Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Conviction Jewish institutions and contexts Hasidic and Haredi communities Melbourne, Victoria, Australia · 2025

Australia: Chabad figure Velvel Serebryanski convicted of raping and molesting a child at Melbourne's Yeshivah Centre

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

Adult figure within Melbourne's Chabad-Lubavitch Yeshivah Centre community, son of a prominent Chabad emissary rabbi

Organization

Yeshivah Centre, Melbourne (Chabad-Lubavitch)

Spiritual nexus

The victim was a child inside the Yeshivah Centre's Chabad religious and educational community; the defendant's standing within that community, as the son of a leading Chabad emissary, gave him access to isolate the child from communal religious settings including a synagogue study session.

  • Pastoral or clerical authority
  • Institutional obedience or isolation

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 2025-12-05 · conviction at trial

    County Court of Victoria, Australia. Velvel Serebryanski, 61, was found guilty on all four counts — three charges of indecent assault and one of sexual penetration of a child aged 10-16 — over the molestation and rape of Manny Waks, who was 11-12 years old at the time, in the late 1980s in and around Melbourne's Yeshivah Centre and its affiliated synagogue. One incident occurred during a Shavuot study session when Serebryanski led the child from the synagogue to a restroom and assaulted him. Serebryanski had emigrated to New York and was extradited back to Australia in 2023 to face trial; he had separately confessed to the abuse during a 2017 televised exposé.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • standing within the Yeshivah Centre's Chabad educational and religious community
  • isolating the child from a synagogue study session on the pretext of leaving to talk privately, then assaulting him in a restroom

Primary record

Sources

international jewish press court reporting verdict report 'Member of prominent Chabad family in Australia convicted of child sex abuse in long-running scandal', The Times of Israel, 2025.

Report of the County Court of Victoria conviction on all four counts, the victim's identity and age, the 1980s Yeshivah Centre setting, and the defendant's 2023 extradition from New York.

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