In
a cafe in Melbourne’s south-east, not far from her old school, Dassi
Erlich is writing about her former school principal, Malka Leifer. “I
see her pleading fingers undressing me, the slow crawl of her touch over
my exposed skin,” she types. “But I am not there. I am empty. In that
room, I do not exist. She has killed me. A silent death that no one will
ever know of. No one will believe me.”
Erlich
was only 15 years old and no one in her ultra-orthodox Adass Jewish
neighbourhood in East St Kilda knew then that she was being abused by a
doyenne of that community, the respected female principal of the Adass
Israel School. Erlich herself would not understand what it all meant
until years later, when memories haunted her and then almost killed her.
She
would have to reject the tightly knit religious community of barely
2000 people and all she had known in order to seek justice. Then came
the police statements, the court case, the million dollars in damages
and the stunning news that her community leaders had spirited Leifer out
of Australia in the dead of night to Israel, where she continues to
evade justice. In a cruel twist, Erlich also learnt that two girls close
to her were abused by the same woman.
Erlich,
now 29, has good reason to be angry with those who have let her down,
from her former school to the leaders of Melbourne’s Adass community to
the Israeli justice system, which has so far blocked the extradition of
her former principal. Instead, she cradles a coffee in her hands at her
favourite cafe and says she doesn’t want to throw another grenade after
the bad publicity her court case has already garnered for the
reclusive Adass. “I don’t want to talk badly about the community because
there are many people there who haven’t done anything wrong and who are
just living their lives to the best of their ability and who are
happy,” she says. “But from the outside, when I look at the kids who
grow up in that community and the way of life, I can’t condone it, I
think it’s wrong. I think a lot of the rules about keeping the community
so excluded and making the outside world seem so dangerous breed that
kind of [sexual] abuse.”
Now, almost 18
months after former Victorian Supreme Court judge Jack Rush ordered the
school to pay $1,024,428 in damages – one of the largest sex abuse
payouts in Australia’s history – and nine years after Leifer fled the
country, Erlich is ready to tell her story for the first time.
Over the past year I have met Erlich regularly at
the cafe as she ponders how to tell her remarkable story in the book
she is writing. At each meeting she is friendly and upbeat, talking
about her nursing studies and showing me pictures of her six-year-old
daughter Leah. She dresses in hip modern clothes, wears red lipstick and
large jewellery, a world away from the dour wigs and flowing
Amish-style dresses of the Adass women. “This is about owning my own
story,” she says. “My daughter will one day grow up and read about my
life. I want it to be a story of strength and inspiration rather than
victimhood.”
Yet it is hard to imagine a
more vulnerable target than Erlich and at least 15 of her fellow Adass
schoolgirls who say they were assaulted by Leifer, a mother of eight
who was then in her late 40s. “Children were raised not having knowledge
of world events and were completely isolated from anything beyond the
community they were within,” Erlich told the court in 2015. “We weren’t
to know that a relationship could exist between a male and a female.”
Erlich
and her six siblings were brought up in the strict Adass tradition of
no access to television, radio, internet, magazines or newspapers. Her
parents met at a Jewish youth club in London and in 1981 emigrated to
Australia, where they joined Melbourne’s small Adass community. These
so-called Adassniks, the most insular of the Haredi or ultra-Orthodox
spectrum of Jews, live almost entirely within an eight-block radius of
East St Kilda. Women are not expected to have careers but rather to
raise large families, often with more than 10 children in each. Adass
men dress as if they are roaming through 19th-century Europe, with tall
mink fur hats, black silk knee-length coats, white pantaloons, stockings
and black slip-on shoes. They are the closest Australia has to an Amish
community. “I didn’t realise it was an unusual community until I left
it,” says Erlich. “It was my way of life and I didn’t know anything
else. We were told that ours was the best way of life and the superior
way of life; it was just accepted that you didn’t interact with people
who are not part of your community unless absolutely necessary.”
When
Leifer began to take an interest in her, Erlich, then 15, was so naive
that she had no idea that a kiss on the mouth “was something that could
be done”. In any case, there was no reason to imagine that someone like
Leifer could be a sexual predator. The Adass community had recruited her
from Israel in 2000 to head the Adass Israel School in Elsternwick,
which had around 500 children enrolled in the separate boys’ and girls’
campuses. Among the Adass, Leifer was a towering figure who inspired
awe. “People looked up to her and listened to her as if hers were God’s
words,” recalls Erlich. “She was someone who everyone looked up to and
idolised. She was like an angel who had flown in from overseas.”
