Transcript

INTRODUCTION: Hi, I’m Ted Baillieu, former Premier of Victoria. Tonight’s story is one in which I and others have had a huge interest.

 

For years, Dassi Erlich and her two sisters harboured a chilling secret about their former principal, Malka Leifer. When they finally exposed her, it would spark a decade long legal battle to bring her back to Australia.

 

Tonight, Dassi and her sisters reveal the deeply personal story behind their very public campaign.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  If I looked in a looking glass 10 years ago, when I was 20 years old, I would have never in my wildest dreams imagined that this is where I would be today.  We really had no interaction with the outside world.  And even if I imagined a different life, lobbying for justice was never a part of it.

 

TV NEWS STORY:  Authorities in Israel are under pressure to send a former Melbourne school principal back to Australia where she’s wanted on 74 charges of child sexual abuse.

 

NICOLE MEYER, SISTER:  We fear that the longer Malka Leifer lives freely in Israel, she can potentially hurt other vulnerable females.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  It’s important I think for us just to continue this journey ensuring that she comes back to Australia.

 

DAVID GRABER, ELLY’S FORMER BOYFRIEND:  They don’t play a victim card.  They just push for progress, they push for change.  Those three sisters are a force to be reckoned with.

 

ELLY SAPPER ON TV NEWS: You know you wait for this day to come and you hope to come.

 

SHANA AARONSON, JEWISH COMMUNITY WATCH:  They’re not attorneys, they’re not doing this, this is not their job.  This is something that they literally put their life on hold for and it was just unbelievable.

 

TV NEWS STORY:  New evidence shows she obstructed court proceedings, hid evidence.

 

TED BALLIEU, FORMER VICTORIAN PREMIER:  To think they have been shunned by their school, their community, their own family.

 

NICOLE MEYER, SISTER:  But we had no idea how things would unfold.  We didn’t know what we had set in motion.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  I just know that when I saw her hand and kind of looked at those hands covering what I assume was her shame or what I hope was her shame that a lot of the memories of what those hands had done came flooding back.  And it was quite confronting.

 

TITLE:  THE JUSTICE PRINCIPLE

 

DASSI ERLICH:  We grew up in East St Kilda, in Melbourne, in an ultra-orthodox Jewish community, called Adass.

 

ELLY SAPPER, SISTER:  The Adass community, it’s not like the wider Jewish community.  It’s literally bordered by a block of streets, which has its own synagogue, its own fish shop, its own meat shop. Everyone you know lives in that area.

 

NICOLE MEYER, SISTER: My father did not grow up religious, but he definitely knew plenty of Jewish traditions.  My mother had a mixture of both, so when she met my father they weren’t religious.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  And then over time I believe they met one of the rabbis from Adass and they lived next door to him and slowly they moved into the Adass community. 

 

ELLY SAPPER, SISTER:  I think my parents definitely felt a little bit outside, so they did everything to fit in. And then they went full on from there. So, there was no going back after that.

 

MANDY SAPPER, AUNT:  Once they joined the Adass community, my brother Mark and his wife became more secretive.  They didn’t want to let us into what was happening in their lives.  Whenever I would go around to see the family, it would be like visiting strangers.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  We watched no TV, didn’t even know about TVs.  Didn’t have any radio, didn’t have any newspapers or newsletters.  Even the advertisements that used to come in the post, my mother would throw them out, she didn’t want us to see anything that wasn’t modest in there.

 

ELLY SAPPER, SISTER:  The whole idea of being modest, of being ‘tzinzius’ it’s called, is to keep you pure for when you get married.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  The expectation as soon as you can understand it is that you grow up to be a Jewish mother, that you have an arranged marriage, you pretty much fall pregnant as soon as possible, and you just start having babies.  But I wouldn’t call my mother a role model.

 

MANDY SAPPER, AUNT:  From the little interaction that I had with the children, I felt that they were tense the whole time and there was a whole secret that nobody else was allowed to find out.

 

NICOLE MEYER, SISTER:  Life at home wasn’t very simple. Every single action any of us did was governed by a fear of what would happen if we didn’t do the right thing at all times, day or night.  Over the years my sisters and I have discussed wanting to visit the house we grew up in, just to see and feel some memories we had together.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  My two sisters who are closest in age to me, Nicole and Elly, by the time we were teenagers we had grown extremely close.

