{"id":173554,"date":"2018-07-27T03:30:23","date_gmt":"2018-07-27T07:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=173554"},"modified":"2018-07-27T03:30:23","modified_gmt":"2018-07-27T07:30:23","slug":"expulsion-order-carried-group-hasidic-jews-north-montreal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/07\/27\/expulsion-order-carried-group-hasidic-jews-north-montreal\/","title":{"rendered":"Expulsion order carried out for group of Hasidic Jews north of Montreal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
File Photo: \u201cThey sing songs and play drums \u2014 it’s a party.\u201d (Photo<\/a> by Dennis Jarvis\/Flickr<\/a>,CC BY-SA 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

MONTREAL \u2014 Most of the young, Hasidic Jewish men who were court-ordered out of homes they were renting in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains had left as of Thursday night, said the town’s mayor.<\/p>\n

Denis Chalifoux of Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts said he had little choice but to obtain a court injunction ordering the roughly 50 young men from the homes after consecutive summers of complaints by residents claiming they were making noise late into the night.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey sing songs and play drums \u2014 it’s a party,\u201d Chalifoux said in an interview. \u201cAnd it’s already two summers that it’s happening. They don’t respect the rules.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said the court order stipulated the young men had until Thursday at 5 p.m. to leave.<\/p>\n

The group was renting a couple of homes belonging to members of a Hasidic sect called Lev Tahor, said Alex Werzberger, a member of a Hasidic community in Montreal whose grandson works in Sainte-Agathe.<\/p>\n

Members of Lev Tahor had become the subject of a youth-protection investigation in Quebec over allegations of neglect and child abuse before the community fled to Chatham, Ont., in 2013. The sect, totalling about 200 members, left shortly before some of them were due to appear in front of a Quebec judge for a hearing to ensure child welfare officials had regular access to their children.<\/p>\n

Werzberger said the Lev Tahor-owned homes were rented and being used as a dormitory and as a private, all-boys school for the summer.<\/p>\n

The boys \u2014 from different parts of\u00a0Canada\u00a0and the U.S. \u2014 may have been a little \u201crambunctious,\u201d Werzberger said, but he added he doesn’t believe they made enough noise to warrant an expulsion order.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoys will be boys,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Chalifoux said the Lev Tahor sect left behind about 20 buildings in the community when it moved to Ontario in 2013. Some of the homes were sold by the city to recoup back-taxes, while others were seized by financial institutions.<\/p>\n

A small number of the homes were still owned by members of the sect \u2014 two of which were being used by the newer residents in violation of zoning regulations, Chalifoux explained.<\/p>\n

Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts and several villages in the Laurentians are home to various Jewish communities, some of whom have been the victims of hate crimes over the years.<\/p>\n

In 2012, vandals broke into about 15 of 50 homes owned by Jewish people in the neighbouring town of Val-Morin. The vandals damaged houses and spray-painted swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti on the Jewish-owned properties.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know that a member of the community has accused the city of anti-Semitism but that’s absolutely not true,\u201d said Chalifoux. \u201cThe Jewish community has been in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts for 100 years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In general, relations are friendly between the region’s Jewish communities and non-Jewish residents, Chalifoux said.<\/p>\n

The mayor said most of the young men had already left as of Thursday afternoon, and a city employee would pass by Friday morning to make sure the court order had been respected.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MONTREAL \u2014 Most of the young, Hasidic Jewish men who were court-ordered out of homes they were renting in Quebec’s …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":173559,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-173554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news-ca","mauthors-giuseppe-valiante","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173554\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}