Judge Gave Kids Juvenile Detention For Refusing Lunch With ‘Abusive’ Dad? Omer Tsimhoni Tells His Story

When Judge Lisa Gorcyca gave three kids juvenile detention for refusing lunch with their dad, many people were upset since the mother, Maya Eibschitz-Tsimhoni, and the eldest child claimed Omer Tsimhoni is an abusive father. Both are involved in a messy divorce, and the dad claims that the mom has “poisoned” his children against him and that the stories are not true.

In a related report by the Inquisitr, Judge Lisa Gorcyca originally sent the three kids with their mother to tour Mandy’s Place in Children’s Village, which is a facility for abused and neglected children, after all of them refused to meet with Omer Tsimhoni. It’s unclear from the court record if the tour ever happened, but some reports say the judge did not give the kids juvenile detention for refusing lunch with their dad, while others say she kept the children “in the county’s juvenile detention center” for the past several weeks. The judge also made the children spend two full days in her courtroom and another half day with a different judge. In any case, the children are now being sent to a Jewish summer camp called Camp Tamarack in West Bloomfield.

Omer Tsimhoni is a traffic safety researcher and General Motors engineer who works frequently at a GM research lab in Israel. Maya Eibschitz-Tsimhoni is a pediatric eye doctor. The divorce settlement says they married in 1995, had three children, and then moved to Israel in 2008 for work. But the wife did not want to move to Israel with him.

“She decided not to come,” Omer told the Observer. “Then she filed for divorce and stopped letting me see the kids or speak to the kids. After some months there was a reconciliation. She moved to Israel, we moved all of our belongings here and then one day she suddenly disappeared and took the kids. Next I heard from her she was in Michigan – not where we had lived, in Ann Arbor, but in Oakland County. That’s when the divorce proceedings began.”

The Judge Lisa Gorcyca gave the kids juvenile detention for refusing lunch with their dad because they defied a court order.

“But I do not apologize for — for not talking to him because I have a reason for that and that’s because he’s violent and he — I saw him hit my mom and I’m not gonna talk to him,” the boy told the judge. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“No, you did,” the judge countered. “You — I ordered you to talk to your father. You chose not to talk to your father. You defied a direct court order. It’s direct contempt, so I am finding you guilty of civil contempt.”

In September of 2010, Judge Gorcyca denied an order for person protection since the mother “failed to complete the process.” Initially, the mother claimed Omer Tsimhoni “hit me, pushed me against my car and assaulted me,” threatened to kill the children, and “threatened to fix things so I never work as a surgeon again” by damaging her hands.

Omer remembers those events quite differently.

“The one incident that happened was five years ago I had a five-hour unsupervised visit. We were in a park and Maya was circling around the park the whole time, trying to sabotage the visit. Two hours into the visit, the children ended up in her car and she was trying to leave. I tried to prevent her from leaving because it was my time with the children. I was very careful not to do anything but she claimed that I pushed her. She screamed at the children, ‘Call 911! Call 911!’ The police showed up and Maya was screaming and the police confirmed that nothing happened. But in the children’s mind, that’s what happened.”

The judge also compared the mother to Charles Manson based upon the way the mother was allegedly manipulating the kids, and some reports claim the mother warned her kids not to cooperate with the judge.

“Your children — you need to do a research program on Charlie Manson and the cult that he has. Your behavior in the hall with me months ago, your behavior in this courtroom… is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in 46,000 cases,” said Gorcyca.

So when reports claimed that the judge gave the kids juvenile detention for the lunch with dad refusal, Omer says that was actually his ex-wife manipulating the media.

“I’m in shock by what’s happening,” he said. “My ex-wife lost in court after many times she was warned and as a result she just went out to the media to put pressure on the judge or overrule the judge. I understand everybody’s pain—the children’s pain, my pain, that the children are where they are. But she saw it coming and never tried to prevent it.”

The divorce battle has been waged in multiple courts, even in Israel, and U.S. District Judge Robert Cleland wrote that he had difficulty believing either parent after watching them testify.

“The court ultimately cannot find either party fully credible or fully persuasive,” Cleland wrote, according to the Detroit Free Press. “There are inconsistencies in earlier statements made by each party that are sufficient to raise reasonable concern about each party’s credibility.”

What do you think?

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