State deems sex abuse suspect fit for hearing on extradition to Australia

A state psychiatric examination submitted Tuesday to a Jerusalem District Court judge deemed Malka Leifer fit to continue facing an extradition hearing.

The former principal of an ultra-Orthodox girls’ school in Melbourne is wanted on 74 charges of child sexual abuse in Australia. She was arrested in February following a police undercover operation that cast doubt on  her claim that she is mentally unfit to appear in court.

Leifer’s attorney Yehuda Fried disputed the conclusions submitted Tuesday by Jerusalem District Psychiatrist Dr. Moshe Weisbroth and demanded that the defense be allowed to have its own medical professionals evaluate the suspect.

Judge Chana Lomp accepted the request and ordered Fried to submit his psychiatric assessment of Leifer by October 14. The next hearing will be held a month later on November 14, when each side will be given the opportunity to question the other’s conclusions.

Dassi Erlich, one of Leifer’s alleged victims who has been campaigning for the former principal’s extradition, said the state psychiatrist’s report represented a “big sigh of relief.”

However, she lamented the dragged-out extradition process, which began over four years ago.

“How many more assessments do we need? How much longer do we need to keep assessing to come to the same conclusion?” Erlich wrote in a Facebook post.

Leifer, an Israeli citizen, fled Australia to Israel in 2008, days before allegations of sexual abuse against her surfaced following a heads-up from officials at the Adass Israel school where she taught.

After authorities in Melbourne filed charges against her, Australia officially filed an extradition request in 2014. Leifer was then arrested in Israel but released to house arrest shortly thereafter.

Several years after coming to Israel and living in Bnei Brak she moved with her husband and 10 children to the ultra-Orthodox settlement of Emmanuel in the northern West Bank.

In June 2016, an Israeli court stopped the extradition process after an initial psychiatric assessment found that she was not fit to stand trial. Mental health professionals, including the Jerusalem district psychiatrist, found that the woman’s panic attacks prior to her scheduled court appearances were genuine and said that the proceedings of a court hearing put her under extreme anxiety.

Leifer was allowed to remain in Emmanuel under the supervision of community rabbis so long as she reported to a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation every six months.

During that time, Jewish Community Watch — a global anti-child abuse organization — hired a private investigator to look into claims that Leifer was feigning mental illness.

The investigator installed hidden cameras that showed the woman going about her daily chores. The footage led to a police undercover operation, which came to the conclusion that she had in fact been faking in order to avoid extradition.

After Leifer’s subsequent February arrest, her defense team filed a number of petitions demanding her release, standing by the assertion that she is mentally unfit for trial. The most recent of which fell short last June when a Jerusalem District Court rejected Fried’s request to have Leifer released on bail. The decision cited a psychiatric evaluation completed shortly after her arrest that deemed the conclusions of the 2016 evaluation to have been false.

The psychiatrist who completed the evaluation has since been taken off the case.

Nonetheless, the defense argued that Leifer’s condition has severely deteriorated since entering prison this year and demanded that a new evaluation be conducted.

But even before the results were made public Tuesday, Fried made clear that he had issues with the psychiatrists being used by the state and that Leifer’s specialist in Australia was better fit to judge her mental health.

Shana Aaronson from Jewish Community Watch — which led the undercover operation that led to Leifer’s arrest — explained that “there are many people in the (Adass) community who do not want Leifer coming back.”

Aaronson said a trial in Australia would mean the airing of the community’s mistakes in its handling of accusations against Leifer.