Lev Tahor families flee San Juan La Laguna just months after fleeing Canada amid child abuse allegations
After fleeing Canada amid allegations of child abuse, about 230 members of the ultraorthodox Jewish group Lev Tahor have now been expelled from the Guatemalan village where they had reassembled their reclusive community.
An edict from a group of indigenous elders in the town of San Juan La Laguna, 150 kilometres west of Guatemala City, said that the Lev Tahor members were no longer welcome in the lakeside town.
It was the culmination of a dispute with the local community that escalated in recent days with some Lev Tahor families having their water supply cut off and being threatened with violence, Nachman Helbrans, the son of the group's spiritual leader, Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, told the Star.
The move was denounced by another prominent Jewish leader in Guatemala. Rabbi Shalom Pelman, who leads the Chabad Lubavitch congregation in Guatemala's capital city, said it is the type of activity that brings to mind the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany.
“This is not typical in the world I live in. Even in Iran, Jews are not expelled,” he told the Star in a telephone interview.
Locals said a bus full of Lev Tahor families left for Guatemala City on Thursday and a second bus departed San Juan La Laguna on Friday morning.
The edict to leave was delivered Wednesday after Lev Tahor and the Council of Indigenous Elders, representing the majority Christian population, were unable to negotiate a solution to their clash of civilizations.
Lev Tahor, a radical strain of Hassidic Judaism, was founded by Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans in Israel and flourished after he moved the group to the U.S. in the early 1990s. While living in New York, Helbrans was jailed for kidnapping a young follower. He was deported to Israel after serving a portion of his prison sentence. In the early 2000s, he moved his group to the Quebec town of Ste-Agathe-des-Monts.
Problems began several years ago when encounters with Quebec's child protection authorities led to suspicions the group was carrying out underage marriages, forcing members to take powerful and unnecessary psychiatric medication and raising their children with no access to doctors or proper education. That prompted a raid in August 2013 and proceedings to have more than a dozen children taken into foster care.
The community fled to Chatham-Kent in November 2013. After investigators from local Children's Aid Society, the Canada Border Service Agency and Quebec provincial police followed up on the original Quebec child-welfare probe, Lev Tahor members started fleeing the country.
Nachman Helbrans said that two children remain in foster care in Chatham-Kent and a number of families are still fighting in Ontario court to overturn a ban on obtaining Canadian passports so that children can be reunited with their parents. In some cases, those parents have fled the country or been deported for immigration violations.
Stephen Doigt, executive director of Chatham-Kent Children's Services, would not comment on the details of any ongoing cases, but revealed that the few Lev Tahor families who had remained in Ontario mysteriously fled this week, likely on the evening of Aug. 27.
“Their means of departure was similar in nature to their departure from Ste Agathe. (Children’s Services) has alerted child welfare authorities across Canada,” he said in an email.
But the majority of Lev Tahor members have reconstituted their community in the tourist town on the shores of Lake Atitlán.
Their arrival last spring did not sit well with locals, said tour guide Luis Cholotio, a lifelong resident of San Juan La Laguna.
“They want to be on their own, they don't believe in the schools, the educational systems here, so they do their own things,” he said in an interview. “So the leaders talked about the future of the community and said they can live in Guatemala, we don't care, but they should live in a separate place, not inside a community.”
A spokesman for the indigenous council, Miguel Vasquez, said the decision was made to protect the culture of the local population.
“We act in self-defence and to respect our rights as indigenous people,” he told Agence France-Presse.
Cholotio also said there were concerns about the oft-repeated accusation that Lev Tahor children are forced to marry as early as 13 years old. Lev Tahor has repeatedly denied this claim, and says the community always abides by the laws of the place in which they reside.
Rabbi Pelman, a 15-year resident of Guatemala, said he has never before heard of such an edict being applied in the country.
“Even if they are the most problematic group . . . the expelling of a religious group or ethnic group from one place to another is not acceptable,” he said. “That's why we have laws, we have judges, we have police. They are the ones qualified to deal with problematic issues.”
He is calling on the Guatemalan government and the international community to come to the defence of Lev Tahor.
“It's less than 70 years since the Holocaust. If that can happen again it's a wake up call for the international community to see what we're doing wrong and how we can fix it sooner rather than later.”
