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Lev Tahor: in the footsteps of the “Jewish Taliban” in America

2021-12-19T04:48:43.348Z


A sect accused of child abuse, sexual abuse and other crimes fled Israel to the United States and then to Canada, Guatemala and Mexico, from where they sought to escape again, this time to Iran. The leaders have just been convicted in New York after being arrested in a small Mexican town, in the middle of the kidnapping of two minors


In the early morning of December 18, 2018, an international command was about to give a withering blow to Lev Tahor, an extremist sect that was called "the Jewish Taliban" by the Israeli press after leaving a trail of more than 40 years of accusations of marriages. forced labor, human trafficking, sexual abuse and child abuse. The group's leaders had traveled from Guatemala to New York to abduct two minors, a 14-year-old girl and her 12-year-old brother. They used costumes, false names and passports, disposable phones, and traveled by land and air to avoid be discovered. Their final destination was to return to Guatemala, where the group had been established four years ago, with the objective of returning the adolescent with the “husband” that the community had chosen for her.

After weeks of investigation, the satellite tracking of one of the mobiles used by the kidnappers led FBI agents, the Mexican Federal Police, state police and diplomatic personnel to the doors of an unimaginable hiding place: San Miguel Tlaixpán, a small town in the state. of Mexico of less than 15,000 inhabitants. The transnational command broke into a large house in the town minutes after three in the morning, according to police reports declassified this year. The land is nestled on a hill, between narrow and steep streets, surrounded by chicken coops and trees. "You could tell they weren't people from here, they were very white," recalls Yolanda, a neighbor who lives a couple of houses away.

That night everything happened very late and very fast.

It took less than six minutes to arrest the six men who had coordinated the plan to kidnap the children, nephews of the current leader of the sect, Nachman Helbrans.

Their mother had fled with them a couple of months ago when she decided to leave the community.

Once they entered the house, the agents began to search every corner to find the minors.

"After approximately an hour of brutal search and when they were all pointing guns at us from five different angles, they arrested us," reads a judicial statement from Helbrans and his right hand, Mayer Rosner: the two main defendants by the kidnapping.

Members of Lev Tahor at La Aurora airport, in Guatemala City, in 2021.

Rosner's son, Jacob, was the "husband" who came to claim the girl and was one of six arrested that night. Among them was also a 15-year-old minor, whose disappearance had been reported by his mother two months earlier in Guatemala, but he was not one of the two that the command was looking for. Despite the police deployment, the children were not found that night. "Almost instinctively, my niece and her brother jumped into a closet and covered themselves with clothes, and miraculously they were not found by the FBI and Mexican bandits ('the authorities')," reported the leaders of the sect.

After the officers left, the children came out of the closet and found a phone that had not been seized by the police. They searched the call history and dialed the most recent number: that of another member of Lev Tahor's leadership. Incredibly, the sect found the kidnapped children and took them away just hours after the police operation. By then, the minors had been captured by the security cameras of at least three different hotels in central Mexico, one of them in Colonia Doctores, a neighborhood in the heart of the capital.

On December 27, three weeks after a car took them from their mother's house at midnight, the children and their captors were located in a three-star motel on the highway between Tenango del Aire and Amecameca, more than 4,000 kilometers from home.

The rescue, after a new operation, ended at 10:30 in the morning.

The day before, Helbrans, the Rosners and two other subjects were escorted by Mexican agents and deported on a flight to New York, where they were arrested as soon as they set foot on US soil.

The children were returned to their mother, who stayed with them in the United States.

Members of Lev Tahor in the town of San Juan La Laguna, their first settlement in Guatemala, on August 24, 2014. Jorge Dan López (REUTERS)

Lev Tahor was founded in Israel by Shlomo Helbrans, father of the current leader, in the 1980s.

Since then, its more than 300 members have made a pilgrimage through America: exiled from the United States, fled from Canada and recently settled in Mexico and Guatemala.

Between fanaticism and secrecy, between conspiranoia and systematic deception, the pilgrimage of the community has left a trail of scandals.

The kidnapping that ended with two of its leaders awaiting sentences that could sentence them to life imprisonment, was essentially a family lawsuit for the sect: their intention was "to rescue the children."

For the world it was a warning sign.

A "dangerous cult"

The case of Lev Tahor - which translates from Hebrew as pure heart - made headlines in the international press due to the stridency of the kidnapping plot. It was the story of a mother who fought against the sect that had taken her children from her, at a time when many discovered in Netflix series what was happening within the most extreme Orthodox Jewish communities.

The revelations of the judicial process were worse: behind the facade of that group of wandering Jews who had landed in southern Mexico and Guatemala, what existed was a community that normalized crimes and that was marginalized by its fanaticism, even from the perspective most fundamentalist of the Abrahamic religions. Beatings, systematic humiliation, rape, human trafficking, absolute control over all members in all aspects of their lives. On November 10, the Southern District Court of New York found Nachman Helbrans and Mayer Rosner guilty of four counts of child sexual exploitation and kidnapping, for which they face up to life in prison. His attorneys did not respond to interview requests for this story.

"I don't like to call them Jewish Taliban because I think being in Lev Tahor is even worse," says Yoel Levy, a 20-year-old who was born and raised in the group until he managed to escape about three years ago. His family was one of the first to join the sect, which first gained notoriety for the clothing of its women: a kind of black robes, similar to the

burqa

, that cover them from head to toe from the age of three. The trial encouraged more people to speak up and testimonies of abuse, separation of parents and children or the use of non-prescription psychiatric drugs as a remedy against "evil" and "internal demons" came to light.