 

ELLY SAPPER, SISTER:  There were a lot of memories.  Brought up good ones and not so good ones as well.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  We walked on constant eggshells at home.  We would kind of give each other secret smiles and lend each other support.

 

ELLY SAPPER, SISTER:  As I was following along with my sisters on skype when I was overseas, there was a cupboard that we needed to see. Seeing that cupboard helped us all to kind of remember what really happened.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  My mother always had her good and bad children. If you were the bad child that week or day or month then you were punished more regularly, not allowed to eat food for however long she decided.

 

ELLY SAPPER, SISTER:  We used to write our thoughts and our feelings and I think that helped us go through those periods of times where we couldn’t express it with anyone but we felt that the diary or the journal was listening.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  We were absolutely petrified to explain to anyone what was going on at home because we knew that would be used against us. You would not be offered the marriage prospects you would be if you didn’t come from an abusive home.

 

NICOLE MEYER, SISTER:  My sisters and I went to Adass Israel School, which is an only girls school.  The most religious, strictly orthodox girls’ school in Melbourne at the time.

 

ELLY SAPPER, SISTER:  The focus on secular education was basically nothing.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  We were allowed to read books but there were vetted books so there were huge parts of the books that were blacked or whited out so that we couldn’t even have an understanding about what a relationship between a male and a female is.

 

SHARON SWIATLO, FORMER ADASS TEACHER:  I started teaching Adass in 2005.  However, the restrictions on what could be studied was so great that I would never have been able to discuss anything sexual, even the word sex, with them.  But I will tell you that once in year eight, I don’t know how this word got through, the word ‘romance’ got through.  And somebody put up their hand and said ‘what does that mean?’ and I wasn’t sure if I could, I couldn’t even answer her. But another girl put up her hand and said, ‘I know what it means’.  I said, ‘what?’ She said, ‘romance is, are people from Rome’.  Romance. I couldn’t help laughing.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  When I was in year eight the school wanted to go in a more religious direction. And very soon afterwards, Malka Leifer became the new principal of the school.

 

ELLY SAPPER, SISTER:  Malka Leifer’s husband was a rabbi, and therefore she was a rebbetzin.  Rebbetzin is an esteemed position.  It’s someone that people look up to.

 

DASSI ERLICH: She had five or six kids by that time.  She would walk in the hallways and put her arm around a girl’s shoulder, and, which was strange, because we had grown up in a culture where that was not something that ever happened.

 

SHARON SWIATLO, FORMER ADASS SCHOOL TEACHER:  She was a woman who exuded confidence.  She was well liked. She knew how to charm people, she really did.  She had the gift of the gab, she knew what to say.

 

DASSI ERLICH: Nicole told me that she had explained to Mrs Leifer about the situation at home, and that Malka Leifer was understanding and helpful and wanted to help. Opening up to Mrs. Leifer about it was because we had a huge degree of trust in her. And we did explain to her how controlling my mother was and how scared we were of her and of the punishments and the beatings that she gave and you know how she used to keep us home from school to hide the bruises.

 

NICOLE MEYER, SISTER:  Mrs Leifer had a weekly group that said psalms every Saturday, so I would go. From then it progressed pretty quickly.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  At year ten Malka Leifer started pulling me out of class and at some point during the year she took me home to her house. And that was completely accepted at school. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t move, there was just this like heavy, heavy silence in the room.

 

NICOLE MEYER, SISTER: The way Malka Leifer would work was she would manipulate girls and play games with them. Mental games. She would favour for a couple of weeks and then move onto someone else, leaving the other girl hanging. She destroyed friendships like that. She just liked the power she had with girls that would do anything for her.

 

DASSI ERLICH: Mrs Leifer began to spend a lot more time with me. She would take me into her office, close all the blinds, close the door.

