A member of a prominent ultra-orthodox Jewish family has been spared jail for raping a young boy in a Melbourne synagogue in the late 1980s.
Zev “Velvel” Serebryanski, 62, the son of well-known Chabad emissary Rabbi Aaron Serebryanski, was in December found guilty by a jury of three counts of indecent assault and one count of sexual penetration of a child aged between 10 and 16, and faced the County Court of Victoria for sentencing on Friday.
But despite his horrific abuse of victim Manny Waks, a former vice-president of powerful lobby group the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Serebryanski walked free from court after Judge John Kelly gave him a sentence of just three months, wholly suspended for three years.
Judge Kelly took into account 99 days Serebryanski spent in jail in New York before being extradited to Melbourne in 2023, said he had to consider sentencing practices from the 1980s, and noted a suspended sentence was not opposed by prosecutors, the Australian Associated Press reported.
He also determined Serebryanski, who had been on bail awaiting sentencing, was already rehabilitated due to having no further convictions in the decades since the sexual assault, and told him: “I do not believe you will reoffend.”
Mr Waks, the brother of Rebel News journalist Avi Yemini, confronted his attacker in New York in 2017 and filmed Serebryanski confessing to the abuse, and telling Mr Waks he was “infatuated” with him, and “wanted to do what I thought you wanted”.
The footage was played at trial, and Judge Kelly in sentencing referred to the comments as “paedophilic justifications”, and called Serebryanski’s offending “an attack on innocence, an attack on childhood”.
“You said you were only following your victim’s lead … that is a transparently absurd proposition,” he said.
The trial heard Serebryanski followed Mr Waks, who was aged 11 or 12, upstairs at the Yeshivah Centre in St Kilda East on the first night of the religious Shavuot festival, began groping him, and then led him into a women’s bathroom where the rape took place.
Mr Waks was also abused by former Yeshivah school security guard David Cyprys, who was convicted in 2013 and jailed for eight years for child sex offences against nine boys in the 80s and 90s.
In an impact statement read to the same court in December, Mr Waks said he was shunned by the Jewish community and forced to leave Australia after reporting the abuse.
“When Velvel sexually abused me, at the age of 11 or 12 years old, I was an ordinary child, the eldest boy in a large, ultra-Orthodox Chabad Jewish family,” Mr Waks said in his statement, which he also published on his website and read on YouTube.
“The first time Velvel sexually abused me was inside one of the most sacred sites in the Jewish community: the synagogue. It is our place of worship and spiritual connection. Our family’s main synagogue was the Yeshivah Shule, which was part of Melbourne Chabad’s Yeshivah Centre.”
Mr Waks went on to describe how he struggled to deal with the effects of the abuse while receiving no help from the police or the Jewish community, and said when he reported it to Yeshivah Centre Chief Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Groner, the rabbi indicated that he knew about some of it, but never took action.
“Eventually, I became a full-time public advocate addressing child sexual abuse within the Jewish community … During this period, my family and I came under sustained attacks by some members of the Jewish community and even some of its leadership, primarily from the ultra-Orthodox Chabad community in Australia and abroad, though not exclusively,” he told the court.
“This was one of the most difficult periods of our lives. It detrimentally impacted all of us in various ways. As one of 17 siblings, I watched as it tore my family apart. Even my parents eventually got divorced.
“Ultimately, after facing ex-communication and even multiple violent attacks from within their own Yeshivah Chabad community, my parents decided to leave Australia and relocate to Israel. Soon after, my then-wife, our three boys and I followed suit.”
A Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found in 2016 that victims of paedophiles at Jewish institutions in Melbourne and Sydney were let down by rabbis due to their adherence to the Jewish law of Mesirah which forbids informing on another Jewish person to a secular authority.
Header image: Left, right, Serebryanski outside court on Friday (10 News).
The post Jewish paedophile avoids jail for raping boy in Melbourne synagogue first appeared on The Noticer.
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