How Could You? Hall of Shame-Canada-Lev Tahor Jewish sect UPDATED
This will be an archive of heinous actions by those involved in child welfare, foster care and adoption. We forewarn you that these are deeply disturbing stories that may involve sex abuse, murder, kidnapping and other horrendous actions.
From Montreal, Canada, “Members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Lev Tahor Jewish sect in Quebec have fled Canada ahead of court appearances related to alleged child abuse.
Among those who fled the country are 14 children ranging in age from 6 months to 17 years who were to be placed in foster homes in Quebec, the (Montreal) Gazette reported Thursday.
In November, a Quebec Superior Court judge in St. Jerome ordered the children be placed in foster care after Quebec’s Department of Youth Protection alleged abuse, neglect and squalid living conditions in their homes. At that time, families of the children fled the area.
On Wednesday, six of the children were located in Trinidad and Tobago with three adults. The eight other children have not yet been found.
Nachman Helbrans, a spokesperson for the Lev Tahor community confirmed the children left Quebec to avoid being placed in foster care.
“The children are on a trip, on a vacation,” he said, without specifying where they are.”
Ultra-Orthodox Jews flee Quebec over foster care order[UPI 3/6/14]
“Police in Chatham, Ont. say 12 of the children from an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect who’ve been ordered into the care of children’s aid are no longer in the country.
Some of the dozen kids appear to be in Trinidad and Tobago, where they are being held with three adults after being stopped en route to Guatemala. Other members of the two families were apparently connecting to Guatemala through a Mexico airport.
Police and child services are still trying to locate the remaining two children who have been ordered into children’s aid care.
An Ontario judge has issued an emergency order that the children from the Lev Tahor community, who are at the centre of a custody case, be placed in the care of child services.
Families will be returned to Canada
A community member told supporters in an email obtained by The Canadian Press that two families whose children were ordered removed from their custody left Canada for Guatemala, but nine of the travellers were detained in Trinidad and Tobago during a stopover.
Among the nine stopped at the international airport in Port-of-Spain were six minors and three adults. Other members of the family were connecting to Guatemala through a Mexican airport.
The Attorney General of Trinidad said late Thursday three adults and six children from the sect had lost their attempt to prevent being returned to Canada. The group had filed an emergency petition of habeas corpus after they were stopped en route to Guatemala, but the High Court dismissed their claim.
Immigration authorities in Trinidad met Wednesday with Canadian embassy officials about the case, according to Marcia Hope, a spokeswoman for that country’s Ministry of National Security.
Community’s homes searched
Authorities entered the homes of ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect members in Ontario Wednesday night looking for children after members of some families at the centre of a child welfare case left the country.
Two police officers and four children’s aid workers went door to door in the community of homes in Chatham, Ont., where the Lev Tahor members have been living since they left Quebec late last year in the middle of a child protection case.
Police would not confirm if they were looking for the 13 children at the centre of the court case, but a Canadian Press reporter, who was at the Lev Tahor complex when authorities arrived Wednesday night, could hear the officers ask parents to see their children and to produce identification.
The police officers and child welfare workers stayed at the complex for about 90 minutes and left around 10 p.m. without apprehending anyone.
Most community members could be seen allowing police into their homes, but not the children’s aid workers. Police asked the landlord to let them into one home where there was no answer.
Not eager to return to Canada
The email from the community member to supporters details how two of the families at the centre of the order left Canada ahead of an appeal. The email indicates they were not eager to return willingly if the appeal did not go their way, though they had return tickets for March 13.
“The families choose to be on a vacation tour in the Caribbean on the time of the appeal hearing, to wait out for the decision of the appeal. If they see that the Ontario can force them back to Quebec, they will decide whatsoever to return to Ontario or even to Canada,” reads the email.
The group of nine — three adults and six children — that went through Trinidad was detained “for no reason,” the email said. Immigration authorities there wanted to send them back to Canada, but they wanted to be permitted to join the others in Guatemala, it said. The members of one family are American citizens and the others are Israeli citizens, the email said, so they dispute that they should be sent to Canada.
