Guatemala finds children taken by Jewish sect after abuse investigation 

Guatemalan authorities have recovered several children taken by members of an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect who had broken into a care centre where they were being held.

Officials said that members of the Lev Tahor sect had entered the shelter on Sunday in an effort to take back 160 minors who had been taken from the sect’s compound on Friday in a police raid. Authorities accuse the sect of child sexual abuse.

Some of the children were found on Sunday, while others were recovered early on Monday, according to the AFP news agency.

The farm compound in Oratoria, southwest of Guatemala City, was raided on Friday by authorities to rescue children and adolescents who “were allegedly being abused by a member of the Lev Tahor sect”, said Minister of the Interior Francisco Jimenez.

Nancy Paiz, a prosecutor at Guatemala’s Prosecutor’s Office Against Human Trafficking, said at a news conference : “Based on the statements of the complainants, the evidence obtained, and the medical examinations, it was possible to establish that there are forms of human trafficking against these minors, such as forced marriage, abuse and related crimes.”

About 100 of the children’s relatives who belong to the sect gathered on Sunday outside a care centre in Guatemala City, where the children were being held, to demand their return.

Sect members then “broke into” the centre at about 4:30pm local time (22:30 GMT), “forcing open the gate and abducting the children and adolescents sheltered there”, a statement from the Attorney General’s Office said.

“We want them to let the children out of here,” Uriel Goldman, a representative of the families, told the AFP outside the centre before the attempted recapture of the minors.

Those outside the shelter tried to prevent the authorities from bringing back the minors, leading to some scuffles with police, according to an AFP photographer at the scene.

With police help, the centre “managed to locate and protect everyone again”, the Attorney General’s Office said, although the Secretariat of Social Welfare of the Presidency later clarified that some had “evaded” authorities and a search alert has been activated.

Lev Tahor has also accused local authorities of religious persecution.

“The authorities… tell lies with false accusations,” Goldman said.

The Lev Tahor community, founded in 1988 in Israel, practise an austere form of Judaism with interpretation of Jewish law that includes long prayer sessions and arranged marriages.

The community settled in Mexico and Guatemala between 2014 and 2017. In 2022, a Mexican police operation in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas on the Guatemalan border rescued a group of children and adolescents from a Lev Tahor camp, whose members were arrested on suspicions of participating in abuses against minors.

The Jewish Community of Guatemala in a statement said the sect was foreign to its organisation and expressed its support for Guatemalan authorities in carrying out the necessary investigations “to protect the lives and integrity of minors and other vulnerable groups that may be at risk”.

It called on the “government and diplomatic corps of countries from whose nationalities make up members of Lev Tahor, to join forces to protect those whose rights may be violated”.

The minors are now under the protection of the government and investigations remain under way.