 

MICHELLE ORBACH, SISTER: I’m older by more than 12 years of my younger sister. I was already married for a long time, so I wasn’t quite as close to my sisters as if I had been, if I’d been living at home. People would say to me ‘it’s wonderful that your sisters are close to Mrs Leifer’. So, such was their attitude of a community. I thought someone was actually looking out for them. No one could have imagined that there was anything sinister. It just seemed like she was taking an interest in looking after the girls’ welfare.

 

DASSI ERLICH: By that point I had an understanding that what was happening was not right, even though I had no words to explain what was happening or absolutely any understanding of how it wasn’t right. So by that time I would just disappear and just not even be in that room anymore.

 

NICOLE MEYER, SISTER: I would probably label it severe dissociation. So just robotic. There was no thinking how to stop it. There was no thinking what’s happening now.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  When I was in year 12 and I was 17 years old, I went to camp for one night and Malka Leifer was running that camp.  Nicole by that point was a teaching in the school, she had just finished school and she was teaching.  I came out of the camp room and we just shared this look of mutual understanding. For the first time we knew what was happening to one another.

 

NICOLE MEYER, SISTER: There was no reason to speak abut it. It was just a matter of self-preservation and surviving at that point.

 

DASSI ERLICH: For many years before I’d had fantasies of running way all through my childhood and that had obviously increased by then. But I had nowhere to go and I had no idea how to survive on my own or have any idea of what was outside of my community, so I was very much stuck inside that community.

 

NICOLE MEYER, SISTER: When I got married I didn’t tell anyone anything regarding Mrs Leifer. She was as much a part of my life as she was before.

 

DASSI ERLICH: So, Elly was in the year below me and she was coming through high school at that point.

 

NICOLE MEYER, SISTER: I don’t remember when, but Dassi and I definitely tried to warn Elly without many words.

 

DASSI ERLICH: We just said, ‘don’t go near Mrs Leifer, it may look good but trust me it’s not’.

 

ELLY SAPPER, SISTER: But I think I was too in my own world of wanting attention and wanting some love, that I wasn’t going to listen to anyone anyways. At the end of year 11, I was 16, that’s when Mrs Leifer started to, I guess, pay attention to me. We were all hearing ‘this is good for you, this is going to be good for you when you get married, what I’m doing is helping you and I’m giving you love’.

 

DASSI ERLICH: When I learnt that Elly had had a relationship with Mrs Leifer I was devastated.

 

MICHELLE ORBACH, SISTER: Dassi was arranged to date a young man and she chose to marry him, and she was very young.

 

DASSI ERLICH: My thoughts around getting married were getting out of the house and not being under control of my mother anymore, so I was very excited about that, and starting a new life with my husband in Israel.

 

MICHELLE ORBACH, SISTER:  But things were not so easy for her. Dassi had a lot of trouble conceiving and later on she had a devastating miscarriage.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  I didn’t really know this man who was my husband, so we were getting used to each other. But I was extremely cut off from my emotions, so it was hard.  I started seeing a social working.  And I explained to her my thoughts around sex and she told me that there was something not right there, that there was something I wasn’t telling her.

 

NICOLE MEYER, SISTER:  In the beginning of 2008, Dassi let out to a social worker slash therapist that she was seeing in Israel that Malka Leifer had abused her.

 

DASSI ERLICH: She had this look of utter disbelief on her face and really didn’t believe me, so I had to reassure her that it was true.

 

NICOLE MEYER, SISTER: So, she gave permission or the therapist to call me to confirm he fact.

 

DASSI ERLICH:  Nicole asked me what I had done. She wasn’t upset at me. She just was very, very shocked. At the time I had some idea what my words would do. I didn’t know how that would play out and I was nervous and scared and anxious and, in a way, I regretted saying them.

 

NICOLE MEYER, SISTER:  A few days after I had that first phone call I was teaching as normal and Malka Leifer came to my classroom. She looked a little bit scared and I’ve never seen her look scared before. She asked me, ‘tell me, tell me. What’s going on? What do you know? What’s going on?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, I’ve got nothing to say. I don’t know’. And that was the last time I ever saw her.

 

MICHELLE ORBACH, SISTER: Nicole called me up from school and she sounded stressed. And I said to Nicole, ‘so what’s going on?’ and she said to me, ‘it’s because of what happened’. And I said to her ‘what do you mean?’ And she said, ‘well, Mrs Leifer...’ and she just blurted it out very quickly. ‘She molested Dassi and I.’ And I was utterly, utterly gobsmacked.

