Head of Austrian community offers help to UK mum’s bid to reunite with twins
Oskar Deutsch said he'd support Beth Alexander, who is fighting to take part in the barmitzvah of her sons, after they were separated from her by an Austrian court ruling
Jenni Frazer is a freelance journalist
The president of the Vienna Jewish community, Oskar Deutsch, has offered to help the British Jewish solicitor, Beth Alexander, to take part in the upcoming barmitzvah of her twin sons, Samuel and Benjamin, from whom she has been separated after a ruling of the Austrian courts.
Ms Alexander has been in prolonged dispute with her ex-husband, Dr Michael Schlesinger, since shortly after the twins’ birth nearly 13 years ago. The couple have fought many battles in court, during which Dr Schlesinger challenged Ms Alexander’s fitness as a mother, while she accused him of calling on his contacts in the Vienna Jewish community in order to impede her relationship with the children.
Dr Schlesinger won custody of the twins but Ms Alexander — who had returned from Austria to live in Britain and qualify as a lawyer in the UK — recently made a renewed attempt to improve her access to the boys. After the latest court ruling, in which she was told that she was to have no contact at all with the children, she launched a public campaign in London to raise awareness of the case.
The boys’ barmitzvah is due to take place in June in Vienna. Ms Alexander said she had been given no details of the event, but hoped to be able to celebrate with the twins in the UK.
Oskar Deutch, after a conversation with Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis — who flew to Vienna in 2018 to try to resolve the situation — now says that everyone should “rally behind the immediate goal of helping Beth to participate at her twins’ upcoming barmitzvah”. He has told the Chief Rabbi that he personally has contacted Dr Schlesinger and reports that “he says he never declined Beth attending their sons’ barmitzvah and is still willing to allow her to see the boys within a framework both need to commit to”.
It is understood that it has been made clear to Dr Schlesinger that any such “attendance” by Ms Alexander ought to allow her to participate fully in the simcha, and not merely be an observer at the celebration.
In his letter to Rabbi Mirvis, Mr Deutsch emphasises that “the ruling over the children’s custody is a legal one and has been made by independent courts. The Jewish community did not participate in the court case… no president, no rabbi and no community official is able to influence or even overrule a court hearing”, Nevertheless, he says: “One cannot hear about Beth’s fate without being deeply touched… I feel her pain”.
Meanwhile, according to a report in the Jewish Telegraph, a man styling himself as the former chief rabbi of Vienna, Moshe Friedman, has staged a “dramatic intervention” and has pledged to “reunite” Beth Alexander with her sons.
A number of sources, however, say that not only is he not the former chief rabbi of Vienna, but that he is not even a rabbi. The Jewish Telegraph quotes him as saying that the Vienna Jewish community “feared his involvement in cases and described it as “a game changer. The community fear me. This is their worst case scenario,” he told the paper.
He has been involved in a number of controversial court cases, notably one in which he sued after a school in Antwerp refused to accept his sons as students at a girls’ school. In 2006 the New York- born Friedman took part in a Holocaust revisionist conference in Tehran, organised by the then Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The JN has contacted Beth Alexander and the Office of the Chief Rabbi for comment.
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