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An immigrant's certificate and a passport are seen on top of a piano as newly arrived immigrants from France play it at Ulpan Etzion, the original residential school and absorption centre, which has taught Hebrew to tens of thousands of immigrants since 1949, in Jerusalem January 20, 2015. For Jews coming to "the Jewish state" from all corners reached by the diaspora, the move may bring relief, but it also raises challenges: a new language and culture, unfamiliar social codes and the difficulty of finding a job. With anti-Semitism rising in France, and their worries stoked by this month's killing of four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris, French Jews now make up the largest group of new migrants to Israel. Picture taken January 20, 2015. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

A Melbourne senior rabbi believes that paedophiles and gays could be cured. Rabbi Zvi Telsner made the stunning statement during a royal commission’s examination of the response of Jewish schools and centres to child abuse cases that go as far back as the ‘80s.

Telsner, the spiritual leader of the Yeshivah Centre in Melbourne, said that through therapy and time, a person who has sexually abused children could be cured of his condition. The same thing could also apply to gay people.

“There is a certain belief that if someone, for example, after 20 or 25 years, has not committed any offences, and all of this time has gone to therapy, there would be a good possibility that the person may have been able to change his way of life,” he said at the hearing on Friday. When asked if he has the same views about homosexuals, the rabbi answered, “I would say the same thing that could happen to someone who was gay, I would suspect.”

The questions stemmed from an incident at the school in 1976, during which a mother whose son had been sexually abused by a worker in the college, was told by a rabbi they thought they had cured the offender.

The Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse has been conducting hearings to examine how Melbourne and Sydney Jewish schools responded to child abuse cases.

In a hearing in Sydney last week, the president of the Rabbinical Council of New South Wales, told the royal commission that although he knew that a man massaging a child was “highly inappropriate” under the Jewish law, he wasn’t aware that a man touching a child’s genitals was illegal.

The rabbis’ views were slammed by Rabbi Yaakov Glasman, the former president of the Rabbinical Council of Victoria. Glasman told the royal commission that the other rabbis’ opinions were “fringe,” and therefore people should not assume all rabbis hold the same views.

“It would be an understatement to say that we are deeply disturbed by some of the comments that have been made by rabbis in this very box,” he was quoted by the AAP as saying on Friday. “There can be no words that could in any way seek to mitigate or to reverse the damage that they have caused … comments which I know the overwhelming majority of the rabbinate distances themselves from emphatically.”

The hearings concluded on Friday after two weeks. The royal commission is expected to reveal its findings later this year.