Australian Child Sex Abuse Inquiry Asks Senior New York Rabbi to Appear

By Melissa Davey
The Guardian
February 5, 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/feb/06/australian-child-sex-abuse-inquiry-asks-senior-new-york-rabbi-to-appear

A senior religious figure within New York’s Orthodox Jewish community, Rabbi Boruch Lesches, has been asked to appear before Australia’s royal commission into institutional responses into child sex abuse.

Lesches had been contacted and asked to provide a statement or appear via video link but was yet to respond, counsel assisting Maria Gerace told the commission at Melbourne’s county court on Friday.

Lesches was a former senior figure and rabbi within Sydney’s Yeshivah community, and currently heads the Lubavitch community in Monsey, New York.

Child abuse victims told the commission this week that Lesches had dismissed their abuse allegations when they gained the courage to tell him what they had suffered within Yeshivah centres and their schools in the late 80s and early 90s.

One child sex abuse victim, identified only as AVB, told the commission that Lesches told him “the proper, clever thing to do” about the abuse “would be to let it go”.

He was also told by Lesches that if he reported the staff who had abused him to police, he would ruin their lives, the commission heard.

AVB said Lesches had admitted to confronting a known abuser, former Yeshivah Centre Bondi director Daniel Hayman, about his abuse of children several times, but had never gone to the police.

“You can hear it from the teachers,” Lesches allegedly told AVB. “They are speaking about how to do it, where to go and which place to go, and when the parents will not know.”

On Wednesday Rabbi Moshe Gutnick, a senior judge of the Sydney Beth Din rabbinical court, told the commission a “culture of cover-up, often couched in religious terms” had existed within the Yeshivah centres and the Orthodox community.

Gutnick told the commission: “I’m prepared to say that Rabbi Lesches lied when he said that he didn’t know about the abuse by convicted child abuser Daniel ‘Gug’ Hayman.”

It was a statement that spread shockwaves through the Orthodox community in Australia, victims said.

Child sex abuse in Australia’s Orthodox Jewish community is under scrutiny for the first time since the commission began its work in 2013.

The hearings continue.