HasidiCult

          Sitting at the Friday night Shabbos table last week, I was hit with some shocking news. Casually, one of our guests threw the bombshell that Malka Leifer was extradited to Australia from Israel.      "What, you didn't hear yet? It was all over the news last week."       She said it so casually, as if discussing last night's meatball and spaghetti dinner or the latest celebrity gossip. Meanwhile, my jaw had dropped so low that I was incapable of forming coherent words. After so many attempts to extradite her, countless interventions of the three sisters at the forefront of the case, and the strained relations between Israel and Australia, it had almost become somewhat of a righteous yet unattainable goal. The kind of thing that you hope for desperately but resign yourself to the thought of it never being achieved.      The fact that it was now a reality stunned me speechless. The relief and ecs...

     Thirteen years after Malka Leifer fled Australia to escape 74 charges of rape, indecent assault, and child sex abuse charges, among others, she is finally extradited to Australia. This followed attempts in 2014 and 2016 to extradite her, both of which were unsuccessful due to Leifer's fabrication of mental illness that deemed her unfit to stand trial. Israeli Deputy Minister of Health Yaakov Litzman is being investigated by police for interfering into the mental health assessment and pressuring psychiatrists to proclaim Leifer unfit to stand trial. Only last year, once an Israeli psychiatric panel declared that she was lying about her mental illness, was her case set back into motion. Israel began the process of extraditing her yet again, leading to the Supreme Court rejecting a final appeal against her extradition. After that, Israel's justice minister, Avi Nissenkorn, signed an order to send Leifer back to Australia.     Leifer has already had her fi...