Rabbi calls for leniency for paedophiles

Sky News
February 9, 2015

http://www.skynews.com.au/news/national/2015/02/09/rabbi-calls-for-leniency-for-paedophiles.html

A senior rabbi believes the justice system should be more lenient towards paedophiles who have stopped offending so that those who repent don't feel like 'scum' forever.

Paedophiles who are no longer abusing children should not have to spend their lives feeling like the 'scum of the earth', Rabbi Yosef Feldman told the royal commission into child sex abuse on Monday.

'I would be asking for more leniency on people who have shown that they haven't offended in the last 20 years or decades ago, and have psychological analyses that this is the case,' Rabbi Feldman said.

'Once someone is not a pedophile any more or is showing (he) is not acting wrongly any more, that should be considered in a very strong way.'

A more lenient approach for pedophiles, including avoiding lengthy jail terms, would show them that 'when you do the right thing, you won't get mistreated badly and it's not the end of the world ... then you are not treated like a pariah, like a scum of the earth'.

Rabbi Feldman was also asked about an apparent conflict between his public statements and a private email he sent in mid 2011.

Publicly, he supported a rabbinical directive that said it was not against Jewish law to report child abuse allegations to secular authorities.

But in an email to a Sydney Jewish group, he discouraged them from issuing a media statement calling on members of the Jewish community to report abuse.

Rabbi Feldman told the commission he was only concerned that more media attention would trigger false complaints.

'I was worried that the publicity would bring about fake victims,' Rabbi Feldman said.

'... Too much hype causes miscarriages of justice.'

The commission also took evidence from a man who, in 1991 and as a 15-year-old, was raped by David Cyprys, then caretaker at Yeshivah school in Melbourne.

His mother interrupted her leukaemia treatment to fly from interstate once she learned of the abuse.

Yeshivah responded by cancelling the boy's school scholarship.

'From the time of the disclosure, no one associated with the Yeshivah would speak to us or help us,' the victim, named only as AVR, told the commission.

Cyprys was convicted and jailed for eight years in 2013 for abusing nine boys at Yeshivah Melbourne.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is investigating the response of Yeshivah Melbourne and Yeshivah Bondi to child sexual abuse by Cyprys and also David Kramer and Daniel Hayman in the 1980s and 1990s.

All three have since been convicted.