Yeshivah abuse victim says scholarship was removed after he reported rape

By Melissa Davey
Guardian
February 9, 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/feb/09/yeshivah-abuse-victim-says-scholarship-was-removed-after-he-reported

Rabbi Pinchus Feldman did not alert police when the alleged abuser said he might leave the country.

A child sex abuse victim who was repeatedly raped by a staff member of an Orthodox Jewish school said he was stripped of his scholarship when he told the principal what happened.

The victim, identified only as AVR, said a security guard at the Yeshivah centre and college in Melbourne, David Cyprys, raped him multiple times.

Cyprys was convicted of those offences in 2013, and is in jail.

AVR told the royal commission into institutional responses to child sex abuse that he had been living in Queensland when his mother fell ill with leukaemia, and in 1990 he was sent to school at the Yeshiva college in Melbourne.

It was there that Cyprys began abusing him.

“I did not know much about sexual matters,” AVR said, adding that he had no father and that Cyprys was the only father figure he knew.

Despite this, AVR said he eventually gained the courage to call his mother.

“My mum was sick, alone, and interstate and I was worried about her, so I didn’t tell her about the full extent of the abuse,” he told the commission at Melbourne’s county court on Monday. “She was quite sick, and I thought that would push her over the edge.”

His mother immediately flew to Melbourne see him, and together they reported the abuse to the principal of the school, Rabbi Abraham Glick, and the director, Rabbi David Groner, who is now dead.

“Rabbi Glick said my scholarship had been cancelled from that time,” AVR said. “I feel Rabbi Glick and Yeshivah did not want me there any more. They did not offer help or counselling. No one at Yeshivah would speak to us or help us. Even our own family members would not help us, and we had a lot of trouble getting back to the airport.”

Glick will give evidence in the coming days.

Cyprys was “a serial abuser of children”, the commission heard last Monday. AVR said his mother had stopped treatment for her cancer when she came to Melbourne to rescue him from Cyprys, and that she passed away a few years later, in 1995.

“I often wonder if she would have lived without that stop in her treatment and the stress of what happened at Yeshivah and the flow-on effect of what happened to me,” AVR said.

“I became withdrawn and angry after we returned [home]. At the very least her last years would have been happier and easier were it not for the events of Yeshivah.”

Last week, other victims told the commission how they were ignored by senior religious leaders within the orthodox Yeshivah community after reporting their abuse, and of being verbally abused and ostracised.

The hearings continue.