Australia: Chabad figure Velvel Serebryanski convicted of raping and molesting a child at Melbourne's Yeshivah Centre
Request a correction or replyRecord 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)
Archive classification
This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.
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
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
Cited 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.
Source provenance
Source access and integrity log
This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.
- Source and tier basis
- https://www.timesofisrael.com/son-of-chabad-rabbi-in-australia-convicted-of-child-sex-abuse-in-long-running-scandal/ Corpus classification: international-jewish-press-court-reporting; evidentiary role: verdict-report. SHA-256 c04711bf30a6903301c5f8d0c4fd5faf0be517f7f47ea9adecdd88e23ee8e6d0
- Retrieval
- 2026-07-27 · Preserved
- Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
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