(JTA) – Dan Goldberg, a JTA correspondent in Australia, won his country’s most prestigious journalism award for his documentary on child sex abuse at a Melbourne yeshiva.
Goldberg and director Danny Ben-Moshe on Dec. 4 won the 2013 Walkley Documentary Award for “Code of Silence,” which documents the story of a fight for an investigation into allegations of child sex abuse at Yeshivah College, an Orthodox Jewish school for boys.
Goldberg and Ben-Moshe followed the story for a year from July 2013 and was the only TV crew to gain access to courtrooms, according to the award’s website.
Manny Waks, the former Yeshivah student who blew the whistle on the abuse by school rabbis, now serves as chief executive of Tzedek, an advocacy group for Jewish sex abuse victims.
“It’s a little bittersweet to win this prestigious award; we wish we never had to tell this story,” Goldberg told the website JWire.
The documentary “contributes to public understanding of the magnitude of the failure across institutions, both religious and secular, to protect children because of a more dominant reputational defensiveness,” the judges said in their comments. “Through actuality and interview, the documentary effectively breaks the ‘code of silence’ which had prevailed to cover up abuse in this close-knit community.”
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