Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Chabad Rabbi Sorry for Suggesting Australian Boys Agreed to Sex Abuse

The Chabad rabbi at the center of a scandal surrounding his views on allegations of child sex abuse in Sydney two decades ago has apologized.

Rabbi Baruch Lesches, who now runs the Lubavitch community in Monsey, N.Y., issued a statement Monday saying he “deeply regretted” comments attributed to him in news reports Sunday and stressed he encourages victims of abuse to report it to police.

The apology came a day after Fairfax Media released legal recordings of a phone conversation during which Lesches is heard suggesting boys at Sydney’s Yeshiva Center may have consented to sex abuse.

“I would like to apologize for statements made in a private telephone conversation that caused pain to the greater public,” he said. ”As I clearly told the caller in a subsequent phone conversation, I had no knowledge of the alleged charges claimed to have occurred some 25 years ago and discussed in the news report.”

The Fairfax report claimed Lesches failed to inform police of the allegations when he was head of the rabbinical college in Sydney from the mid-1980s for 20 years. And it quoted Lesches, who was heard saying that reopening such cases would be a “can of worms” that “would not be productive.”

Lesches said in his statement: “I am shocked to hear of these allegations, because I often entrusted my own young children to the care of the alleged perpetrator, without hesitation. I would never have done so had I known of the allegations.”

He said in his community in New York ”there is no reticence to contact the police. We do not hide from or cover up criminal behavior.”

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.