Suffer The Children

"There is no future for this community in Canada. There is none ... Generally speaking, these people want to be together, and that's going to be impossible here in Canada. They have some very bad memories here."
"The children are fine in Guatemala. There are millions of children in Guatemala."
"It's obviously a country that is a bit poorer than Canada ... It's a lot poorer, but children live there."
Guidy Mamann, Toronto immigration lawyer

"This is a town of peace and tranquility. Here, no one is discriminated against. They called us racists, but we have never had problems with these people."
Rodolfo Perez, Mayor of San Juan La Laguna, Guatemala

"In terms of the laws of Guatemala, they have not committed any offence. They are here legally."
Fernando Lucera, spokesman, Guatemala's General Directorate of Migration

Angelyn Smolders for National Post     Six children believed to be members of the Lev Tahor sect from Canada are seen taking cover from the impending rain in San Juan La Laguna, Guatemala on May 19, 2014.

Canada has child-protection standards which are absent in a country like Guatemala. Yes, there are millions of children in Guatemala, and they are free to grow up and become adults. Thousands of those Guatemalan children have chosen, despite their very young age, to flee their country of birth, however; they are among the tens of thousands of children and teens from all points of the disadvantaged compass flooding into the United States as illegal migrants, and they're doing it unaccompanied by adults.

But this is a reverse migration of sorts. The strangely primitive ultra-orthodox Jewish sect of Lev Tahor which claims itself to have been persecuted by Canadian authorities over some of its cultural practices frowned upon in Canada as abuses of human rights, has chosen to depart Canada after a decade of living there when they found the United States similarly unwelcome to their strange ways, after initially and originally leaving Israel for many of the same reasons.

This is a Jewish cult which insists that its female children over the age of three wear chadors, black, all-encompassing body coverings leaving only the face free to observe a world hostile to the patriarchal peculiarities of their elders. They had installed themselves in Quebec where an investigation by child protection officials in 2013 found children within the community suffering from poor dental health and fungal infections, unbathed and unschooled in Canadian curricula.

At age fourteen the community's girls are considered mature enough to be marriageable; a direct confrontation with Canadian human rights entitlements. They seem to have more in common with some breakaway Mormon sects and fundamentalist Islamists than with traditional Jewish orthodoxy. With Canadian authorities breathing hot and heavy down their necks, seeking to place the children in protective custody, the followers of Lev Tahor have chosen to flee.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Dave Chidley     Members of Lev Tahor in Chatham, Ont., on March 5.

The men, garbed in traditional Hasidic clothing dating back to the 17th Century of eastern Europe, present just as awkwardly bizarre a picture as do the women. The choice of Guatemala was a decision of desperation, but one based on another similarly peculiar ultra-orthodox Jewish sect's decision to relocate there; a sect calling themselves Toiras Jesed.

Several of the Lev Tahor families have left for Guatemala, among them a mother and six children subject to a court order to remain in Chatham where the group had relocated to, when faced with Quebec orders to surrender some of their children, and where a Jewish social services agency had been locating foster homes for them. That mother with her children had presented themselves before a Guatemalan judge to ascertain their legal status on arrival.

Not having been accused of any crime in Guatemala they were free to go and settle themselves in the comfort of knowing that there were no prevailing laws regarding basic rights of children in the country that this sect must observe. There is no doubt that the elders of the cult, the parents of the children, hold their offspring dear. They are idiotically ignorant of modernity and have no wish to be separated from what they believe, and from one another.

So be it.