So
when Leifer offered to give “private lessons” to Erlich, the student
was flattered. “I would go to her office and study and she would put her
arms around me,” she recalls. “I found it quite comforting, I felt
quite loved and really special that she was giving me her attention.”
But as the lessons progressed, first in Leifer’s office and then at her
home, she says the principal began to rub her thighs against her
student and slide her fingers up her legs. “I thought it was weird but
it was also like, ‘Well, she is the boss, she is the adult here so it
must be right.’”
The meetings would
continue on and off for the next three years, with Leifer going further
each time and Erlich becoming more confused about what was happening to
her. “Every time we walk away as if it has never occurred… I have no one
to talk to and even if I did what would I say,” she writes in her book.
“It is much easier to make believe it is all OK.”
In
his 2015 judgment against the Adass Israel School and Leifer, Justice
Rush stated: “I accept that because of her [Erlich’s] extremely
sheltered background she did not understand what was happening to her,
particularly as to whether she was right or wrong.”
Erlich’s
encounters with Leifer ended when she entered an arranged marriage at
the age of 18 with a 23-year-old partner chosen by her parents. “I was
very nervous,” she recalls of her first visit with her future husband.
“Suddenly I was supposed to speak to this guy I didn’t know and have a
conversation about marriage as my mother was in the next room listening
in. We talked about the guiding principles of life and what sort of home
you wanted to be in and what kind of kids you want to bring up. How
many kids is never a question because birth control is not an option –
you have to get the Rabbi’s permission for that.”
Within
a week of their first meeting, she was engaged. “I met him [for the
first time] at his house on a Monday… I met him four times over that
week and I got engaged to him on the Saturday.”
After
they were married, they left for Israel so that her husband could
pursue religious studies. Erlich struggled to get pregnant and when she
finally did, she had a miscarriage. She became depressed and started to
see a therapist. It was during those therapy sessions in Israel that
she began to open up for the first time about what had happened with
Leifer, something she had not even shared with her husband. “It was like
a very shameful secret because I believed it was all my fault – it was
like self-loathing,” she says.
She says
the therapist did not believe her at first but when Erlich told her
that two other girls close to her had also been abused, the therapist
passed on her claims to a colleague in the Adass community in Melbourne.
In late February 2008, those claims were relayed to a teacher at the
Adass school, Sharon Bromberg, who briefly confronted Leifer. The
principal deflected the questions. When Bromberg heard in the following
weeks that two other former students were alleging abuse by Leifer, she
raised the issue with the school and senior Adass community members.
By the time school and community leaders
met at the house of the late businessman Izzy Herzog on March 5, 2008,
they had become aware of at least eight separate allegations of abuse
involving Leifer and girls at the school. In attendance that night was
school board president Yitzhok Benedikt, school board member Meir
Ernst, barrister Norman Rosenbaum, psychologist Vicki Gordon and
Bromberg. What then unfolded would later be described by Justice Rush as
“disgraceful” and “deplorable”.
The
group put Leifer on speakerphone and put the allegations to her. She
denied them. “You have destroyed my reputation, I’m not going to stand
for this,” she replied. The group then told Leifer she would be stood
down as the head of the Adass school. But then, in a fateful decision,
it was agreed that rather than report Leifer to the police, the
principal should be spirited out of the country.
Dassi
Ernst, the wife of school board member Meir Ernst, asked a local travel
agent to open her shop at 10pm that night, only hours after the
meeting, and to book a plane ticket to Israel for Leifer. Less than four
hours later – at 1.20am – Leifer and four of her children flew to
Israel. (She was later joined in Israel by her husband Jacob, a rabbi.)
The school paid for her ticket.
In his
judgment, Justice Rush stated: “In such circumstances the alleged
perpetrator should not be assisted to urgently flee the jurisdiction.
The failure of the board to report the allegations to police prior to
arranging Leifer’s urgent departure is deplorable.”
Three
of those at the meeting – Gordon, Rosenbaum and Bromberg – have
declined to comment, but school board president Benedikt maintains they
did nothing wrong. “We have acted as any normal person would act, we
have responsibilities for our children and for our community,” he tells
this magazine. “We could not allow at that time a teacher like that to
stay anywhere near the children. Don’t you agree with me that the best
thing is that they don’t have anything more to do with the children?”
Benedikt maintains it was Leifer’s choice to leave that night and that
her departure had “nothing to do with the school”.
