update: posted the entire Facebook article
The following appeared on the
Facebook page of Avi Yemini (Manny Waks brother) and it illustrates the complexity of ascertaining the truth. I am not taking sides. There is obviously a lot that has gone in the family. I have discussed the Facebook posting with his father Zephaniah Waks - with whom I have a good relationship. He disagrees strongly with many of the statements his son has made but he said that it will not serve any useful purpose to publicly reply and discuss the accusations.
See - Paying the price for speaking out against abuse
Avi Yemini (Manny Waks brother) writes:
Enough, no more silence.
This is my personal opinion about the Waks family’s compromised involvement in the child sexual abuse campaign, led by my brother Manny Waks and backed by my father Zephaniah Waks. I am sharing it here in a facebook post in response to the constant attempts to silence me whenever I express an opinion which does not promote or support Manny or the Waks family. Just because somebody is fighting a worthy cause, does not give them free reign to say and do whatever they want while silencing anyone who doesn’t support them. Just because I was born in the Waks family, doesn’t mean I am going to keep pretending what a big happy family we are. <
I feel extremely motivated and free to share it now as my father boycotted my wedding and my mother cynically cancelled my Shabbat Chatan behind my back because I refused to apologize for expressing an opinion which does not support Manny. It’s sad to me that it took them attempting to ruin our simcha with their toxic energy to realize this, but it is clear to me now that their sudden and random request to reconcile with us (after years of estrangement) nearly 18 months ago, was purely motivated by a fear of what I would say publicly about their involvement with the campaign against child sexual abuse.
This is just the first thing I have to get off my chest. Enough, no more silence. I supported Manny in the beginning when he went public about being sexually abused, because I felt strongly that someone going public with something as serious as sexual abuse would need as much support as he could get and I obviously believe in people speaking out about what they’ve experienced in an attempt to help others. I still absolutely support the cause itself, of course. However over the past year and a half I have found it very difficult to continue to support the path Manny is taking in regards to campaigning against child sexual abuse.
This is not and has never been acceptable to my parents. All my life my family has operated on a “you’re either with us or you are against us” approach. I experienced this as a young teen when I didn’t want to be religious. In our family that was not acceptable and myself and many of my brothers were given ultimatums that we had to either tow the line (ie. Be ultra orthodox Lubavitch) or get out. I spent my teenage years in foster care, on the street, in friend’s homes, addicted to heroin, drugs and generally wasting my life until I finally got myself into rehab and joined the army. I spoke of this experience in May 2012 at Mizrachi when I was asked to give a speech about my upbringing and the role it played in turning me away from the religion, as the topic for the evening was “Off the Derech”.
I believe it was this speech which motivated my parents to fake reconciliation with me. Since then, it’s been increasingly clear that the only thing that matters to them is keeping me from expressing my opinions about Manny.
Over the past 18 months my relationship with my parents has been filled with demands to apologize to Manny and as a result we were banned from coming to their house if Manny was going to be there because he refused to be in the same room as us e.g. last Pesach we were meant to go for the first night seder and got told at the last minute not to come because Manny was going. It has been filled with constant obsessive discussion about which community member my father says is accused of child abuse, while sitting at the Shabbat table. My father even asked me about hiring bodyguards so that he could continue to go to shul and act like he felt scared to go there without security.
When my parents recently announced their move to Israel, I was accused of forwarding the email onto someone they didn’t want reading it (I still don’t know which sibling forwarded it) and later discovered it was because it contradicted their big, two page spread in the newspaper that came out that weekend, claiming, among other things, to have been ex-communicated when really, it was all financial and something they have been planning to do for years – my mother told me how her plan was always to move as soon as my youngest sister finished school, which she did in 2013.
When I responded to my younger brother’s brave facebook post condemning the way Manny leaked (he calls it “facilitated” in his blog post) a prominent rabbi’s name to the media in connection to allegations of child sexual abuse with this comment:
“Good on you for saying what many of us are thinking. It must have taken alot of courage to write it, and I for one really appreciate it.
I have thought for a while now that the direction this campaign has gone is disgraceful. The Glick thing just seems to be the final episode in a very sad story.
The saddest thing is that future victims have had their stories hijacked by self serving people and their so called organisations.”
