ISRAEL
Tablet
January 14, 2020
By Sarah Krasnostein
Israel is harboring the woman accused of being Australia’s worst Orthodox Jewish sexual predator. Could today’s court ruling finally send her home to face her accusers?
“You have to be as normal as possible so you don’t have black marks against your name, so that you can get married, and your children can get married,” Dassi Erlich explained to me the first time we met, at a café in Melbourne. “As soon as you have mental illness, sexual abuse, someone going off the derech”—off the religious path—“in the family, you start having black marks against your name. And when you’re not from a very wealthy family, those marks mean a lot.”
Growing up as one of seven siblings in an ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, home in Ripponlea, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, Erlich knew about black marks. She was born with a whole mess of them. “A, my mother is Sephardi,” she said. “B, my parents joined the community as adults, they didn’t grow up in it. C, my parents are not wealthy. So growing up, my mother drilled into us that we had to be perfect students, because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t get married. … No matter what was going on, we knew we would face severe punishment if we didn’t get A’s in everything.” The severe punishment to which she is referring included being denied food and locked for extended periods in a dark cupboard under the stairs. “We were absolutely petrified to explain to anyone what was going on at home because we knew that would be used against us,” Erlich told the television news program Australian Story. An abusive home was another black mark.
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