The Fiddler's Shtetl

Dave Chidley for National Post    About 200 members of a Jewish sect — The Lev Tahor group — have moved from Quebec to Chatham, Ontario. Community director Mayer Rosner, speaks about the group's move, alongside his daughters.

Canada isn't Tsarist Russia. Where Jews living impoverished, insecure lives in small towns where they might form a majority or a minority within a larger majority of gentiles, feared those regular deadly occurrences called pogroms, when Cossacks would sweep through their town on a drunken mission to settle scores with a religious group whom they despised attacking desperate and defenceless people.

In Canada, in Quebec in particular, there is a wish to encourage people to emigrate from abroad to embrace Canadian customs and values. The Parti Quebecois has expressed its profound distaste at obviously social/religious custom and garb infiltrating their view of Quebec as a seamlessly secular society, taking pride in equality of a kind that mitigates against equality allowing expressions of faith in overt visual terms.

It isn't just Quebec, however, and their insistence that religious adherence be kept private and away from the public sphere. In this day, in this country, it is reprehensible that any religious sect or any political ideology or any heritage of social custom dictate that women be channelled from childhood to adulthood into a narrow sphere of home, bedroom and kitchen in strict obedience to a husband's wishes.

A culture that formalizes and institutes conventions that demand women who marry shave their hair and wear wigs as a sign of their marital status, and one that demands that women and girl children wear all-encompassing black garments, is archaic and dysfunctional. Remnants of a patriarchal society where women have few rights and must adhere to the misogynistic demands of male leaders.

The Jewish sect Lev Tahor, which migrated from Israel where even there and even among the Orthodox, their values and customs are abhorred, came to Canada to be free from state persecution. They discovered themselves to have been persecuted in Quebec when the education system demanded that their children be exposed to the science of evolution, to sex education and discussions of homosexuality.

Charges that members of the sect beat their children, deprive them of nutritional food, don't practise basic hygiene, fail to ensure their children are given medical treatment when required, are all denied by their spokesman, Mayer Rosner, the 37-year-old father -- with his wife Malka to whom he has been married for 17 years and with whom he has nine children -- of four boys and five girls.

Because child and youth services in Quebec were investigating the group of 200 adults and 120 children, and charges had been laid against some of the parents, they left the province last week, moving to Chatham, Ontario.

Where they had earlier bought land with the future understanding that they would re-settle there, and leave Quebec. "People have been very friendly and welcoming. Our people have gone shopping in Chatham and had no problems. People waved", said Mr. Rosner in an interview. Unlike what happened in Quebec where: "Everywhere we went on the street, people were cursing us."

They do present as a startling contrast to the people by whom they would have been surrounded anywhere. Their garb alone hearks back to the 19th Century, their priorities and customs are alien to the country. But then there are other groups within Canada, who have come to the country to find haven from persecution suffered elsewhere, like the Amish and the Doukhobors.

"This is a perfect place. It is private; there are many homes together. It is this place that brought us here", he said, describing the community to which his ultra-Orthodox group of Jews has removed itself.They are now ensconced within two rows of identical cottages in a private development on the outskirts of Chatham, Ontario, some 80 kilometres east of Windsor.

"They say we have forced marriage. We don't but, like many orthodox religious communities, we have organized marriages." A marriage broker is engaged to introduce parents to prospective mates for their marriageable-age children, with the two families agreeing on whether or not to proceed, their children generally having little voice in the outcome, although Mr. Rosner does say that if the children object the marriage won't take place.

"We didn't just decide to move last week, we've been looking for property for the last few months. These [units] are rented now but the whole place is also for sale. We'll settle in. See how it goes. Our community is growing." Boys and girls are kept separate in their school system. The girls are taught at an early age household skills.

"Our boys are not allowed to pick up girls on the street. We allow marriage at the age of 16. Some people object to that; everyone has their own choice. Everything is written upstairs", says Mr. Rosner, pointing to the sky.

PHOTO COURTESY TO VINnews.com - Nachman Helbrans, front-centre, is pictured with two families of the Jewish fundamentalist group, Lev Tahor, where they are staying at the Ramada Limited Windsor, Sunday, Nov. 24, 2013. (DAX MELMER/The Windsor Star)