Raid, arrests at Orthodox school
POLICE in France have raided a prominent Orthodox Jewish school, arresting 16 teachers for alleged child abuse and placing dozens of teenage boys temporarily under the state’s custody.
Police began investigating Beth Yossef, a boarding school near Paris, last July after a student left the institution and sought the help of staff at the US embassy in Paris, Agence France Press reported.
The prosecutor’s office of Meaux, a municipality east of Paris, said in a statement that it had raided the school, which enrols students from Israel and the US in addition to France, because investigators found that students were being mistreated. The entire faculty was arrested.
The raid was in response to “sequestration, confiscation of IDs, unsuitable living conditions, maltreatment, denial of access to education and other services without the possibility of allowing [students] to return to their families,” the statement said.
Last week’s raid was the largest operation in recent history against a Jewish school in France, and the first time that the entire faculty of such an institution was arrested. It comes amid a crackdown against schools that operate outside of government oversight that began in France in 2020.
Many French Jews have supported the crackdown on unlicensed schools, announced by French President Emmanuel Macron and widely understood to be aimed at curbing informal Muslim schools as part of a broader push against radical Islam.
Attempts to reach staff of Beth Yossef, which was founded in 1948, were not immediately successful. Beth Yossef is authorised by the French government to operate, but does not receive government funding, leaving it outside the normal oversight structure for French schools.
A taskforce set up to lead the crackdown on unlicensed schools – the Inter-ministerial Taskforce of Vigilance and Fight against Sectarian Movements – flagged it, Le Figaro reported.
Beth Yossef’s website offers extensive details about its Judaic studies program, but does not mention secular subjects at all.
Meyer Habib, a prominent French Jewish leader, and member of the National Assembly, said he did not have specific information about the conditions at Beth Yossef and could “not assess at this point the merit of the allegations”.
“There are all kinds of claims circulating: On the one hand, that things that shouldn’t happen did happen at Beth Yossef,” said Habib, a lawmaker in the French National Assembly and a former vice president of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities.
“And on the other hand, that this is a case of students settling scores with teachers.”
JTA
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