American Teacher David Kramer Convicted of 6 Abuse Counts at Australian Chabad Yeshiva
An American Jew pleaded guilty to charges of sexual assault against students at an Orthodox boys school in Melbourne.
David Kramer, 52, pleaded guilty to five charges of indecent assault via video link Friday at Melbourne Magistrates Court.
He also pleaded guilty to one count of an indecent act with a minor; six of the original 12 charges were withdrawn.
Kramer, who was jailed in 2008 for sodomizing a 12-year-old boy at a synagogue in St. Louis, was extradited from the United States by Australian police last December.
He pleaded guilty to assaulting students at Yeshivah College, an Orthodox boys’ school run by Chabad while he was teaching there between 1989 and 1992.
It was alleged in court last year that Kramer’s employers did not report the allegations to police. Instead, they allegedly paid for him to relocate to Israel.
He later moved to America,.
Manny Waks, the founder of Tzedek, an advocacy group for Jewish victims of child sex abuse, described Kramer’s guilty pleas as an “important milestone” for victims and “a watershed moment” for the Australian Jewish community.
“David Kramer will be the first perpetrator to be convicted for his crimes against innocent children since this scandal broke in mid-2011 and the first to be convicted for such crimes within a Jewish institution as an employee,” Waks said in a statement.
“It will send out a strong message to our community,” Waks said. “You will be brought to justice irrespective of how far back you committed these crimes.”
Kramer made no application for bail and was ordered to appear at the County Court on July 17.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
