Chabad abuse cases

Documented and court-verified cases of child sexual abuse involving Chabad-Lubavitch institutions or personnel, and how Chabad bodies responded, chiefly as examined by Australia's Royal Commission (Case Study 22)

Template:Infobox event Chabad abuse cases are the documented and court-verified cases of child sexual abuse that involved Chabad-Lubavitch institutions or personnel, together with the way those institutions responded. The best-documented cases come from Australia. There, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse examined Yeshivah Centre Melbourne and Yeshiva Centre Bondi in Case Study 22 (public hearing February 2015; findings report October 2016). The Commission found that leadership responses "ranged from inaction to enabling". It also found that the way Jewish legal concepts of informing were applied discouraged some community members from reporting abuse.

This page uses careful legal language. A person is called "convicted" only where a court has entered a conviction or accepted a guilty plea. Otherwise the allegations are described as allegations. Victims and survivors are named only if they have spoken publicly under their own names. Elsewhere the page uses the Royal Commission's pseudonyms (AVA, AVB, AVR and so on).

Scope and exclusions

• Malka Leifer is not covered. She was principal of the Adass Israel School in Melbourne, which belongs to a separate ultra-Orthodox community and is not a Chabad institution.
• Brooklyn cases involving other Hasidic groups (for example Satmar) are not covered. Neither are cases whose Chabad affiliation could not be verified in reliable sources.

Australia: Royal Commission Case Study 22

The institutions

The Royal Commission found that both institutions are "part of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement". Yeshivah Melbourne was established in 1949 and Yeshiva Bondi in 1956, and the two operate independently of each other. In Melbourne, Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Groner, an emissary of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, led the Yeshivah Centre until his death in 2008.

Convicted offenders

• David Cyprys was a security guard and martial-arts instructor associated with Yeshivah Melbourne. In 1992 he pleaded guilty in Prahran to indecently assaulting AVR; he received a good-behaviour bond and no conviction was recorded. In 2013 a jury convicted him of five charges of rape, and he then pleaded guilty to 12 further child sexual offences against other children. On 20 December 2013 he was sentenced as a serious sex offender to eight years' imprisonment, with a non-parole period of five years and six months.
• David Kramer taught at Yeshivah College's primary school from late 1989. He left Australia in 1993 after four parents complained that he had sexually abused their children. In the United States he was later convicted of serious child sexual offences committed in March 2007 and sentenced to seven years. Victoria Police charged him on 20 December 2011 with offences against four students aged 10 to 11, and he was extradited to Australia on 29 November 2012. He pleaded guilty in the County Court of Victoria on 17 July 2013. ABC News reported that he was sentenced to three years and four months' imprisonment with a minimum of 18 months. It also reported that the college had paid for him to leave for Israel and that no report was made to police at the time.
• Daniel Hayman was associated with Yeshiva Bondi. On 10 June 2014 he pleaded guilty in the NSW Local Court to an offence committed in the 1980s at a Chabad camp (Camp Gan Israel, Stanwell Tops) and received a 19-month suspended sentence. He lives in the United States.
• Velvel (Zev) Serebryanski was extradited from New York in 2023. In December 2025 a jury found him guilty of three counts of indecent assault and one count of sexual penetration of a child aged between 10 and 16. The offences were committed against Manny Waks at the Yeshivah Centre synagogue in the 1980s. On 20 March 2026 the County Court of Victoria sentenced him to 22 months' imprisonment, of which 19 months were suspended; because of time already served on remand in the United States, he served no further time in custody. This case came after the Royal Commission and was not part of Case Study 22.

The Commission found that, despite complaints, Cyprys, Kramer and Hayman "had a continued association with, presence at or employment at the institutions". It identified a recurring pattern in which reports were made, assurances were given and "apparent inaction" followed.

Allegations not resulting in conviction

The Commission also examined allegations against a volunteer at Chabad Youth, whom it named as Kestecher. He volunteered from 2005 to 2008 and was asked to stop. A report was made in 2011, but the family did not press charges. On 1 July 2011 Rabbi Zvi Telsner banned him from the Yeshivah Centre. No criminal conviction is recorded, so these remain allegations.

