Nearly two decades after the nightmare of their abuse by their revered ultra-Orthodox Jewish principal and mentor began, two Melbourne sisters will finally learn her punishment.
Malka Leifer, the former principal of the Adass Israel School, will be sentenced today for the sexual abuse of Dassi Erlich and Elly Sapper when they were students at the Elsternwick school between 2004 and 2007.
Erlich, Sapper and their older sister Nicole Meyer, whose allegations of abuse Leifer was acquitted on, will be there in person for the hearing in the Victorian County Court.
She will watch proceedings by videolink from the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, Melbourne’s maximum security women’s prison.
The journey from charges to conviction to sentence has been long, delayed by Leifer fleeing to Israel in 2008 when allegations were first raised with school officials.
A years-long legal battle against extradition followed, during which Leifer spent time in home detention and prison in her homeland.
Psychological reports accused Leifer of feigning mental illness to avoid extradition, a finding backed by prosecutor Justin Lewis.
He described Leifer as having “some sort of allergy to the legal proceedings themselves”.
The 56-year-old mother of eight arrived back in Australia to face justice in 2020 and was convicted after a trial earlier this year.
Jurors found her guilty of 18 offences relating to the abuse of Erlich and Sapper.
Erlich said the darkness Leifer had created in her through the abuse would not define her.
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“Instead I choose to focus on the light,” she told a pre-sentence hearing.
“I am resilient, I am powerful and I am so much more than the limitations you chose to impose on me.”
Sapper said Leifer was the first person who told her she loved her – something she yearned for.
“Faced with the painful truth that her love wasn’t real was a betrayal of such magnitude it left me broken,” Sapper said.
Judge Gamble is expected to take into account the time Leifer spent in Israel, including in home detention, when he hands down the sentence.
Her barrister, Ian Hill KC, described that time as punitive, confined to a space away from her husband and children.
While she could have visitors, she missed religious duties and functions and was under constant supervision, he said.
Hill previously described Leifer as lonely and a broken woman.
A former colleague, Malky Fixler, said she had gone from an “upbeat and inspiring educator to an isolated, depressed shadow of her former self”.
