Dassi Erlich was sexually abused by her school principal. Now, after a landmark court win, she tells her remarkable story.
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.
Read the full article by Cameron Stewart in The Weekend Australian Magazine (subscription only).