Police say 16 detained in northern town in crackdown on underage marriages

Police on Thursday said that forces detained 16 people in a raid in the northern community of Yavne’el tied to illegal underage marriages, a practice law enforcement officials suspect has been ongoing for years in the town.

In a statement, police said that a raid Thursday morning in the Lower Galilee town resulted in the arrests of 16 adults and minors who are “suspected of having recently married or of having begun making actual preparations for an illegal wedding ceremony.”

It was the second raid on the ultra-Orthodox Breslov sect within months, after police detained several residents of the community in June on suspicion of secretly marrying dozens of minors to one another.

According to Hebrew media outlets, police questioned a 15-year-old girl in her home because she could not leave her two-month-old baby alone.

Police said they have been waging an “ongoing battle” against the phenomenon taking place in a “small closed community” centered in the town.

Members of Yavne’el’s ultra-Orthodox Breslov sect have been reported to systematically marry off girls as young as 12 to husbands, some their age and others much older, pointing to alleged widespread child sexual abuse in the community.

Organizers allegedly go out of their way to conceal these weddings from the public eye, limiting the number of guests and barring those in attendance from bringing their cellphones to ceremonies, usually held early in the morning.

Children raised in the community are taught to marry and conceive young as part of the group’s religious outlook.

In February, police raided an underage wedding ceremony that took place in a private home in Yavne’el. The couple was wearing wedding attire, and police found a marriage contract and wedding rings on the property.

The community’s practices have drawn media attention over the years.

A Haaretz report in April detailed the systematic marrying off of girls as young as 12 to husbands who are not much older, while also describing the failure of welfare services to help them, and community members’ fear of speaking out.

Citing previously unpublished findings of a government panel established in 2023 to look into the closed community, Haaretz reported child marriages to be “very widespread” in the Breslov community of roughly 500 families, which accounts for over half the residents in the 5,000-odd town.

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