 

TAMMY KONIARKI, TRAVEL AGENT: In the middle of the night I had a phone call from a girl that works for me. Her husband was active on the board of the Adass school and she said to me, ‘Tammy, I’ve got a compassionate. A lady with children that needs to go urgently to Israel. Somebody in the family’s not well.’ I said, ‘okay, what do you want to do?’ She said, ‘I’ve booked it, all we have to do, can you please issue it?’  So, I open the office and I came in, I took the credit card, ordered the ticket and that’s it. Didn’t ask anything else. It was a one-way ticket to Tel Aviv at 1.20 in the morning. 

 

ELLY SAPPER, SISTER: When Mrs Leifer fled the country that night, there was a massive upheaval in the community. People just didn’t talk, teachers were turning up crying, people had no idea. Literally, people no idea.

 

MICHELLE ORBACH, SISTER: Immediately there was a sense of denial, that she had been wronged, that Leifer had been wronged.  And that it was unfair that she had been dismissed so quickly.

 

ELLY SAPPER, SISTER: There was a lot of speculation of who were the victims, who was the one that reported her.  Until one day the rabbit in the community got up and he said, ‘I’m gonna put a stop to this. This is called lashon hara’ which is gossiping about another fellow Jew and there’s to be no more talk about this in the community and that’s it.

 

ASHLEY BROWNE, FORMER EDITOR, THE AUSTRALIAN JEWISH NEWS: There were people in the Adass community who, said the most important this is the welfare of the girls. So, the newspaper got a call from someone from the Adass community to say that Malka Leifer, the principal of the Adass Girls School, had left the country and the circumstances were murky. To this day we still don’t know who it was. I could tell he was quite emotional and he told me that these girls’ lives had been ruined from now on.  So, we broke the story on the Thursday and by the Friday there were TV cameras out the front of the school and the story was everywhere.

 

TV NEWS STORY: When the Australian Jewish News published that the female principal of the girls’ school, Malka Leifer, a mother of eight, had been stood down because of allegations of improper behaviour with her students.

 

ASHLEY BROWNE, FORMER EDITOR, THE AUSTRALIAN JEWISH NEWS:  The questions were there, ‘how does this happen? What circumstances would force her to flee the country so quickly and who enabled it?’

 

TAMMY KONIARSKI, TRAVEL AGENT: When I heard what had happened and who this lady was I rang up my young lady that works for me and I said, ‘tell me. You asked me for a discount for this lady?’  She said, "look, you're judging." I said, "I'm not judging all I can tell you I'm reading as a mother of children. And if God forbid, something like this happened to my kids you don't want to know what I would do to you.’

 

ELLY SAPPER, SISTER:  I couldn't grasp what had happened. At that point, I think I was in such a shock that my mind just went completely blank. I slowly started to question religion. I started to question everything that I had been through. I was trying to discover myself and you know wore, started to wear pants and started to uncover a bit. And I would just walk down the street and get people saying words like ‘shiksa’ which means like you’re non-Jew. I was completely ostracised, like the 18 years of my life that I had built up with all my friends and stuff just went down the drain in a second and I had no one.

 

DASSI ERLICH: Leaving the community and everything that you’ve every know is a very strange experience and it’s not something that many people can relate to.  We have just set a ball rolling that couldn’t be turned back.

 

END OF PART ONE

 

NEXT WEEK:

 

MANNY WAKS: It’s been over a decade Malka Leifer has been on the run.

 

SHANA AARONSON, JEWISH COMMUNITY WATCH: As far as places to hide, Emmanuel was certainly a perfect spot.

 

NICOLE MEYER, SISTER:  We heard that Shana had hired investigators to follow Leifer.

 

YEHUDA FRIED, MALKA LEIFER’S LAWYER (TRANSLATION): We must understand that these are only allegations, OK? That means everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

 

SHANA AARONSON, JEWISH COMMUNITY WATCH: Everybody is looking at this case and all eyes are here watching to see what happens next.