Hundreds of families from an insular Hasidic 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and former members of the Bratslav community in Yavne’el, officials with knowledge of the matter, and the previously unpublished findings of a government panel established in 2023 to look into the closed community.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 suspect crime,” “multiple cases of dysfunctional parenting,” and “sexual abuse, part of which goes unreported.”

“It’s straight-up rape,” said a current community member quoted by Haaretz. “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 were taught from an early age that “getting married at a young age is a goal they must aspire to,” the government report was quoted as saying.

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

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. The weddings take place at a rate of one or two a month, the sources said.

Current community members agreed to speak only on the side of the road far away from the town, and “looked in fear at every car that approached,” Haaretz said. It quoted one community member as saying, “Whoever talks risks ruining their and their family’s lives.”

“I don’t want my house to be stoned or my kids to get beat up at school,” she said.

‘It’s very important that it stays a secret’

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, told Kan that girls aged 9-10 would beg the sect’s spiritual leader Eliezer Shlomo Schick to find them husbands, because of the “brainwashing” that getting married young was a sign of piety.

The girls were taught to treat Schick, who founded the Yavne’el Bratslav community in the 1980s, as though he “is God,” said Maimoni at the time.

When Maimoni was 12, she said, Schick arranged for her to marry a 19-year-old man who had raped her for six months when she worked in a community kitchen, where dozens of men sexually abused her. The rabbi later canceled the marriage, and Maimoni went on to be wed at 14 to a man five years older.

Within three months, Maimoni was pregnant, and her family kept her hidden to avoid unwanted attention from the authorities, she said. Schick sent her to give birth “as far away as possible,” in Bnei Brak, and on the way, she was instructed to memorize a cover story to explain how she got pregnant, said Maimoni.

“The law doesn’t exist in Yavne’el,” said Maimoni, who fled when the community was grieving Schick’s death in 2015.

Marriages like Maimoni’s are common in the Yavne’el Bratslav community, according to Haaretz.

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 reportedly 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 the weddings in secret, changing child spouses’ addresses, delivering false information to immigration authorities, and getting doctors to register adult mothers as the patients of fertility treatments performed on young girls.

Teachers and counselors in schools are themselves community members and apparently also take part in hiding students’ pregnancies from welfare authorities, according to Haaretz and government reports.

A letter written by one of the teachers, which was brought to the attention of the Education Ministry that summer, indicated she may have helped cover up the sexual abuse of a female student who tried to commit suicide, Haaretz said.

The teacher wrote to a community leader in early 2024 that the girl had “swallowed a lot of pills” because “she apparently wanted to kill herself” following “great spiritual suffering after her brother-in-law touched her,” according to Haaretz.

“It’s very important that it stays a secret, without any intermediary finding out,” the teacher’s letter was quoted as saying. “With God’s grace I managed to prevent the intervention of a social worker. Thank God for giving me the words that put their minds at ease.”

The student had not reported the abuse to her parents, and the teacher was trying to “encourage her each day with the renewal of faith, that this too shall pass,” Haaretz quoted the letter as saying.

That summer, parents — the report did not specify whose — complained to the Education Ministry’s northern regional manager about the apparent cover-up, Haaretz said. The complaint reportedly included quotes from the teacher’s letter.

The Education Ministry said in a response to the newspaper that “the incident was examined in real time and oversight was done according to protocol. There were no findings to substantiate the claims.”

When asked by phone about the incident, the teacher hung up, Haaretz reported.

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