For three devastated sisters, it’s a matter of principal

Israel’s justice system does not know what to do with accused sex predator Malka Leifer.

Malka Leifer, a former Australian school principal accused of dozens of cases of sexual abuse of girls, arrives for a hearing at the District Court in Jerusalem. Picture: AFP

It’s hard to believe that after 57 court hearings in Israel, the Australian victims of accused sex predator Malka Leifer are no closer to knowing when she will answer for the crimes she is said to have committed. Nicole Meyer and her two sisters can barely contain their frustration.

They went to Victorian police in 2012 to describe how Leifer ­abused her position as principal of a fundamentalist Jewish girls school to groom and violate each of them before fleeing to Israel when the whistle was blown.

Yet Israel’s vaunted legal system — ostensibly so ferociously independent that a sitting prime minister can be put on notice of indictment for corruption — seems locked in a time warp, pitching from one Groundhog Day to another.

If justice delayed is justice denied, the sisters have every right to be indignant. Three Israeli judges, 30 psychiatrists and some of the country’s top lawyers have been unable to reach a decision on whether Leifer is fit to appear in court, let alone to be put on a plane to face 74 charges of sexual assault in Australia.

“It’s been all about her, nothing about us,” a dismayed Meyer, 34, tells Inquirer. “All the judge needs to say is she is fit to stand trial and send her here, and then we will have our chance to say how the trauma affected us, what we are living with every day as a result.

“We’ve had our hopes raised again and again. But just when we think something positive is going to happen, we hear there’s another delay. These proceedings go on and on and on.”

Monday’s hearing in the Jerusalem District Court was supposed to be the circuit-breaker, with judge Chana Lomp to rule one way or another on Leifer’s capacity to attend court. Since her initial arrest in 2014, after an extradition request from the Australian government was taken up by the Israelis, Leifer’s lawyers have claimed that her dread of appearing caused debilitating panic attacks, rendering her unable to communicate or interact with her lawyers as required by Israeli law.

Prosecutors with the Office of the State Attorney insist this is a sham, contrived to drag out the case for so long that it becomes impractical to run, which very nearly happened. In May 2016 the original trial judge, Amnon Cohen, ruled her unfit and suspended the extradition. Leifer was released from home detention.

But in a monumental miscalculation, she dropped the pretence and resumed what seemed a normal life. Photos of her smiling and mingling in the crowd at a religious festival in May 2017 were capped last year when she was recorded on video out and about shopping: Israeli police pounced, filing charges of obstruction of justice. With the extradition revived before a new judge, Leifer was remanded in custody and evaluated by psychiatrists all over again.

Lomp pleased no one with her decision to keep the merry-go-round spinning by ordering yet another “expert panel” to report on the 54-year-old’s state of mind. Leifer’s voluble lawyer, Yehuda Fried, warned it would be hard to find “objective medical experts who have not been intimidated by the media”, a nod to how many psychiatrists have been engaged to date. Remember, the Israeli courts have yet to broach the substantive issues of extradition, and you can bet that process will be equally drawn out if and when the wheel turns. “How much more will Leifer’s victims have to tolerate?” wonders Jeremy Leibler, president of the Zionist Federation of Australia. “This circus has gone on long enough.”

The problem is there is more to the case than due legal process: Leifer’s extradition is complicated by the politics of religion in the Jewish state, imbuing it with a searing significance that is hard to fathom from the distance of Australia.

The ultra-Orthodox community in Israeli, the Haredi, wields political clout that belies its physical presence — about 12 per cent of the population, though growing fast. Under Benjamin Netanyahu, small, archly conservative parties of the religious right have underpinned his governing numbers, increasing their influence.

This has been a bellwether of the political times, reflecting a hardening of attitudes on security and against Palestinian autonomy since the bloodshed of the Second Intifada on the streets and in the cafes of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem at the turn of the century. (The lasting effect of that Palestinian uprising is often overlooked in discussion of Netanyahu’s longevity as prime minister.)

But secular Israelis still begrudge the largesse showered on the Haredi: the men, bearded and dressed from head to toe in black, are exempt from compulsory military service and often choose not to work, raising large families on welfare.

After the date of Leifer’s 58th hearing was set on Thursday, this time for bail, Meyer lamented: “Something is not right here. I strongly suspect something is being fixed behind the scenes.” Her suspicion has foundation. Last month, Israeli police recommended the country’s most powerful Orthodox politician, deputy health minister Yaakov Litzman, be indicted on charges of fraud and breach of trust for pressuring psychiatric witnesses. Litzman denies any wrongdoing.

The September 17 general election introduced another wildcard, with Netanyahu’s Likud party narrowly beaten into second place behind the emergent Blue and White group headed by former defence chief Benny Gantz. Wily Bibi, though, has first dibs at stitching together another government even though he is under threat of indictment himself. Who knows what the religious right will demand.

This is not to suggest that a judge could be, or has been, gotten at; Israel’s judicial system is too robust for that to happen. However, the leniency afforded to Leifer is puzzling. As Meyer points out, “she plays the system and for some reason the system allows itself to be played”.

Fried and the rest of Leifer’s ­pricey lawyers — two prominent Tel Aviv firms are involved in her defence, and just who is footing the bill raises another set of questions — have been allowed to instigate one delay after another.

Consider the sequence of events that led up to Monday’s hearing before Lomp. In July, The Times of Israel reported that the medical board put in place under the previous judge, Cohen, had been “gearing up” to find Leifer was faking mental illness. The panel was due to reconvene on July 11 to finalise its recommendation. But the subsequent court hearing was pushed back after Fried called in sick, and was postponed again when he went on holiday.

At the same time, ranking Jerusalem District Psychiatrist Jacob Charnes flip-flopped in his evidence. Having initially endorsed Leifer’s fitness to face court in April 2015, he retracted the finding; after her rearrest last year, he prevaricated on signing off on an updated report that she was able to appear. Cross-examined in court by Fried, he then recommended that a fresh panel be appointed, the option Lomp embraced.

None of the sisters — Dassi is 32, Elly has just turned 30 — was surprised when Jerusalem’s progressive deputy mayor, Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, alleged this week that Leifer had been grooming and possibly molesting young women behind bars in the all-female Neve Tirza jail outside Tel Aviv, a claim rejected by the prison service.

“It doesn’t come across as grooming but it really is to get to an end point, to do what she wants to do,” says Meyer, now a mother of four in Melbourne. “That is how she does it. That is her MO.”

The sisters, each of whom complained to police of being abused by Leifer when she was principal of the Adass Israel School from 2003 to 2008, are convinced there are more victims out there. They are still living with the consequences of what was done to them: Meyer sees a therapist twice a week and is mindful of how unworldly she was when she fell into Leifer’s clutches.

She grew up in a household where there was no television, internet or unapproved books, and is adamant her own children, while steeped in the ultra-Orthodox stream of Jewish faith, will know enough not to be preyed on as she was.

Most of all she wants to look Leifer in the face in an Australian court. “I want to be able to show her that after everything she did to me, I’m still standing,” the young woman says. “It will be confronting but I hope very much that day will come.”