It’s not clear from the email if all of the 13 children have left Canada.
Families retain lawyer in Trinidad
The group retained a lawyer in Trinidad, and a letter from him to that country’s minister of national security was attached to the email. In the letter, Farai Hove Masaisai said he had not been given a reason for the group’s detention and alleged they were being poorly treated and underfed.
“The manner in which they were treated personally brought me to a fundamental low and made me heavily embarrassed and ashamed to call myself a Trinidadian,” he wrote.
When contacted by The Canadian Press, Masaisai said he could not comment because the case was before the courts.
In his letter, six members of the group are identified as being Israeli while two have American citizenship and one has Canadian citizenship.
An appeal of the court order that would see the 13 children turned over to child protection authorities in Quebec was scheduled to be heard Wednesday morning, but instead a lawyer for the local children’s aid authority brought an emergency motion, which prompted a closed-door hearing with the judge.
Superior Court Judge Lynda Templeton excluded members of the media from the hearing because she thought the presence of journalists “would cause harm to a child who is the subject of the proceeding.”
Templeton made an order at the end of the day dealing with “the apprehension of the children who are the subject of this appeal,” but the court refused to release that order to reporters until Thursday.
The actual appeal is now scheduled to be heard April 4.
Sect investigated for child welfare
Much of the Lev Tahor community of about 200 people left their homes in Ste-Agathe-des-Monts, Que., in the middle of a November night, days after a child welfare agency started a court case against a couple of the families.
In their absence, the court in Quebec ruled in November that the children be placed in foster care for 30 days, but the insular community had already settled in Chatham. The community maintains that the move from Quebec had been planned for some time as they felt persecuted in the province, especially in light of a proposed secular charter.
The community was under investigation for issues including hygiene, children’s health and allegations that the children weren’t learning according to the provincial curriculum.
A spokesman for the community has said Lev Tahor children are given religious education, but he has denied all allegations of mistreatment. The group says the other children, not subject to the order, have been traumatized by the experience.
The Lev Tahor, which means “pure heart,” came to Canada from Israel in 2005 after their spiritual leader, Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, was granted refugee status here.
The courts have heard that children’s aid has intervened with the community in the past.
Testimony from social workers highlighted concerns that the community is almost completely isolated from the outside world, the children are terrified of others who are not modestly dressed or “pure,” and some girls are married as teenagers.
When reporters went to the community Wednesday, some children peeked curiously from behind curtains while others waved and smiled.”
Lev Tahor families in Trinidad to be returned to Canada[CBC 3/6/14 by The Canadian Press]
REFORM Puzzle Piece
Update: “Attempts by Canadian and Guatemalan authorities to seize child members of the Lev Tahor sect have been blocked by a temporary court ruling.
A judge ruled Saturday that the children can stay with the adults until Monday, when they will go before a family court judge.
The temporary ruling found that Canadian officials working with the office of Guatemala’s solicitor-general did not provide sufficient evidence to proceed with a removal order.
At least two Lev Tahor families are known to have left Canada for Guatemala last week in the face of child custody hearings.
About 200 members of the sect settled in Chatham last year.
They fled Quebec authorities who said they weren’t being educated according to the provincial curriculum.
The group has denied all allegations of mistreatment.”
Judge blocks removal of Lev Tahor children in Guatemala[WindsorNews 3/15/14]
Update 2:” It was unusually quiet at the Lev Tahor settlement Monday, where ultra-orthodox Jewish families prepared for the Passover feast while awaiting a crucial court ruling in a legal fight over the seizure of some of their kids.
Over the last five months, since fleeing a Quebec child-welfare probe in the dead of night, the runaway Jewish sect’s leaders were ready to talk to anyone who’d listen — to plead their case about religious freedom and persecution.
National headlines followed.