This was enough for my father to boycott my wedding and what pisses me off is not that he didn’t come, but that a father could use their own son’s simcha to try to manipulate them into supporting their dodgy campaign.
As much as that speech scared them into “keeping their enemies close” they’ve obviously forgotten all the other things I know and they’ve obviously not thought their tactics through very carefully. The big issue I have with my father’s involvement in this campaign against child sexual abuse, is that ours was a home full of physical child abuse. My father used to beat all the boys with a belt as punishment. I remember lining up one day to receive the belt after a whole group of us (there are 11 boys in the family) were caught climbing on the mikveh roof. I was the smallest in that group and the last in line, it was terrifying watching my older brothers scream while wondering what would happen to me. I was also the one he eventually broke the belt on and then he stopped using it but there has always been a culture of intimidation and manipulation - emotional, psychological, mental and physical, in our home.
I think it’s disgusting that someone who clearly has his own violent tendencies can go around condemning other abusers – all child abuse ought to be brought to light and the perpetrators brought to justice, even if it isn’t sexual. I might be the only one from the family who will ever have the guts to say it out loud, but no matter how they present themselves in the documentary about the family, Zephaniah isn’t someone whose judgement of others on the matter of protecting children from abuse is one to trust.
I think that initially his intentions were good - when the first newspaper spread was sprung on him in 2011 by Manny, he probably wanted to support my brother out of the terrible guilt he must have felt over not taking proper responsibility when not one, but THREE of my brothers were sexually abused and he did not go to the police. In fact, in a conversation we had, he justified it, explaining that it was the climate at the time (sounding very similar to the explanations from Yeshivah itself), I didn’t understand what it was like for him, there was no way he could report it and besides where would he send the children, it was the only Chabad school in Melbourne. Justifications aside – he was one of the ones who put pressure on the school to send the perpetrator away, so instead of condemning everyone else I think he should be apologizing himself.
I think he raised us in an environment where we learnt some pretty messed up messages. Some of the boys got molested at school, most turned to drugs to some degree and at some point, many got kicked out of home and all were vulnerable as a result of his shocking parenting tactics. His pursuit of sex offenders now is just a misguided attempt to deflect blame away from himself.
Manny is far too damaged himself to be a stable leader, especially not for victims of abuse. I think it’s disturbing that when confronted by one of our sisters, Manny denied that anyone was ever hit in our home. While he joked about being “touched” in personal conversations between us before portraying himself as a victim became his profession, I don’t think that either making light of sexual abuse OR turning it into a sensationalist media campaign is the right thing to do.
My mother literally said to me just months ago “If you don’t have something to say that promotes or supports Manny, don’t say it at all. Better to be quiet”. I refuse to do that about such an important issue. I refuse to just join the crowd in congratulating and thanking him when I have serious doubts about his motives and think that more people should be thinking more deeply about his motives and the ethics of his conduct. He has been after a leadership position for his entire life and starting Tzedek finally gave him that position. Just because they are one of the only Jewish (not the first) organizations to offer support to victims, doesn’t mean they should be blindly supported without being held to the same standards of accountability and transparency that anyone who is paid to lead an organization should be held to.
This is my opinion. I wont be silent about it.
From now on, whenever anyone congratulates me on how wonderful my parents are, because they saw the doco, or they had a Shabbat meal with them, or they are simply impressed by how many children they brought into the world, instead of smiling awkwardly I will tell them my truth about what I experienced in their home.
From now on whenever anyone congratulates me on how fantastic Manny is, I will continue to express my concerns that his motives aren’t as pure as he would have us believe and to express my opinion that he is not the right sort of person to lead this cause.
From now on, whenever anyone wants to use “enough, no more silence!” as their tagline, they’re going to remember that it also applies to them and they can no longer bully their critics into keeping their mouths shut.
I’m sharing this opinion because the issue of child abuse is too important to blindly allow, as a community, any self-serving individual to hi-jack the stories of future victims to suit themselves. I don’t gain anything from writing this, I wont ever gain a cent from talking about child abuse, I just have the satisfaction that those who tried to silence me did not succeed in preventing me from speaking my truth and that anyone who reads this has an opportunity to see things from my perspective and use it to make up their own minds.
If you don’t like the fact that I posted this – too bad, this is my facebook wall, this is my opinion and you don’t have to read it.