Members of Radical Lev Tahor Sect Detained in Caribbean
Image by haaretz
Several members of the controversial haredi Orthodox Jewish sect Lev Tahor have been detained in Trinidad and Tobago, reports the Toronto Star.
A man in Trinidad who identified himself to the Star as a senior immigration official said three adult members of the sect arrived with six children around 5 a.m. on Wednesday. He said they came from Toronto and were en route to Mexico. The official said the group refused to go back to Toronto and was subsequently detained. Sect members hired a lawyer to try and get passage to Guatemala, he added.
“I think they ended up in Trinidad by mistake because they missed their flight to Mexico,” the official was quoted as telling the Star.
News of the detention came on the same day an appeal was to be heard of an order for the removal of 13 Lev Tahor children over allegations of physical and emotional abuse within the sect. Sect members did not show up in court Wednesday.
It is unclear if any of the children subject to the order are among those detained in Trinidad and Tobago, the Star said. But those under the order were strictly prohibited from leaving the region of Chatham-Kent, Ontario, where about 200 Lev Tahor members fled from adjacent Quebec last November.
Julie Lee, the lawyer representing the sect families, refused to comment outside court, saying the case was a child protection matter. The immigration official said sect members were detained in Trinidad because they did not have connecting tickets.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
