A rabbi who admitted to sexually abusing children at the Orthodox Jewish Yeshivah centre in Melbourne was allowed to keep teaching because senior religious leaders feared he would self-harm if they fired him.
Giving evidence to the royal commission into institutional responses to child sex abuse on Tuesday, Zephaniah Waks spoke of how three of his children were abused by staff at the centre, and of a culture that discouraged him from going to the police.
In 1993, one of Waks’s sons told him that his younger brother was being abused by a teacher, rabbi David Kramer, at the Yeshivah college.
Waks said he went to the school principal, Rabbi Abraham Glick, who told him he would speak to Kramer. A few hours later, Glick called Waks and said Kramer had “partially admitted” to what he had done, but that the children had initiated and enjoyed it.
Waks said he was shocked when he noticed Kramer was still teaching at the Yeshivah centre school a couple of days later.
“I confronted Glick and said, ‘How is this possible, what is going on’,” Waks told the commission at Melbourne’s county court.
“Glick said a psychiatrist concluded Kramer allowed himself to be caught because he wanted to be stopped, and there was danger of self-harm, ‘So we can not fire him’.
“I thought this was absolutely outrageous, however if I reported this to the police I would be in breach of the Jewish principle of mesirah.”
Waks said the concept of “mesirah” prevented members of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad sect of Judaism from going to outside authorities.
“At the very least, the breach of mesirah almost certainly always leads to shunning and intimidation within the Jewish community and would almost certainly damage marriage prospects of your children,” Waks told the commission.
The Yeshivah centre was the centre of his universe, Waks told the commission, and members of the Chabad movement did not make any decisions, including where to send their children to school or who to marry, without consulting a rabbi.
His children were sent to the school within the centre, they prayed at the centre synagogue, and social activities took place there, Waks said.
“It was our whole life,” he said. “We lived there. All of our friends [were] there.”
Despite this all-encompassing culture that frowned upon members from going to police, Waks said he arranged a meeting with other parents from the Yeshivah college to discuss what to do about Kramer.
He wanted to get them to agree to collectively approach senior leaders at the centre and tell them if they did not fire Kramer, they would all go to the police.
That meeting was called off, Waks said, when he received a call from Harry Cooper, a senior lawyer and chairman of the management board of the Yeshivah centre, who told him they would fire Kramer.
In fact, the centre paid for Kramer to go to Israel, where he attempted to get a job as a teacher, Waks told the commission. Waks said he believed Kramer abused about 60 children while teaching in Melbourne.
On Monday, the commission heard Kramer later travelled to the US, where he was charged with serious sexual offending against a child and sentenced to seven years’ jail.
In 2013, Victoria police also charged Kramer with historical child sex abuse offences and he was extradited to Australia. He was sentenced to jail and was eligible for parole 18 months later. After serving his sentence, he was deported to the US, where he remains.
Later, Waks said he found out another of his sons, Manny, had also been abused, but by two other senior Yeshivah staff. By this point, he believed going to police was a “no-brainer,” he told the commission.
“The taboo had been broken,” he said.
Manny Waks gave evidence of the abuse he suffered on Monday, telling the commission how he was bullied and ostracised by the Yeshivah community when he came forward.
Both Manny and Zephania Waks have left Australia since speaking out about the abuse, the commission heard, because of intimidation and isolation they experienced from Yeshivah community members.
The commission is examining child sex abuse in the Jewish community for the first time since hearings began in 2013.
The hearings continue.