But when word came down that a London judge had agreed 14 of the group’s kids named in a Quebec order shouldn’t be returned to that province in temporary foster care, after all, community leader Uriel Goldman reacted with bittersweet relief.
“Now, hopefully, everything is going to be settled down,” he said.
Instead of sending the kids back to Quebec, Superior Court Lynda Templeton ruled they should remain in the care of the local child-welfare agency that’s enforcing an emergency order she made last month to round up the kids for evaluation.
An unwritten plea in her 35-page decision was made directly to the Jewish sect and to Quebec youth protection officials to put the kids first.
“To create further upheaval and instability in their lives, would most surely have disastrous emotional and psychological ramifications for them,” she wrote, noting there’s nothing to gain by separating the families by a provincial border.
Seven of the children are in foster care in Ontario, some distance from Chatham-Kent, with Jewish Hasidic families, said Steven Doig of the local children’s aid society.
Six of the others remain in Guatemala, where they were taken by their parents, and another — a teenaged mother — has been re-united with her family in Chatham.
The silence at the Lev Tahor compound Monday, the start of the Passover celebration in which Jews mark their delivery from bondage in Egypt, was in stark contrast to the months-long circus that began playing out last fall at the rental duplexes near Chatham, known as Spurgeon’s Villa, where the sect settled after fleeing Quebec.
Led by controversial Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, and nicknamed the ‘Jewish Taliban’ for their extreme conservative views and dress, the group left Quebec to avoid the prying eyes of that province’s department of youth protection.
In the middle of the drama were Lev Tahor children, not just the few named in the Quebec order — but all of them, with sect leaders saying the kids were terrified after being repeatedly told the children’s aid society was coming to get them.
The Quebec officials were concerned about allegations of child abuse and neglect, including of forced marriages of teens, and sub-standard education — allegations Lev Tahor has denied. While it cried foul, Ontario courts wrestled with what to do. All the while, other drama swirled around the sect — a raid by Quebec police,
arrests by border officials, an escape out of Canada by some families ordered to stay put and a continuing court battle over whether the kids would be seized.
Templeton made clear “the lesson to be learned” is that you can run to another province, but you can’t hide from custody and child protection proceedings.
Templeton was also critical of Lev Tahor leaders and Denis Baraby, director of Quebec youth protection in the Laurentians, for publicly disclosing allegations in the case. She stressed none of the allegations has been proven. But, she also said there’s “cogent and probative evidence” of some of the charges.
Baraby acknowledged the criticism, but said “this went way beyond what we were expecting media-wise . . . I didn’t go that far. I just named the problems.”
“I think to at least answer and explain to the public what was going on was important for these children.”
He said the agency was counter-acting the sunny lives portrayed by Lev Tahor leaders. “The sun is not so bright as what they are trying to depict.””
Lev Tahor children to remain in child protection in Ontario[Chatham Daily News 4/14/14 by Jane Sims]
Update 3: “An Ontario judge has ordered an infant with an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect to be released from foster care and placed in the care of the baby’s 17-year-old mother.
Justice Paul Kowalyshyn ordered Chatham-Kent Children’s Services to release the Lev Tahor child, who with the mother was taken into custody in Calgary after fleeing Ontario ahead of a child custody appeal hearing.
Kowalyshyn banned the infant’s father from seeing the child until further notice and told the mother there would be “very specific terms of supervision,” though details were not released.
A custody hearing for another six children placed in foster care after being stopped in Trinidad and Tobago and then sent back to Canada will take place next week.
A Superior Court judge ruled earlier this month that 13 children who are part of the group do not have to be sent back to Quebec, where much of the community fled late last year amid a child protection case.
Certain families in the community face unproven allegations of mistreatment, and child marriages.
Spokesmen for Lev Tahor have acknowledge the children are given a religious education, but have denied allegations of abuse and underage marriage.
Lev Tahor, a community of about 200 people, left their homes in Ste-Agathe-des-Monts, Que., in the middle of the night, after a child welfare agency started a child protection case against a couple of the families.
