French police arrest 16 teachers at ultra-Orthodox school for alleged student abuse

BUSSIERES, FRANCE — Police in France raided a well-known ultra-Orthodox Jewish school, arresting 16 teachers for alleged child abuse and placing dozens of underage students provisionally under the state’s custody.

The raid Monday on Beth Yossef, a 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.

Social services have taken 42 pupils from the school near Paris into care, local authorities said Tuesday, as the institution faced allegations of years of abuse.

The school, in Bussieres, around 60 kilometers (35 miles) east of the capital, was hosting “in abusive conditions many underage American and Israeli children who do not speak French,” said Laureline Peyrefitte, the prosecutor in nearby Meaux.

Children, aged 12 and above, allegedly suffered “being locked up, confiscation of their identity documents, poor conditions, acts of abuse, lack of access to education and healthcare, and no possibility of returning to their families,” she added.

Authorities in the Seine-et-Marne department said in a statement that the children were placed in temporary care after being removed from the school, set apart from the village on its own grounds.

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, Le Figaro reported.

The status of any child whose legal guardian has not been located at the end of that period will be determined by a family court, the report said.

An American boy escaped from the school in July and sought shelter at the US embassy in Paris.

Others followed, and Israeli public television has been investigating the school for months.

“We found ourselves with around 30 witness accounts dating back to the 2000s from former pupils saying they suffered violence,” documentary filmmaker Dubi Kroitoru told AFP.

The journalists sent all their information to French police in July.

To relatives, “it seemed like the Harry Potter school, out in the green spaces,” said Jerusalem resident Rivka Azoulay, 26, whose 13-year-old brother had started at Beth Yossef just last week.

In conversations from a payphone at the school, the boy had so far seemed “happy,” Azoulay added, complaining that the French authorities had not been in touch with families.

France’s chief rabbi Haim Korsia told AFP: “It’s unacceptable for children’s lives to be put in danger, the charges are terrible.”

“The conditions they were living in are unacceptable, full stop,” he added.

Attempts by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to reach staff of Beth Yossef, which was founded in 1948, were not immediately successful. An accountant working for the institution said he had not been able to contact his employers since the arrests. Reports in the French media about the arrests did not include the reaction of the institution to the allegations.

Meyer Habib, a lawmaker in the French National Assembly and a former vice president of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities, told JTA that he does not have information about the conditions at Beth Yossef, and can therefore “not assess at this point the merit of the allegations.”

According to Habib, who has been following the affair, “there are all kinds of claims circulating: On the one hand, that things that shouldn’t happen did happen at Beth Yossef. And on the other hand, that this is a case of students settling scores with teachers.”

What is known, he said, “is that the children are well, they are together in one place, they are getting kosher food and their legal guardians are being contacted.” Habib also said that “it is sad that this happened at such a reputable institution.”

The raid at Beth Yossef occurred amid a crackdown against unlicensed schools in France that began in 2020. The move, announced by French President Emmanuel Macron, was widely understood to be aimed at curbing the activities of informal Muslim schools as part of a broader push against radical Islam. Many French Jews have supported the crackdown.

Asked whether the raid at Beth Yossef could be collateral damage in the crackdown on Muslim counterparts amid fears of radicalization, Habib said: “It’s a good question. It’s a question we will be asking in the coming days.”

A task force set up to lead the crackdown on unlicensed schools — the Inter-ministerial Taskforce of Vigilance and Fight against Sectarian Movements — has also flagged the school, the report said.

Orthodox schools in Western Europe have come under increasing pressure by authorities in recent years to conform to mandatory curriculums.

Among other issues, European officials have objected to the segregation of male and female students and the instruction of the theory of evolution by natural selection in Orthodox schools. The tension has resulted in inspections, loss of public funding and citations for noncompliant and partially-compliant institutions. Arrests, however, have been extremely rare.