BEHIND a military checkpoint on a hillside in the Palestinian West Bank stands the village of Emmanuel, home to 3000 people, almost all members of the ultra-orthodox Jewish community.
Here, men and women walk on opposite footpaths, people use “kosher phones’’ which are not internet-enabled, and many of the men do not work, but instead devote their days to studying the Torah.
It was in this secretive, closed community that Malka Leifer, the Melbourne schoolteacher who fled to Israel on the day former female students accused her of sexual abuse, found sanctuary.
And it was here that police broke a 10-year legal standoff by dragging her screaming from the apartment she shares with her husband and some of her five children, accusing her of faking the mental illness she has so far successfully argued should prevent her being extradited to Australia.
SEX CRIMES
That Ms Leifer, a former principal of the Adass Israel School in Elsternwick in Melbourne, was wanted in Australia on 74 allegations of sexually abusing female students, had been an open secret in Emmanuel for years.
But the ultra-orthodox community closed ranks around her, the rabbis defended her, and the courts had little option but to block her extradition after the district psychiatrist and psychiatric committees repeatedly found she was too mentally unwell to face extradition.
A neighbour in Emmanuel, about 90 minutes drive from Jerusalem, told News Corp she knew the 50-something Ms Leifer well, and that she was “sane.’’
Read the article by Ellen Whinnett (from Emmanuel, Israel) in the Herald Sun.