AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
August 16, 2015
Simon Scott
Jacob was 11 years old when he was raped, in a Catholic school chapel, by two Brothers who threatened to do the same to his younger brother if he spoke out. It took 48 years to break his silence. He tells Simon Scott his story.
In late 1964, after his family moved to Japan from Australia, Jacob Bernstein* was enrolled at St Mary’s International School, a prestigious, private school in an upmarket Tokyo neighbourhood.
His father, Robert*, a diplomat, had been posted to the Australian embassy in the city.
Late in 1965, Jacob was searching for somewhere to eat lunch when he passed the school chapel. Being Jewish, the 11-year-old grade 6 student couldn’t eat the lunches served in the dining room. St Mary’s, a Catholic boys’ school run by the Brothers of Christian Instruction, or Mennaisians, was unable to prepare food that was kosher, so he had to bring lunch from home.
That day his mother had prepared his favourite, rollmops – pickled herring fillets held together with skewers – so he was eager to tuck in. “I saw the chapel door open and went in and started eating my lunch alone. I didn’t think it was not permitted,” says Bernstein.
Brother Lawrence Lambert in St Mary’s 1969 Yearbook. It shows that he was back teaching 6th Grade elementary students at the school by 1969, just four years after the sexual assault of Australian schoolboy ‘Jacob Bernstein’.
Brother Lawrence Lambert in St Mary’s 1969 Yearbook. It shows that he was back teaching 6th Grade elementary students at the school by 1969, just four years after the sexual assault of Australian schoolboy ‘Jacob Bernstein’.
Suddenly, Lawrence Lambert and another Catholic Brother entered, made the sign of the cross and then approached him. “Brother Lawrence said I was to be punished for eating in the chapel,” he recalls. “I was taken to a table near the door and made to face it and drop my pants and bend over. I thought I was to be spanked. One of them pulled my pants right off.” Then, he says,
“Brother Lawrence started to sodomise me. I had no idea of what he was doing, only that it hurt.”
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