Chassidic sect in northern Israel churns out child brides and conceals sex abuse

The late Cult leader Eliezer Shlomo Schick.

 Hundreds of families from an insular Chasidic sect in northern Israel are systematically marrying off girls as young as 12 to husbands who are not much older, as welfare services fail them and community members fear speaking out, Haaretz reported Thursday.

The report cited current and former members of the Bratslav community in Yavne’el, officials with knowledge of the matter, and the previously unpublished findings of a government panel established in 2023 to look into the closed community.

The panel that looked into the community reportedly found “cases that give rise to suspected crime,” “multiple cases of dysfunctional parenting,” and “sexual abuse, part of which goes unreported.”

“It’s straight-up rape,” said a current community member . “Nobody asks a 14-year-old girl if she wants to get married. A year later she’s taking a baby to the playground.”

According to the government panel, the weddings are mainly between children aged 15-17, who are taught from an early age to get married young

“The community perpetuates and is permeated by a religious and cultural outlook that says early marriages of minors are desirable and, among other things, help keep youth away from various dangers,” said the government report, without elaborating, 

The newspaper cited current and former community members as saying the “dangers” that the community fears are non-procreative seminal emissions, which are prohibited in halacha, or Jewish ritual law.

Current community members agreed to speak only on the side of the road, far away from the town, and were wary of approaching cars, Haaretz said. 

It quoted one female community member as saying, “Whoever talks risks ruining their and their family’s lives.”

The government panel that looked into the Yavne’el community was established by the Welfare Ministry with representatives of the police and of the justice, education, and health ministries following an interview by the Kan public broadcaster with a woman who escaped abuse in the sect.

The woman, Mika Maimoni, was wed at 14 to a 19-year-old husband and got pregnant in three months. Maimoni was sent to give birth in Bnei Brak and was instructed on the way there to memorize a cover story to explain her pregnancy, she told Kan. She escaped the sect in 2015 when it was grieving the death of its spiritual leader Eliezer Shlomo Schick.

Marriages like Maimoni’s are common in the Yavne’el Bratslav community, according to Haaretz. Community members cited by the newspaper said the weddings take place at a rate of one or two a month.

In 2003, Tiberias police uncovered about 20 cases of marriages arranged by Schick of young girls, some of them aged 12, to grooms as young as 15.

And in its report, the panel established in 2023 found child marriages to be “very widespread” in the community of roughly 500 families, which accounts for over half the residents in the 5,000-odd town, according to Haaretz.

But the panel reportedly said it could not give exact figures because of conspirators’ “synchronized and systematic cover-up technique and subterfuge.”

Those were said to include holding weddings in secret, changing child spouses’ addresses, giving authorities false information, appointing loyalists as teachers and counselors, and getting doctors to register adult mothers as the patients of fertility treatments performed on young girls.