AUSTRALIA
The Australian
October 3, 2016
RICK MORTON
Social Affairs reporter
Melbourne
@SquigglyRick
Manny Waks took a razor on the plane bound for Israel and shaved his whiskers after takeoff.
He hoped the journey and clean-shaven face would deliver him not only from his community in Melbourne but from the Ultra Orthodox sect that so reminded him of the sexual abuse he had endured as a boy.
He tried to forget Jewish holidays, customs, language. The abuse had erased his childhood innocence and taken from him his larger identity in the world.
After years of trying to deal with the perpetrators of his abuse in private, Manny Waks blew the whistle on the pedophiles who preyed on him and others at Melbourne’s Yeshiva Centre in 2011.
When the centre’s leaders were called before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, it became the most watched public hearing, jarring an international Jewish community now confronted with abuse and cover-ups, as with the Catholic Church before it.
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