Terry Firma

A former vice president of the Executive Council of Australian Jews has begun dedicating much of his time to calling out Jewish child sex abuse that he claims was (or perhaps is) pervasive in his country.

“It’s been endemic within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community — both the abuses and the cover-ups. There’s enough evidence to support that,” [Menachem] Waks says. “There are so many cases, so many allegations, so many perpetrators, so many victims and so many more allegations yet to be revealed.”

Waks (photo) says that he himself was molested as a student at Chabad’s Yeshivah College in the 1980s,

…not once, but several times, and not by one person, but by two: a security guard and the son of a venerated Chabad emissary. Waks said he was molested in a synagogue and in a ritual bath, where he was lured to bathe in the nude by his alleged assailant. … In August, Yeshivah Center, the college’s parent body, apologized “unreservedly” for “any historical wrongs that may have occurred.”

That feeble, non-specific apology does nothing to help kids who were sexually assaulted by the pious adults who were supposed to take care of them. And happily enough, it doesn’t mean much in terms of the justice system either: pretty words notwithstanding, this year, three cases of Yeshiva College abuse will be examined in Australian courts, and Waks says he has only just begun.

[image by Tony Fink via Times of Israel]