Court Documents Reveal a Glimpse inside the Troubled Jewish Sect

By Allan Woods
Toronto Star
September 10, 2014

http://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/toronto2014election/2014/09/10/lev_tahor_court_documents_reveal_a_glimpse_inside_the_troubled_jewish_sect.html

Police interviews with disaffected sect member Adam Brudzewsky and others gathered in documents used to obtain a search warrant offer an inside perspective on the allegations against Lev Tahor.

Police believed leading members of the radical Jewish sect Lev Tahor were involved in human trafficking and forgery when officers raided their Ontario homes last January, court documents reveal.

Released to the Toronto Star and other media Wednesday, the set of documents, called an Information to Obtain, were used by the Surete du Quebec to seek a search warrant, following allegations that people in the 200-member cloistered community were being held and moved against their will.

Police were seeking credit cards, financial documents, travel documents, power-of-attorney forms, marriage certificates, coupons to obtain food and medical prescriptions.

The allegations in the document have not been tested in court.

The raid, carried only out after Lev Tahor members had fled their homes in Ste-Agathe-des-Monts, north of Montreal, was prompted by interviews with several community members, notably Adam Brudzewsky.

Brudzewsky fled in 2012 with the help of a local Orthodox rabbi, along with his pregnant wife, after he questioned edicts of the group’s leader, Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, who reportedly runs Lev Tahor with iron discipline.

Documents say Brudzewsky told police he was instructed to hit children to enforce discipline in the community-run school and that children were married off before the legal age of 16.

Brudzewsky also provided a USB key containing internal Lev Tahor documents and told investigators “he was forced to fabricate false documents for the Ministry of Education.”

The child-protection probe began with a clash over Lev Tahor’s home-schooling regime. It was found that children were living in unsanitary conditions and some could speak or write in neither French nor English, part of Quebec’s mandatory curriculum.

But when police accompanied child welfare officials to the community in August 2013 — and were forced to wait over an hour to get access to the homes — they developed suspicions that all was not right within the sect. Among other things, they saw a man going house-to-house carrying a paper bag, according to the court documents.

“When police were finally able to enter the houses, the women and men right away presented their identity papers, either passports, immigration papers or health insurance cards,” the documents note.

Interviews with members revealed in the police document paint a disturbing portrait of life in the community. One unidentified person told police he was forcibly separated from his family upon their arrival there.

“He was placed with an unknown family ... he had nothing to eat; he had to beg,” the ITO states. The same person told of an incident in which a Lev Tahor member was ordered to hit a woman in the face because she refused Rabbi Helbrans’ orders to wear a long black gown resembling a burqa. The person told police all income had to be handed over to Lev Tahor’s leadership, and those who stepped out of line were forced to take psychiatric medication.

Brudzewsky also outlined a registration system whereby each family was allotted an amount of food each week from the general store, which they could obtain with coupons rather than their own funds, the documents state.

There were forced prayers on Saturday, the Jewish holy day, during which Lev Tahor members were required to pray for six hours in the morning followed by one hour of meditation. There were more prayers again in the afternoon and evening.

“Adam (Brudzewsky) indicated that during the prayers at the synagogue in Ste-Agathe-des-Monts, people were locked in the building ... the doors were locked with a key so that no one was able to leave,” police wrote in the documents.

Despite the police investigation and the scrutiny of child-welfare authorities in Quebec and Chatham-Kent, most of the Lev Tahor community successfully fled to Guatemala in the spring. Some children remain in foster care in Ontario, but the Lev Tahor families that stayed behind in Chatham appear to have left on Aug. 27, said Stephen Doig, executive director of Chatham-Kent Children’s Services.

The police have been alerted, but Doig said Wednesday the missing families have not been located.