A Quebec youth court has ordered 14 children from the
ultra-orthodox Jewish cult Lev Tahor be placed temporarily in foster care,
undergo medical examinations and receive psychological support, CBC News
reported Wednesday.
The court also ordered that the children's parents hand in
their passports, CBC said, amid reports that the sect was planning to flee
Quebec.
The court order was prompted by a request filed by Quebec's
youth protection services that the children be removed from their families and
put in foster homes, CBC said.
Authorities alleged that the 14 children from two families
in Lev Tahor, a Haredi sect that was classified a cult by an Israeli NGO
specializing in cults, were living in dirty houses littered with garbage and
that the children, who were home-schooled, were unable to do basic math and
many could neither speak French nor English, CBC News reported.
The group Lev Tahor, or "Pure Heart", with its 200
members of which more than 130 are children, left their homes in
Ste-Agathe-des-Monts, Quebec, early last week, reportedly out of fear that
welfare authorities would take their children. It was suspected that their
fears arose after a dispute with Quebec education authorities over the contents
of the children's homeschool education.
The group was planning to make its home in Chatham-Kent, a
southwestern Ontario town of 108,000, Canadian media reported over the weekend.
Many of the families have already leased homes in the community, the Toronto
Star reported.
The evidence about the cult, headed by Rabbi Shlomo
Helbrans, a newly religious Israeli who left Israel with a group of followers
in 1990, began to accumulate over the past 18 months, following a feature in
Haaretz’s weekend supplement.
During this time, families of community members filed
complaints with the police of child abuse and misuse of psychiatric drugs to
control cult members, as well as the kidnapping of children from their families
in Israel and the forced marriages of 14-year-old girls with adult men.
On Tuesday the Knesset’s Committee on the Rights of the
Child held a hearing on Lev Tahor, and families of the cult members as well as
MKs slammed the State Prosecutor’s Office for dragging its feet in the case.
Police and prosecutors say that since early last year they
have been examining complaints and testimonies about Lev Tahor, made up mostly
of those filed by Israelis, but that there are legal obstacles to any action
being taken in Canada.
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