Rush
disputes this, saying it was done to protect the community’s reputation
and hide its embarrassment. “I have no doubt the conduct was
deliberate,” he says. “The conduct of Messrs Benedikt and Ernst on
behalf of the board in facilitating the urgent departure of Leifer was
likely motivated by a desire to conceal her wrongdoing and isolate the
conduct and its consequences to within the Adass community.” Victoria
Police is conducting what it describes as an “ongoing investigation”
into whether an offence was committed in relation to Leifer’s departure.
Erlich
did not learn of the clandestine arrangement for Leifer’s exit for
seven years until her civil trial in 2015, but says it didn’t surprise
her that the Adass community would try to hide the problem. “I wasn’t
shocked by that when I finally heard about it,” she says. “The cover-up
was like something that all religious communities around the world would
do, so I was disappointed but not shocked. It is what [the Adass] do
with a lot of their problems, they shove it under the carpet, pretend it
didn’t happen and move on.”
In 2009, a year after Leifer’s departure, Erlich
began displaying signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. She returned
to Melbourne from Israel and became pregnant but was alarmed by her
lack of emotional response to the baby. “I couldn’t feel anything for
the child I was carrying – it scared me so much,” she says. “It got
worse after she was born. I was getting lots of flashbacks and I
literally could not deny it any more. I was suicidal, I was
self-harming and I felt like the worst mother in the world.”
She
was admitted to a mental health clinic. Her marriage broke up. Yet the
clinic proved to be her window to a life beyond the confines of the
Adass. “Until I went into hospital I had no connection with people
outside my community,” she says. “In there I met other mums and it
opened up a whole new world for me. They had the internet and I started
reading books on religion, history, philosophy – everything I could get
my hands on.”
Erlich realised she was
drifting away from the Adass and into a new life. For the first time she
weighed up whether she should pursue Leifer and the school in court,
knowing that to do so would see her forever locked out of the only
community she had known. She had by then bonded with her daughter Leah
and that helped her to see Leifer’s crimes in a more chilling light. “I
started thinking about Leifer flying to Israel and maybe committing the
same crimes there,” she says. “I now had a daughter and I couldn’t
imagine that happening to her. But I knew if I did [take legal action]
there would be no going back to the community.”
In
the biggest decision of her life, she went to court, knowing that she
was, in effect, also putting the Adass in the dock. “I knew nothing else
but that community,” she says. “I didn’t have a penny to my name, I had
left my husband and I was in a psychiatric hospital with literally
only the suitcase that I had taken there.”
Erlich
writes of how frightened she was as she sat in Moorabbin police
station, about to tell her story to the police for the first time.
“Panic pulsates my throat. The culture of silence, seeped into the
fibres of my nation, strangles my voice. My words crack and break. I
must continue and think of the motivation driving me to be present in
this moment.”
The civil trial in 2015
was a turning point for Erlich and her faith in the system. Justice
Rush’s withering judgment and the damages he ordered against the school
and Leifer finally convinced her that someone was listening. “I felt
vindicated,” she says. “I was proud of myself for sticking it through.”
Since
the verdict, Erlich has juggled nursing studies with writing her book
and being a single mum. She says she is frustrated by the fact that
Leifer remains in Israel with no immediate prospect of returning to face
her accusers. Leifer is wanted in Australia on 74 criminal counts of
child sex offences but has repeatedly claimed to be too mentally unwell
to attend extradition hearings. Late last year an Israeli judge halted
extradition proceedings and placed Leifer on a psychiatric treatment
regimen that can be extended for six months at a time for up to 10
years.
An Adass community elder, Shlomo
Abelesz, says the community would like to see the former principal
brought back to face justice. He maintains that the decision to send her
to Israel was done to keep her away from the students. “That was the
only reason they wanted to get rid of her,” he says. “But maybe yes, I
agree they should have gone to the police. But they were convinced that
had they gone to the police, [the response] would have been: ‘What can
the police do?’”
Erlich says Leifer is
using the Israeli justice system to her advantage. “I have no
confidence that she will be brought back. It’s disappointing and very
sad.” But these days she tries not to dwell on Leifer or on the world
she has left behind. She still has friends in the Adass community and
remains close to her siblings. She has just qualified as a nurse and,
after her rocky start, embraces being a mum. “I wanted to try to take
the secrecy and the shame away from my story by telling it in my own
voice. Maybe I can even inspire others,” she says with a smile. “I have
found a new life and I love it.”