Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on February 5, 2022

Several dozen members of the Jewish ultra-orthodox Lev Tahor sect, accused of sex-related crimes across several countries, are reported to have migrated to Bosnia.

According to local news site Klix.ba, immigration authorities have confirmed that 37 members of the cult from the United States, Canada and Guatemala are currently living near Sarajevo.

They have taken up residence in a property owned by a local Bosnian-Serb lawmaker outside the capital.

Despite allegations of child sexual abuse in multiple countries where the group has settled, there has been no indication of criminal activity thus far, officials told local cable news channel N1.

Our officers carried out field inspections twice. They did not commit a single offense. We checked to see if they had done anything. Nothing was reported specifically, except that people are disturbed by their appearance, so we did not take action, the head of the Service for Foreigners said.

While members of the group declined to be interviewed, Eliezer Papo, a Bosnia-born Israeli academic who serves as non-residential Rabbi of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, told the network that there was no reason to worry about the groups presence.

These people are simply looking [for a refuge], they probably got the impression that BiH is a bit dead state. They are just looking for a place to settle so that no one interferes in their internal affairs, he said.

Comparing the way that members of the cult dress to Muslim women in Iran, Papo downplayed the conflicts surrounding the group.

In all the countries where they had problems, the problems were related to the social services of that country and the internal organization of the community. There are no conflicts between that community and the surrounding population. It is a community that is absolutely not interested in the outside world, they do everything for themselves. States intervene and say that parents have no right to harass children with long prayers, strict requirements for dressing girls and so on.

Lev Tahor, which counts about 230 members, relocated to Guatemala from Canada in 2014 following allegations of mistreatment of its children, including abuse and child marriages.

Arranged marriages between teenagers and older cult members are reported to be common. The group shuns technology and its female members wear black robes from head to toe, leaving only their faces exposed.

In 2021, U.S. Federal authorities filed child exploitation andchild abductioncharges against the sects leaders, who have been accused of forcing girls as young as 12 years old into marriages with much older men within the sect.

In a press release this April, the U.S. Justice Department said that young brides in the sect, often described as the Jewish Taliban, were expected to have sex with their husbands, to tell people outside Lev Tahor that they were not married, to pretend to be older, and to deliver babies inside their homes instead of at a hospital, partially to conceal from the public the mothers' young ages.

That same year, members of the group appealed to the Iranian government to grant them political asylum. In its request, the anti-Zionist cult declared their loyalty and submission to the Supreme Leader and Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and asked for asylum, protection and religious freedom of the families of its loyal members as well as calling for cooperation and help to counter Zionist dominance in order to peacefully liberate the Holy Land and the Jewish nation.

Last October, hundreds of the groups members reportedlytried to reach Iran, where they requested political asylum in 2019, but their relatives are afraid that Tehran may use the group, who hold Israeli and American citizenship, as bargaining chips.

Members of the cult, based in Guatemala, were found attempting to fly to Iraqi Kurdistan, but the relatives of the cult members contacted their respective governments in a request to try to block the migration.

JTA and Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Members of cult dubbed 'Jewish Taliban' reported in Bosnia - Haaretz

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