Guatemalan authorities raided the compound of a radical Haredi Jewish sect on Friday, taking at least 160 minors into protective custody amid allegations of abuse, they said.
“The operation led to the rescue of 160 minors who were allegedly being abused by a member of the Lev Tahor sect,” Interior Minister Francisco Jiménez tweeted after the raid on the property, a farmhouse located in the municipality of Oratorio, some 60 kilometers (37 miles) southwest of the capital.
The raid was the most aggressive action to date by Guatemalan authorities against the Lev Tahor community, which has attracted legal scrutiny there since establishing a presence in the Central American country in 2013.
The Guatemalan Attorney General’s Office tweeted that suspected human remains, potentially those of a child, were discovered during the raid. The office revealed that the investigation stemmed from a November complaint alleging crimes such as forced pregnancies, child mistreatment and rape, the Associated Press reported.
Lev Tahor, whose women wear black body covers similar to the Muslim burka, has faced legal issues in several countries.
In 2022, Mexican authorities arrested a sect leader near the Guatemalan border and removed women and children from a compound. In 2021, two group leaders in New York were convicted of kidnapping and child sexual exploitation for abducting two children to reinstate an illegal sexual relationship between a 14-year-old girl and an adult man.
Sect leaders have described the investigations as “religious persecution,” AFP reported. The Lev Tahor community in Guatemala of about 50 families settled in Oratorio in 2016 after being expelled from an indigenous Mayan village in 2014 due to conflicts with locals and spending time in a building in the Guatemalan capital, according to AFP.
In March, three leaders of Lev Tahor (“pure heart”)—Yoil Weingarten, Yakov Weingarten and Shmiel Weingarten—were convicted of child exploitation and kidnapping.
The three kidnapped a 12-year-old boy and transported a 14-year-old girl “outside the United States to continue a sexual relationship with her adult male ‘husband,’” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Southern District of New York said.
“The defendants’ conduct—which included forced child marriages, physical beatings and family separations—is unthinkable and has caused irreparable harm to children in their formative years,” it added. “Whether in the name of religion or any other belief system, subjecting children to physical, sexual or emotional abuse will never be tolerated by this office.”
Lev Tahor, which has been described as “the Jewish Taliban,” was founded by anti-Zionist rabbi Shlomo Helbrans in Jerusalem in 1988.