A voice for Jewish victims of sexual abuse in South Africa

The Chaim Walder scandal has shone a fresh spotlight on support group Koleinu. Gillian Klawansky talks to its founders about their struggle to bring the problem into the open

“AS A COMMUNITY we need to treat this latest horrifying case as another call to action. It is a dramatic reminder of the destructive effects of sexual abuse. It is also a shocking reminder that silence is deadly.”

So said South Africa’s chief rabbi Warren Goldstein, addressing the case of Israeli Haredi author Chaim Walder in a message sent to the community last month. Goldstein also advocated the work of sexual abuse support group Koleinu, the Chevrah Kadisha and other organisations working to protect the community against abuse, including his own initiative, the Abuse Review Board, formed in 2017 to ensure that no cases slip through the cracks.

Having long been a proponent of speaking out against sexual abuse, Goldstein also hosted a webinar titled Sexual abuse: let’s talk openly, which included a panel of international and local abuse experts who discussed the halachic and legal obligation to report abuse.

Weeks later, in a public social media post, a prominent Johannesburg Hebrew teacher was accused of having sexually abused teenagers for a number of years. In keeping with the Sexual Offences Act, he cannot be legally named until charges have been formally laid and he has pleaded to them.

When approached by the SA Jewish Report Newspaper, the teacher vehemently denied the accusations and said he had not been contacted by the police.

This story, which has made headlines, also sparked a ground-breaking statement from the Beth Din urging victims of child abuse to report their cases and stressing that this was in keeping with Jewish law.

Unlike other countries where sexual abuse within Jewish communities has attracted media scrutiny and legal action, to date only one known case involving a Jewish sexual abuser has gone to court in South Africa, Wendy Hendler and Rozanne Sack, who founded Koleinu, told The Jewish Independent.

His name was Sidney Frankel, a prominent businessman and philanthropist. Two years before he died from cancer in 2017, reports emerged that Frankel had allegedly sexually abused at least eight (mainly Jewish) children in the 1970s-80s. They became known as the Frankel eight.

A lawyer who represented them, Ian Levitt, brought a civil case against Frankel and applied to have the law against the time limit applied to criminal convictions in sexual abuse cases changed. Ultimately Levitt won and the High Court changed the law, which was a massive victory. But Frankel died before he could be charged and tried.

"I don't even know if Sidney Frankel was ever arrested and I have no knowledge of any other arrests for these types of offences," Hendler says. "There have been individuals placed on the national sex offender registry, one even recently, but the institutions clam up and it's kept very quiet." 

The current case has shone a renewed spotlight on the role played by Koleinu, which Hendler and Sack founded in 2014 to provide support for victims of sexual abuse, after struggling to find the right support for their own experiences.

“We went through the difficulties of getting support, figuring out where to go for help, whether to press charges and who to speak to,” recalls Sack. “So, we decided we wanted to start an organisation in the Jewish community that would be a resource for victims of abuse. We also wanted to start raising awareness in the community and opening the conversation around abuse.”

And so Koleinu was born.

Initially they met with significant resistance. “At that point, there was no talk in the community on abuse, it was very hush hush,” says Sack.

By chance, on a visit to Israel, Hendler met an abuse expert, Debbie Gross, who she brought to South Africa,  and with her help, they started their helpline and trained and vetted volunteers to work on the phones.  The helpline started in Johannesburg and recently expanded into Cape Town as well.

“We are the first place that a victim can call,” adds Hendler. “It’s completely anonymous on both ends and they can then safely tell their story, whether it be of sexual abuse of domestic violence. Our aim is to support them over however many calls it might take until they’re ready to take the next step.”

With the help of Gross, Sack and Hendler also began to do talks within the community on abuse. “I think it was the first time that the community had been exposed to that topic and it caused quite a bit of uproar – they were absolutely shocked,” says Sack.

“But it was important to do it and that’s how we launched Koleinu, we shocked people into saying this is happening in our community.”

From a religious standpoint, it also helped that as the wife of Rabbi Ron Hendler, who heads up the conversion program at the Johannesburg Beth Din, Hendler had an entrée into rabbinical circles. “We were therefore able to get recognition as a body that understands halacha and religious sensitivities,” she says.

“We did a lot of training with rabbis and rebbetzins on reporting abuse within the religious context. Validation within the community helped and we’ve had many calls over the years from rabbis and rebbetzins.”

Today, Koleinu also runs an innovative prevention of child sexual abuse program called “SchoolSafe” which they developed based on extensive research into similar programs from Israel to the United States to Australia. Adapted to operate with a South African context, the program caters to primary school children.

While the program was expressly developed for Jewish day schools, many of which have embraced it, not all of them have taken up the opportunity.  “It’s inexplicable, we can’t get our heads around it,” says Hendler. In fact, interest in the program has largely come from more secular schools. “I think some schools in our community are worried about parents thinking that we’re scaring the kids,” says Sack.

While she and Hendler did report their abuser, a doctor who was ultimately ordered to stop practicing for just one year, it’s only fairly recently that Sack has spoken publicly about her experience. “We have run the gambit of everything the victim goes through from secondary traumatisation – not being believed – to intimidation to death threats and to support and encouragement,” she says.

“Having been through it gives you more credibility. We find that people listen harder when they know our story. [Our work has now] taken on a life of its own within both the Jewish community and more recently in the wider South African community too.”

Photo: Rozanne Sack (left) and Wendy Hendler