A SENIOR Sydney rabbi has lost a defamation lawsuit launched against a newspaper following evidence he gave to the child sex abuse royal commission which a judge found was “capable of being understood in a way that brought shame on the Jewish faith”.
Yosef Yitzchak Feldman sued the publisher of the The Australian Jewish News over a series of 2015 articles written after he told the inquiry he didn’t realise it was illegal to touch a child’s genitalia, which a Supreme Court judge ruled as “shockingly ignorant”.
The influential spiritual leader claimed the paper recklessly failed to fairly report his evidence to the commission that he’d encouraged rabbis to deal with allegations of child abuse internally before reporting it to police.
Read the article by Lucy Hughes Jones in The Daily Telegraph.