Findings on leadership

• Reports to senior figures. The Commission was "satisfied that AVR and his mother reported AVR's abuse by Cyprys to Rabbi Glick", the principal of Yeshivah College. It also examined reports made to Rabbi Groner, including Manny Waks' report in 1996.
• Rabbi Zvi Telsner, head rabbi of the Yeshivah Centre, accepted that his failure to correct misconceptions about one of his sermons was a failure of leadership. The Commission found that "Rabbi Telsner's recollection is inaccurate" and did "not accept the evidence of Rabbi Telsner that the sermon was not about Mr Manny Waks". Telsner told the Commission that Zephaniah Waks, Manny's father, had been refused aliyah (the honour of being called to the Torah) for walking out of sermons and for emails criticising Yeshivah Melbourne. The Commission found that those reasons "indirectly related to Mr Manny Waks' public disclosure of his experience of child sexual abuse".
• Survivors and families. The Commission concluded: "we are satisfied that there was a marked absence of supportive leadership for survivors of child sexual abuse and their families within Yeshivah Melbourne. Halachic principles were stridently – even if incorrectly – applied. Criticism of those who spoke out was forceful." It also found that survivors had been treated as outcasts.
• Rabbi Meir Shlomo Kluwgant. On 3 February 2015, the second day of the hearing, Kluwgant texted a journalist at the Australian Jewish News: "Zephaniah is killing us. Zephaniah is attacking Chabad. He is a lunatic on the fringe, guilty of neglect of his own children. Where was he when all of this was happening?" He told the Commission that he was on medication when he sent it. The Commission also recorded evidence that he had told AVB he should not have sent an email in June 2011, which AVB took as intimidation.
• Rabbi Yosef Feldman of Yeshiva Bondi did not recognise AVL's conduct as a crime. The Commission was satisfied that in emails sent in July 2011 he had expressed views including that "the prohibition of mesirah was relevant when considering whether or not to report allegations of child sexual abuse made against a Jewish person to authorities" and that allegations "should in the first instance be reported to a rabbi". It found that his statement in the Australian Jewish News of 26 July 2011 "was not a true statement of his beliefs but an exercise in public relations".
• Child protection since. The Commission noted that Yeshivah Melbourne had since taken significant child-protection steps, but said the steps taken at Bondi were "unclear".

Resignations

• Yosef Feldman resigned from the board of management of the Yeshiva Centre in Sydney on 11 February 2015. He apologised for the comments he had made to the Commission. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that he remained a synagogue rabbi and kosher supervisor.
• Kluwgant resigned as president of the Organisation of Rabbis of Australasia on 16 February 2015. Victoria Police confirmed that he no longer held his post as a police chaplain.
• ABC News reported that Rabbi Abraham Glick, principal of Yeshivah College from 1986 to 2007, and former general manager Nechama Bendet had also resigned, and that both apologised to victims at the Commission.

Apologies and redress

On 20 August 2012 the Yeshivah Centre, Rabbi Telsner, Rabbi Smukler and the Committee of Management wrote to the community apologising for "any historical wrongs that may have occurred". Manny Waks said that the letter was so qualified that he found it insulting. On 24 July 2013, the day Kramer was sentenced, Rabbi Smukler emailed an apology to parents. The Commission found no formal redress policy at Yeshivah Melbourne. AVB never received an apology from Bondi. In 2015 Rabbi Pinchus Feldman of Yeshiva Bondi made a general apology expressing "deep sorrow".

Civil proceedings

In September 2018 Manny Waks settled his negligence claim against eleven defendants associated with the Yeshivah Centre at mediation; the terms are confidential. In 2020 the Supreme Court of Victoria assessed his damages against Cyprys at $804,170.

Mesirah and reporting

Mesirah is the halachic prohibition on informing on a fellow Jew to non-Jewish authorities, and a moser is a person who does so. The Commission defined these terms along with arka'ot (recourse to secular courts) and loshon horo (harmful speech). It concluded:

We are satisfied that the application of Jewish law (in particular, the concepts of mesirah, moser and loshon horo) to communications about and reporting of allegations of child sexual abuse to secular authorities – in particular, police – caused significant concern, controversy and confusion amongst members of the Chabad-Lubavitch communities. The evidence strongly suggests that, because of the way those concepts were applied, some members of those communities were discouraged from reporting child sexual abuse.

Responses of Chabad and rabbinic bodies

Chabad-side and rabbinic statements, as recorded by the Royal Commission:

• In 2010 the Rabbinical Council of Victoria resolved that mesirah does not apply to cases of child sexual abuse. The Commission noted that Yeshivah Melbourne's leadership missed many opportunities to draw attention to this resolution.
• Rabbi Moshe Gutnick told the Commission: "Mesirah does not apply. You don't call your Rabbi; you call the police." He called the application of mesirah to abuse a "gross misuse of rabbinic power".
• The institutional apologies and child-protection reforms are described above.

United States

• Moshe Keller was a Crown Heights rabbi who ran Gesher Ben Tzion, an organisation for at-risk Chabad youth. He was charged in June 2011 and in May 2012 was sentenced to three years' probation for endangering the welfare of a child. Tablet reported claims, which have not been tested in court, that he had faced earlier allegations in Israel, and that Rabbi Shea Hecht did not suggest going to the police when told of an allegation in 2007. Those claims remain allegations.

Editor's note: other Brooklyn cases often listed alongside Chabad (for example Yehuda Kolko, who is Satmar-affiliated, and Avrohom Mondrowitz) are left out because their Chabad affiliation could not be verified. Cases in Israel and the United Kingdom have not yet been verified and are not included.

See also

• Chabad-Lubavitch
• Crown Heights riot