The Atrocities and Abuse at a French Yeshiva

 

A student from Beth Yossef in France has spoken on Israeli television, describing the horrific conditions and abuse that students endured while attending the yeshiva.

In a telephone interview on i24 News, the young man who remained anonymous, described the “physical abuse” and “horrible” experience of attending the yeshiva.

The bochur said, “I was there for a year and three-quarters, and the experience was horrible.”

He continued, “Most of the guys I know they are interviewing, it’s true. It was a horrible place. The place is rundown, broken, the dorms are in horrible condition, I was on the third floor, and there were holes in the floor so you could see the floor below.

“There was plenty of physical abuse, I was physically abused a few times…never by the heads, it’s very important, the heads did not physically abuse us, they would send others to punish us.”

An Israeli father of another student who went to the yeshiva six years ago, at age 14, spoke with Charedim 10 about his son’s horrifying experience. He said that before sending his son, he had been assured by others that it was a great yeshiva, and his son went skiing within two weeks of arrival.

However one Shabbos early on, a boy saw his son on the side of a building and suspected him of smoking. He ran into the yeshiva, and someone soon came out wearing a mask and “beat his son, blasted him with blows.”

After Shabbos, the father got a call that the yeshiva was sending his son home. The father said, “They left him in a field all alone in France, and he had to find his way home. He had been beaten all over his body, he did not know the language, he was only 14, this was the trauma of a lifetime. All because of a suspicion that he was smoking.”

After the boy managed to get home, the family filed a complaint with an Israeli police department, who said they would send it to France. (They did not know the status of the complaint.)

After reading about the raid this past week, the father and son called it a “miracle” that the boy was expelled so quickly, and did not continue to suffer.

An incident this past July prompted an investigation when a student ran away from the yeshiva to the US embassy in Paris asking for help.

According to an i24 journalist, Israel’s ambassador to France, Aliza Bin-Noun, visited the boys at one point and said they were in good shape, “being fed kosher food.”

last week dozens of students from the Yeshiva were taken into state custody after the faculty of 16 teachers and administrators were arrested.

The raid Monday on the prestigious boarding school-style yeshiva near Paris attended by many students from Israel and the United States, was the largest-scale operation in recent history against a Jewish school in France, and the first time that the entire faculty of such an institution was arrested.

At least 42 underage students from the yeshiva in the Paris suburb of Bussières (Seine-et-Marne) were placed at an undisclosed child welfare facility, Le Figaro reported. The state has assumed custody of the children provisionally for five days, during which attempts will be made to reunite them with their families abroad, the report said.