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Haredi sect leader arrested in Guatemala over child abuse


Guatemalan authorities raided a yard belonging to a community of an extreme Haredi faction Tuesday “Lev Tahor” (Pure Heart) in the country’s capital Guatemala City after a number of serious child abuse complaints.


Lev Tahor is an ultra-Orthodox sect comprised of predominantly Israeli Haredi extremists who leave their families behind in Israel as part of a wider boycott of Zionism. The group is widely considered to be a cult for its extreme conduct which adheres to the strict word of Jewish scripture.


The authorities arrested the leaders of the sect and also took dozens of Israeli children and babies in their possession. Since the raid, Israel has established contacts with Guatemala to coordinate the flight of the children back home.


A Tale of the Pure at Heart


Uriel Goldman’s bushy eyebrows knit together in dismay when he sees a cockroach skittering across the tiled floor near the entrance of his cramped Guatemala City apartment. Despite the warm spring weather, he is dressed in a heavy calf-length coat, velvet wide-brimmed hat, and bulky shoes with stockings — all black. He maneuvers his broad frame into the next room to grab a broom, careful to avoid a gantlet of obstacles scattered around the awkward space: a mini-fridge, a folded-up mattress, a basket of laundry, a bag of groceries. He gently sweeps the bug out the door and into an equally cluttered stairwell.


Goldman, who is in his mid-40s, sits down in a blue plastic chair and sighs. “It’s the seventh month,” he says, “that we are in this terrible situation.” Seven months of pretending that a run-down office building that once housed Guatemala’s immigration directorate is a suitable place for 14 families to live, sleeping six or more people to a room. Seven months of dealing with scores of restless kids who are tired of being cooped up indoors because their parents think the city’s Zona 9 neighborhood, thick with traffic and peppered with sporadic crime, is no place for children to play.


Adam Brudzewsky: Lev Tahor whistleblower or paranoiac?


Television cameras rushed to capture Adam Brudzewsky’s arrival at a Saint-Jérôme, Que., courthouse one snowy morning last November, dressed in the distinctive orthodox Jewish outfit of wide-brimmed black hat, black silk coat tied at the waist, bushy beard and payot, the curled strand of hair flanking his face.


He was there for a hearing that would end eight hours later with a judge’s order that 14 children from the radical Jewish sect Lev Tahor should be taken into the care of foster families in Montreal despite 200 members of the group having fled a few days earlier to a new life in Chatham-Kent, Ont.


Brudzewsky, who is in his late 20s, gave a nervous smile as he passed the journalists.



Photo by Alain Roberge / La Presse file photo

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