http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-07/malka-leifer-and-melbourne’s-secretive-adass-community/7306950

Somewhere in an ultra-Orthodox enclave of Israel, former Melbourne school principal Malka Leifer continues to evade extradition to face criminal charges in Australia. Now one of her alleged victims speaks out for the first time.

Malka Leifer’s role in Melbourne’s Adass community was all-powerful.

As head of the Adass Israel School from 2003 to 2008, she was highly regarded in the community, running day-to-day operations at the school and teaching Jewish studies.

Leifer is now under house arrest somewhere in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Bnei Brak in central Israel, where she fled in 2008 — allegedly with the help of senior members of Melbourne’s secretive Adass community.

She is wanted by Victoria Police to face prosecution for 74 child sex offences involving the abuse of girls at the Adass Israel School.

For almost two years, she has managed to evade extradition proceedings and her latest hearing scheduled for today has been postponed to an unknown date.

Outraged at the failure to extradite Leifer, one of her several alleged victims, who we will call Rebecca, is speaking out for the first time.

“It’s still extremely difficult for me to go into detail in regards to what happened to myself and the other victims,” she told Lateline.

“But the far-reaching effects the physical and emotional abuse is still having … I can’t find the words.”

They were not allowed to watch television, books had to be vetted to make sure they were suitable and they had very little contact with the outside world.

Barrister David Seeman
Last September, in a civil case against the Adass Israel School and Leifer, a Melbourne judge awarded one of the alleged victims $1.27 million in damages.

Barrister David Seeman represented the alleged victim in that case and he says the abuse occurred over a period of three years.

Media player: “Space” to play, “M” to mute, “left” and “right” to seek.

Video: The victim of alleged sex abuse at the hands of a former Melbourne school principal speaks out. (Lateline)
“It was at times frequent abuse, daily abuse and also at times not that frequent,” he said.

“It was conducted at the school, it occurred at Leifer’s home, it occurred on camps.

“It was made up of what you might regard as abuse low on the scale of severity, all the way up to the most serious horrific abuse.”

Mr Seeman has gained a rare insight into the ultra-conservative Adass community, from which the alleged victims came.

“It’s a very insular community. There’s very little communication or access to the secular community,” he said.

He says the alleged victims were brought up in an extremely strict environment.

“They were not allowed to watch television, books had to be vetted to make sure they were suitable and they had very little contact with the outside world,” he said.

“[They] were very, very naive especially as far as sexual matters were concerned.”

I know how manipulative she is. She manipulated all of us into doing many things.

Rebecca
When Rebecca first spoke out about the abuse, no-one believed her.

“Actually the people that I told, they didn’t believe me that it had happened,” she said.

“I only told two people and one of them threatened me that I have to keep quiet. She actually called me and said ‘what happened to you?’ And I started to tell her and she said: ‘That didn’t happen. Make sure you keep it that way.’

“That was the last person that I told.”

Eventually another of the victims revealed what had happened to her.

But only hours after the allegations were first raised, Leifer, her husband and five of her children fled Australia in the middle of the night to Tel Aviv, Israel.

For Rebecca, it was a shocking development.

“I’ll never forget that day,” she said.

“The whole community was in an upheaval and that’s when it properly hit me that the woman who had controlled my life for the past three years had just fled the country and she had just gone.

“And it was the shock, the anger, the pain, everything started coming in at once.”

Even more shocking is that some members of the Adass Israel School board are under investigation by Victoria Police for helping Leifer and her family leave.

The family’s plane tickets — obtained under subpoena — appear to have been paid for by the company of one of the board members.

Six years after fleeing Australia, the law caught up with Leifer and after an extradition request from Australia, she was arrested in August 2014 and placed under house arrest.

But since then, Leifer has managed to avoid seven court hearings into her extradition, with her lawyers arguing that she is unwell, suffering panic attacks and depression whenever a court date approaches.

At a hearing in February, Leifer’s lawyers even asked for the whole case to be thrown out.

Rebecca has been watching the case from Australia.

“I mean, first hand I know how manipulative she is. She manipulated all of us into doing many things,” she said.

