ISRAEL
Times of Israel
March 4, 2018
By Manny Waks
In the wake of a recent child sexual abuse scandal to hit the Jewish community, this time in Baltimore, it is an opportune time to examine similar cases around the Jewish world and reflect on how we have responded to them. Learning from these will help us respond more adequately to such scandals in the future.
For this purpose, I will focus on what has recently transpired in Australia and the United Kingdom.
In 2011, during my tenure as Vice President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), I publicly disclosed for the first time that I had been sexually abused as a child by two perpetrators while a student at Melbourne Chabad’s Yeshivah Centre.
While initially applauded by some, this revelation and my subsequent public advocacy on the broader issue of child sexual abuse unleashed a torrent of additional abuse from many quarters, most notably from many within the global Chabad community, including its leaders and their supporters.
The week after the disclosure, Yeshivah’s senior rabbi, Tzvi Hirsch Telsner, asked a question directed at me and my family in his Shabbat sermon: “Who gave you permission to speak?” An Australian Judicial Inquiry, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, later confirmed that Rabbi Telsner effectively intimidated me and my family (and others) in an attempt to silence us.
The intimidation and cover-up attempts came not just from the Chabad community, the centre of the scandal and investigation. Much of it came from the mainstream Jewish community, including those at the highest levels of leadership. Dr Danny Lamm, then president of the ECAJ, publicly supported Yeshivah’s reactions during the scandal, despite clear evidence that they were behaving unconscionably. The ECAJ recently apologised for its part in the scandal, but Lamm has stubbornly refused to do so.
For many Australian Jews, it was easier to simply ignore the issues, to turn a blind eye, or worse, to actively cover it up. The vast majority remained silent – community members, lay leaders and leading rabbis, some of whom were directly involved in the intimidation of victims and their families. One of these was Australia’s most senior Orthodox rabbi, Meir Shlomo Kluwgant.
Astonishingly, it seemed irrelevant to many of them that after my public disclosure, more and more victims/survivors were reporting their own abuse to police. This directly ensured that my second abuser, David Cyprys, was finally convicted and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. It also resulted in numerous other convictions, not only within Chabad. And it created much greater community awareness and action regarding the issue of child sexual abuse.
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