They settled in Chatham, but the families at the centre of the court case fled the country ahead of an appeal hearing.
Some were stopped in Trinidad and Tobago and were sent back to Canada and a 17-year-old mother and her baby were found in Calgary, but six of the children and two parents successfully fled to Guatemala.”
Lev Tahor child released from foster care[The Record 4/28/14 by The Canadian Press]
Update 4:“
Four more Lev Tahor children have been ordered to be reunited with their parents after they were placed in foster care following a botched attempt to flee the country contrary to a court order.
Just two children remain in foster care — their parents having successfully escaped to Guatemala — as the legal saga enveloping the controversial ultraorthodox Jewish sect seemingly draws to a close.
“At the end of the day, I think how all this is going to shake out, is that ultimately what is going to be left on the table after all of these allegations about abuse and neglect . . . is one fundamental problem which could never ever have been resolved and that is the mandatory curriculum in Quebec was fundamentally in opposition to the teachings (of their religion),” said Guidy Mamann, the Toronto-based immigration lawyer coordinating the group’s legal defence.
Quebec child protection authorities have documented allegations of abuse, underage marriage and a sub-standard education regime within the sect. Sect leaders have categorically refuted all allegations of abuse and insist that Lev Tahor is the victim of a smear campaign and its members are being targeted for their beliefs.
The group fled Quebec en masse in November, kicking off a months-long legal saga. A Quebec court ordered 14 children be removed to foster care and issued apprehension warrants for all of the other children in the community.
An Ontario judge first upheld the Quebec ruling, but placed a stay on his order to allow the families to appeal. The 14 children were found to have left the jurisdiction in March, on the day the appeal was scheduled to be heard. Six of them were stopped at the border in Trinidad and Tobago, while an additional two were found in Calgary. Six more remain in Guatemala with their parents.
All of the eight apprehended children were placed in foster care. Another judge, hearing the appeal, overturned the original decision, meaning the families were no longer subject to the Quebec order. Subsequent hearings have led to the release of six of the eight children taken into care.
The case for the remaining two, whose parents are still in Guatemala, will be heard May 29. Mamann says that other members of the community have offered to take the children in the absence of their parents.”
Four more Lev Tahor kids to be reunited with parents[The Star 5/7/14 by Tim Alamenciak]
Update 5: “Police say two girls who are members of the ultra-orthodox Jewish sect Lev Tahor have left foster care in Ontario, but are safe.
Const. Renee Cowell with Chatham-Kent police didn’t provide any details, saying further information would have to come from Chatham-Kent Children’s Services.
The organization says it cannot, under law, provide any specifics concerning children who may or may not be in their care.
Lev Tahor was the subject of a youth protection investigation in Quebec over allegations of neglect and child abuse before they fled to Chatham, Ont.
Leaders of the small community have acknowledged the children are given a religious education, but have denied allegations of abuse and underage marriages.
The group moved to Ontario late last year, but families fled in March after a judge ruled that 14 children in the community would be sent back to Quebec and placed in foster care.
Seven children were apprehended and placed in care, while six others are believed to be in Guatemala.
An Ontario judge later ruled that 13 children who are part of the group do not have to be sent back to Quebec, saying they shouldn’t bear the consequences of their parents’ legal fight.”
Two girls from Lev Tahor sect have left foster care in Ontario[The Star 9/19/14 by The Canadian Press]
Update 6:“Police detectives trying to investigate human trafficking and forgery in the Lev Tahor haredi cult in 2013, then located in rural Quebec, Canada, blocked province child protection workers from removing children from the cult – children who were allegedly being sexually, physically and emotionally abused, forced into child marriage, and otherwise hurt by cult leaders.
Police detectives trying to investigate human trafficking and forgery in theLev Tahor haredi cult in 2013, then located in rural Quebec, Canada, blocked province child protection workers from removing children from the cult – children who were allegedly being sexually, physically and emotionally abused, forced into child marriage, and otherwise hurt by cult leaders.