“So she’s manipulating the Israeli justice system and even if she is suffering from those panic attacks and even if she is suffering from depression, what is that in comparison to what us victims are suffering every day?”

Leifer’s lawyer Yehuda Fried is refusing to talk to the media, but last year he told the ABC he would fight her extradition all the way to Israel’s High Court.

“We are conducting a court procedure. The Israeli law confirms that anyone in a psychotic state cannot be subject to legal proceedings,” he said.

Rebecca says it is almost unbearable that the woman who abused her and others is still free.

“It’s been very, very long, and every single day for me and any of the victims has been torture to be honest,” she said.

“Day after day we’re waiting for the Israeli justice system to make this woman face her crimes and to come back and be extradited and face her victims and face justice.”

At a hearing in February, Israeli prosecutor Avital Ribner Oron challenged Leifer’s medical claims, telling the judge she believed the former principal was “faking” her illness in order to get rid of the case.

Leifer’s attorney rejected the accusation, but he did admit in court that the panic attacks only occurred around the time of scheduled hearings.

In his ruling, Judge Amnon Cohen also questioned Leifer’s hospital admissions.

A document from the Sheba hospital on January 14 indicated that:

“The defendant arrived at the hospital with a referral letter to the psychiatric emergency department with recommendation of hospitalisation from her physician, from December 30, 2015 and ‘it’s not clear’ why she went to the hospital only on January 3, 2016.

“After the legal hearing took place, the defendant had asked to be released from hospitalisation.”

Judge Amnon also noted concerns about Leifer’s behaviour that were raised by the head of the psychiatric department.

“There is a sharp difference between her behaviour in the [psychiatric] department, among groups, during telephone conversations with family and in her formal examinations,” documents said.

Australian-Israeli victim advocate Manny Waks blew the whistle on sexual abuse at his ultra-orthodox Jewish school and religious centre in Melbourne and also gave evidence to the child abuse royal commission.

Now living in Israel, Mr Waks has founded a new global body to advocate on behalf of victims of child sexual abuse from within the Jewish community.

He has been following Leifer’s case closely and says the latest delay is outrageous.

“It is staggering how long it’s taken and I think it’s a poor reflection on the Israeli judicial system. Especially when we have seen some of the tactics used,” he said.

“It seems to me and to many of us that Malka Leifer and her legal team are really running the show here.”

Speaking from Bnei Brak, Mr Waks said he hoped justice would be served.

“It’s quite sad to think that Malka Leifer is in one of these apartments, living fairly at ease,” he said.

“Almost eluding justice, it’s not right.”

This article first appeared on the Verdict site.

Spotlight is a motion picture with a purpose: to deliver the truth of how every adult who could have halted the sex abuse by Catholic priests in the Boston Archdiocese did not.

Children were betrayed by priests, bishops, parents, lawyers, journalists and the buddy culture of men in power. The message: These kids did not have a chance, and it is no wonder they are angry and suffer from severe post-traumatic stress, among many other related problems.

next thought is: We must do better by our children. The same thought has entered Pennsylvania’s consciousness following the three Philadelphia District Attorney grand jury reports on abuse in the Philadelphia Archdiocese, as well as the attorney general grand jury reports on abuse at Penn State and in the Altoona-Johnstown Archdiocese.

Yet one continues to see deep frustration on the faces of survivors from all corners of Pennsylvania as the bishops hit high-gear lobbying against the victims’ access to justice through statute of limitations reform.

The reports tell us that adults in power shredded children’s lives. True. Only the bishops and their insurers, however, have routinely leveled an additional, knock-out blow to each victim, either through scorched-earth litigation tactics or by lobbying to keep the perpetrators from justice. The trauma these survivors (and their families) already suffered is compounded by the litigation and legislative tactics of the bishops.

The sex abuse alone can cause lifelong debilitating effects, including post-traumatic stress disorder and depression; unemployment; alcohol, drug or sex addiction; and suicide. Children can’t process sex abuse when it happens, and it is simply a scientific truth that multiple factors including shame, guilt and changes in their neurobiology delay victims’ disclosure of abuse until well into adulthood.

