Police Learned of Underage Marriage, Sex Abuse Allegations before Lev Tahor Fled
By Allan Woods
Just days before members of the radical Jewish group Lev Tahor fled Quebec for Ontario, child protection authorities received a list containing the names of underaged girls in the community said to have given birth to children fathered by much older men. It was the second time in the same week that officials responsible for child welfare in Quebec had heard detailed allegations of underaged marriages and possible sexual misconduct within the isolated religious community of about 200 people. It is not clear what came of the allegations, whether they were fully investigated and if they were eventually verified or debunked. But just 10 days later, on Nov. 18, 2012, the vast majority of the group boarded buses in the Quebec town of Ste-Agathe-des-Monts in the middle of the night and fled across the Ontario-Quebec border to new accommodations in Chatham-Kent. Their actions allowed them to evade a massive child-welfare investigation and criminal probe that is unresolved nearly two years later, with the bulk of the group now having resettled in Central America. A few days after their initial midnight flight, a Quebec youth court judge ordered 14 Lev Tahor children into foster care, but that order was stymied by jurisdictional wrangling between Ontario and Quebec and strict legal boundaries that effectively prevented authorities in Quebec from following up on the group. More than a year later, when Ontario courts sorted out who had jurisdiction to deal with the problematic group that some have labelled a religious cult, and when Chatham-Kent children’s aid workers stepped up its surveillance of Lev Tahor, they fled the country for Guatemala. The information about possible underage pregnancies and sexual abuse was contained in a new batch of court documents released to media Friday. The documents contain information about a police investigation into kidnapping and human trafficking charges against the group and were used to obtain a search warrant for Lev Tahor properties in Quebec in November 2013, nearly one year after they had fled to Ontario. None of the allegations about Lev Tahor in the documents have been proven in court. But the police state that on Nov. 8, 2012, three months after child-protection officials began investigating their concerns about the group, they came into possession of a list of names purported to be underage girls who had given birth to children with men over the age of 18 years old, which, if true, could be a violation of the Criminal Code. Lev Tahor’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, allegedly advocates marriage between children as young as 13 years old according to his interpretation of Jewish law. Helbrans’ son, Nachman Helbrans, has repeatedly insisted that Lev Tahor marriages that occurred in Canada were conducted in accordance with the law, which sets 16 as the minimum age. The document states that child protection investigators had intended to check the list of names they had received against local hospital records, but it is not clear what follow up was done and what findings were made. Sections of the document have been redacted by the court to protect sensitive details of the police probe. A spokesperson for the Directorate of Youth Protection for the Laurentians, a region just north of Montreal, would not respond to questions about what came of their investigation of the list. “The Centre jeunesse des Laurentides no longer comments on the situation of Lev Tahor. We will provide no interviews or reactions,” Julie-Lemieux-Cote wrote in an email. A few weeks later, on December 11, 2012, another troubling incident emerged when a pregnant 17-year-old girl was rushed to the hospital with an unknown condition apparently serious enough that she was transferred to a children’s hospital in Montreal. “She told hospital personnel of having been beaten by her brother, sexually abused by her father and being married at the age of 15 to a 30-year-old man,” police wrote in the document used to obtain a search warrant. Police were unable to meet with the girl and interview her because she was in a severely agitated state, but the hospital personal took photos of her injuries and police opened an assault investigation into the incident. When police were finally able to meet with the girl a week later, on Dec. 18, 2012, she made no mention of having been assaulted. The police investigation into Lev Tahor continued with the help of allegations from Israeli residents whose family members were living with Lev Tahor as well as Adam Brudzewsky, a former member of Lev Tahor who fled the community with his wife and unborn child as well as a memory stick he said contained internal documents proving the leadership of Lev Tahor engaged in document fraud. Surete du Quebec investigators also obtained search warrants to search Lev Tahor properties in Chatham-Kent, an operation in which they seized computers and other files to support their investigation. No charges have ever been laid against any member of the group. The likelihood of future charges seems slim after the vast majority of the group fled Canada for Guatemela earlier this year. Last month, Chatham-Kent Children’s Services, which was supervising a number of Lev Tahor children who had been placed with foster families in Ontario, said the families who had stayed behind to keep contact with the children had also disappeared sometime on the evening of Aug. 27. They have not been located. In addition to that, two young girls from Lev Tahor who had been placed in foster care with a family in Toronto were also able to flee to the United States despite a guard who had been assigned to ensure their whereabouts.
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