With 160 children extricated from Lev Tahor, will this grisly chapter finally beat its last?

Photos: David Damen, Guatemala; AP images

When hundreds of policemen surrounded the closed encampment of Lev Tahor in Santa Rosa and rescued some 160 minors, it wasn’t long before a cadre of askanim converged on Guatemala City to help facilitate their reunification with parents who’d left the cult or court-approved family members. Although I was attacked and chased through the compound, here’s hoping this grisly chapter might finally beat its last

For many years the fringe Lev Tahor sect — faced with multiple allegations of severe child abuse, abduction, and human trafficking — was able to outrun law enforcement authorities, fleeing from Canadian compounds in Quebec and Ontario in 2014 after child protection services threatened to remove the group’s children, then taking refuge in Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, and finally in Oratorio, Santa Rosa, about 50 miles southeast of Guatemala City.

While officials all over the world have fielded complaints about Lev Tahor and several of its leaders are serving prison sentences in the US, the cat-and-mouse game avoiding the seizure of the sect’s children came to an end the last week of December, when — after months of preparation and information gathering, plus the gruesome testimonies of several children and teens who had managed to escape — hundreds of policemen surrounded the closed compound in Santa Rosa and rescued some 160 minors. The irony is that while those young people are minors according to international law, several dozen of them are actually parents of young children, forcibly married off by the sect’s leaders at the ages of 12 or 13. They, together with their babies, were taken by the welfare authorities to five structures over an hour’s drive from the Lev Tahor compound, while the adult members of the group — considered a cult even by the most insular elements of the chareidi and chassidic world — moved into a protest tent camp on the streets outside the children’s shelter.

The extreme anti-Zionist Lev Tahor sect, the leaders of whom are accusing the Guatemalan authorities of religious persecution, is known for imposing a tyrannical regime on its followers, including child marriage, severe and shocking punishments for the most minor “transgressions,” and “purification rituals” that are forms of torture.

In 2022, members of the sect were arrested in a police operation in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, but they were later freed for lack of evidence. This time, the battle to save the children — heavily covered over the past month in the international media — is being waged primarily within the walls of family court, assisted by a group of askanim from around the world who’ve spent years trying to extricate them from the clutches of the cult and have now converged in Guatemala City to expedite the process of securing their release and mainstreaming them into normative chareidi and chassidic kehillos.

Some of those activists are prominent rabbanim; others are relatives of Lev Tahor members. And the atmosphere — the furor and the sense of urgency — was palpable as soon as I reached the Chabad House in Guatemala City to daven Shacharis. Some of them have been trying for years to get their family members to leave the sect, and others have court-approved guardianship of the children.