The Catholic survivors are subjected to traumatic betrayal twice. First, when the sexual abuse occurs. Second, when society locks them out of the courthouse, and the padlock stays in place because the bishops lobby to keep the doors locked.

When a survivor finally has the support and courage to come forward, it is devastating to check on legal options only to learn that the doors remain padlocked, because elected officials defer to the hierarchy that betrayed the victims in the first place.

This endless betrayal is a potent destroyer that also can and has resulted in the destruction of survivors’ lives, as well as the lives of their families.

Penn State officials’ handling of the sex abuse by Jerry Sandusky is no model of moral best practices except, perhaps, when compared with the bishops’ merciless treatment of abuse survivors who wish to bring predator priests to justice and dare to seek their day in court from all those who caused them to suffer.

Penn State did not respond to learning about Sandusky’s horrific behavior by mounting a public relations campaign to smear victims and hire lobbyists to make sure victims couldn’t get to court. You don’t find Penn State lobbyists lurking at press conferences and hearings backing the bills that would revive expired statutes of limitations. They aren’t quoted about why it is so unfair to hold Penn State responsible for the abuse on its campus and in its showers.

By and large, Penn State sat down and settled with the victims instead of dragging them through the entire legal process. If all responsible institutions were to do that and accept their responsibility for the costs of the abuse (and it is only fair those costs are shifted from victims to the ones who caused the abuse), the survivors would have to deal with only one excruciating round of trauma instead of the relentless triggering that is inherent in the current bishops’ choice of callous disregard followed by either hardball litigation tactics for the small number in statute and cold-hearted lobbying against every other victim’s (whether Catholic or not) access to justice.

The Catholic bishops have locked themselves into a position of rigid opposition to victims in the legislatures and the courtrooms. Who exactly has benefited from that?

To be sure, the insurance industry that enjoyed collecting premiums for abuse that was never disclosed. But the industry also has sunk untold millions into lobbying against legislation that is inevitable instead of using those resources to improve future protection of children.

The irrefutable logic of statute of limitation reform will inevitably work its way through state after state. If the insurance industry were to set and enforce high standards for employers on child protection instead of canceling sex abuse coverage altogether and resisting justice for the abuse that already occurred, we might avoid repeats of these horrific scandals. That is how risk could be managed intelligently.

Right now, the insurance lobbyists are part of the problem as they aid the bishops in their hide-under-a-rock strategy.

So how can we understand the bishops and the legislators who accede control over child protection to them, like Pennsylvania state Representative Ron Marsico? Is their narcissism and sense of entitlement so great that they are willing to continue to traumatize abuse victims for the sake of the church’s reputation and finances? Are these men the paragons of virtue and morality that the church would have us believe?

They are clearly in conflict with Pope Francis’s admonition in Philadelphia when addressing clergy sex abuse victims: “I pledge to you that we will follow the path of truth wherever it may lead. Clergy and bishops will be held accountable when they abuse or fail to protect children.” It is likely that they are, unlike Pope Francis, all too similar to ordinary leaders corrupted by power and tragically blind to their constituents’ pain.

Members seem to fear voter backlash if they side with survivors, but when a poll was conducted in New York asking Catholics and other voters if they favored statute of limitation reform, solid majorities sided with the survivors and statute of limitation revival. The poll numbers are reinforced by the fact that the primary and most vocal window sponsor in New York,Assemblywoman Marge Markey, has been repeatedly re-elected with large margins—despite the bishops’ robo-calls against her.

It is time for the trauma to end and the healing to begin, and both demand the justice that can only be gained through reviving expired civil statutes of limitations and, going forward, eliminating the criminal and civil statutes of limitation for child sex abuse. Then society can answer the call ofSpotlight to actually protect our children.

Editor’s note: The New York Daily News ran two articles here and here that highlight more survivors’ struggles to get justice and the obstacles that short statutes of limitations create.

Full article: http://www.newsweek.com/bishops-are-still-betraying-child-sex-abuse-victims-441963