Cops wanted to get enough information from inside the closed cult (and through discovery of forged visas, etc.) to prosecute cult leaders. The decision to wait was especially bizarre because the cult had a history of fleeing and because the cult’s leader, Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, is a convicted kidnapper of a child.
The delay police caused by police allowed Helbrans and the cult to flee justice. A similar series of bad decisions made in the neighboring province of Ontario soon afterward allowed Helbrans and his cult to flee Canada to Guatemala, where the cult’s children are still in peril.
The Star reports:
Ontario was the “weakest link” in a child-welfare saga involving the Jewish sect Lev Tahor that fled Quebec in 2013 because the province has no way to enforce protection orders issued outside its borders, according to the head of Quebec’s human rights commission.
Jacques Fremont released a sweeping review of the years-long case that resulted in 200 people from 40 families who were members of the isolated group ultimately fleeing to Guatemala from Canada and the scrutiny of police, education and child welfare officials.
The conclusion is that the competing mandates and priorities of Quebec’s director of youth protection, which wanted to take children into its custody, and the Sûreté du Québec, which wanted to gather evidence for its criminal investigation, meant the Quebec government was unable to ensure the protection of some 134 underage, at-risk children.
After numerous isolated investigations of Lev Tahor in Quebec stretching back to 2006, including allegations of inadequate school conditions, suicide attempts, unsanitary living conditions and sexual abuse, the Lev Tahor probe had to re-start from scratch in for Chatham-Kent, Ont., when the group fled Quebec on the night of Nov. 18, 2013.
“A chain is the weakest at its weakest link,” Fremont said. “Ontario was the weakest link and that’s where (Lev Tahor) went. Was it by chance or deliberately? I don’t know.”
The review recommends that the Quebec government urge Ontario to change the laws so that court orders issued by judges outside of the province can be executed in Ontario.
“If (such measures) had been in place, it’s possible that in the days following their escape, the children — if not the rest of the community — would have come back to Quebec,” said Camil Picard, vice-president of the human rights commission responsible for youth.
Instead, child welfare investigators in Chatham-Kent received a crash course from their Quebec counterparts in the history of a reclusive group, which is labelled by some as a cult. The group aspires to live according to a literal reading of the Jewish law as dictated by its leader, Shlomo Helbrans.
In practice, that means extreme dietary restrictions, long hours of prayer and isolation from the wider community in which they live. Ex-members speak of corporal punishment, children forcibly removed from their parents and Helbrans himself diagnosing wayward souls with psychiatric conditions.
The group has denied doing anything wrong and says it has been persecuted.
Upon Lev Tahor’s arrival in Chatham-Kent, social workers began monitoring and rebuilding the child welfare case against Lev Tahor families.
Quebec’s child-protection authorities began showing their frustration when the crackdown took too long to materialize. When Ontario officials showed signs they were ready to move from study into action, and when border and passport officials started poking around for visa violations or denying the group travel documents, members fled once again, this time for Guatemala.
The conclusion of the review is damning. From the beginning of the case until the end, said Picard, “we lost sight of the interest of the child.”
The review is particularly harsh on the different organizations in Quebec that had a hand in the case, noting that it took 17 months before the province’s director of youth protection first began investigating and the time it was ready to take action to protect 134 Lev Tahor children deemed to be at risk.
The findings regarding the 134 children came after an August 2013 raid of the community, which rented houses in a town north of Montreal. Despite long-standing suspicions, the raid itself was delayed by four months when police investigators lobbied for more time to conduct their criminal probe.
While court documents have revealed police were investigating suspicions that Lev Tahor leaders were involved in human trafficking and forgery, no criminal charges have ever been laid.”
Report: Cops Blocked Child Protection Workers From Protecting Lev Tahor Haredi Cult Kids[Failed Messiah 7/11/15 ]
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