in the Yeshivah community in the period when these terrible mistakes were made remains in such a position today, the community is not able to say that it has learnt and it has changed,” Kennard said.
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