After 38 years, justice for the sexual abuse victim who never gave up

Manny Waks has been the voice of child sexual abuse victims in the Jewish community for so long that some people forget what drove him to take on this role in the first place.

In the late 1980s Waks was sexually abused by two men, in two unrelated incidents, while he was a student at the Chabad Yeshivah Centre in Melbourne, and in 2011 he went public with his allegations to bring them to justice.

Last month, 38 years after he was abused, Manny Waks finally got the justice he has been seeking. On December 5, the second of his abusers, Velvel Serebryanski, now 61, was convicted in the Victorian County Court of all four charges relating to his abuse of Waks when he was just 12 years old.

Waks described the verdict as “an incredible personal milestone” that marked “the closing of a long and painful circle” that dates back to 1987, when Serebryanksi abused him in the synagogue in the Yeshivah Centre in Balaclava, before fleeing to New York to escape prosecution.

Waks went to the police in 1996 with claims that Serebryanksi and his other abuser, David Cyprys, had abused him within the grounds of the Yeshivah Centre. Cyprys was convicted in 2013. But it took another 12 years of campaigning for the law to catch up with Serebryanski.

It was an extraordinary feat of dedication in the face of sustained intimidation and excommunication from the Chabad community he grew up in. Like most victims who go public, Waks has paid a heavy price for the abuse he suffered and for his advocacy.

His famous family - 17 siblings - has been split, his parents divorced, his own marriage broke down and he has suffered from persistent emotional trauma that sent him to the brink of suicide.

For many years Waks was the only victim who broke the silence about child sexual abuse within the Jewish community. There were many others but only Waks chose to speak out. When Dassi Erlich and her sisters bravely did the same thing eight years ago, launching a campaign to have Malka Leifer extradited from Israel, Waks was by their side, supporting and advocating for their cause, as he has been doing for other victims of abuse for the past 15 years.