"I suffered every day that I spent in the cult," says Levy, who suffered abuse from the leaders.

The young man recalls that when he was about nine years old, he was punished for telling a teacher that he could not see well and that he needed glasses.

He was not telling the truth, but the lie so infuriated the heads of the community that they called him to school, put him on a platform in front of his classmates and forced him to wear his underwear.

Afterward, three adults - including Nachman Helbrans - took turns spanking him for hours.

At the end of the punishment he had to kiss their hand and thank them for hitting him.

The Guatemalan Police detain members of Lev Tahor for their extradition to the United States in July 2021.

“Every day I went to school with fear because I knew I was going to be punished,” he says. Among the testimonies are allegations of beatings, slaps on the back of the children, slaps, whipping with belts and broomsticks. Punishments also included penances such as not eating, not speaking, not sleeping, or not seeing their families for days. It could be for any reason. From disobeying a leader to laughing in the middle of class or speaking in Spanish with a convert. "They treated children worse than animals," says 18-year-old Yoel's brother Mendy Levy: "The abuse started from the moment you were born."

According to various testimonies to which EL PAÍS had access, the members of the leadership also frequently asked the children about their sexuality: if they touched their genitals, if they ejaculated, if they felt aroused after seeing another naked person. "After I told them that he had touched me," one of the accusations reads, "they whipped me on the back." The victim was then eight years old. In Lev Tahor brutality is justified as

tikkun

, a Hebrew word that roughly translates to correction: the punishments were a way to atone for their sins.

"The parents couldn't do anything," says Yoel Levy. The families had to inform the leaders every day about how they disciplined the children and if they believed they were not strict enough, they took them away and punished them themselves. "Lev Tahor is the antithesis of religion, his practices have no basis in Judaism, which strictly prohibits any form of manipulation and abuse," says Abraham Tobal, chief rabbi of the Monte Sinai Community of Mexico. "They are so extreme that they have created their own religion," insists Tobal.

The community lives in ostracism, completely isolated from the outside. Cell phones, music, and internet use are not allowed within the sect. Only religious education is given. His last known camp, in Oratorio, a community in the middle of the jungle in the Guatemalan department of Santa Rosa, is completely fenced off and guarded by security guards. The 50 families that are part of the community live in small huts made of wood and plastic, with dirt floors and extremely precarious conditions.

For Marci Hamilton, a specialist in religions and child abuse at the University of Pennsylvania, the isolation creates a bubble where the only thing that exists is Lev Tahor. Everything that is not part of the cult, the "gentile" world, is left out. In that universe, the desires and abuses of the leaders are unquestionable and asking for help from the outside becomes practically impossible. "When you put those two factors together, people get trapped," says Hamilton, director of the Child USA association.

The Levy brothers saw the effects of that isolation for themselves. In October 2016, her father suffered a severe infection. He couldn't eat or walk and the doctors said he had to go to a hospital to save his life. The chief rabbi said no. The Levys' father, who had considered leaving Lev Tahor, passed away from the disease. After the death of her husband, the mother, who was just over 37 years old and had already had 10 children, was assigned to a new man to continue giving birth to children who swelled the ranks of the sect. At the same time, Mendy, Yoel and their siblings were assigned to other families and were punished if they searched for their mother. While that was happening, the sect asked for donations to "help this devastated family." Historically, the group has resorted to manipulation to obtain resources,pretending to financially support the children of the community to raise up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to sources close to the case.

Yoel Levy, when he was part of Lev Tahor, in the Oratorio camp (Guatemala) Courtesy

Israel Amir, another survivor of the sect, says that many teenagers worked as assistants to the leaders.

His job was to bring them food, fix their bedrooms, or send mail.

But it also included organizing meetings between the religious and their faithful.

"The person I worked for asked me to call children during the night and stayed with them to rape them," the 21-year-old told EL PAÍS in a telephone dialogue from Israel.

The meetings, according to his testimony, lasted about an hour and a half until the boys were sent to the

mikveh

, a bath with rainwater that is used in Judaism for purification rituals.

When Yoel Levy was 16 years old, the community decided that he was ready to marry another girl his own age. The rabbi told him that a party was going to be held that same night to make the official announcement with the men in one room and the women in the other. "I was engaged to a girl I did not know and had never seen in my life," says the young man. "They just tell you, 'You're going to marry her," he adds. His brother Mendy was ordered to marry a cousin. He was 15 and she was 12 years old. "I didn't want to and she didn't want to, and from then on I started planning my escape," says Mendy.

The Levy brothers managed to leave before their religious weddings took place. Amir, on the other hand, was forced to marry at 16 to another girl his age. Earlier it had been her sister's turn. She was 13 years old; her “husband”, 19. “Since we were children, men and women grew up separately and we weren't used to having any kind of interaction”, confesses Amir, “being in a room with 'your wife' was weird, you don't know who you don't even know how to relate to her, less sexually and being that exposed ”.

Amir remembers the problems he had in being intimate with his assigned partner. “I neither wanted nor could”, he says, “nor did I want to be a father”. Each week, one of the leaders monitored whether the couples had had sex, Amir notes. The idea of ​​the sect was that they start having children from an early age so that there would be more members, he explains. "They threatened to punish me if I refused to have sex."

Due to the regulations and routines that the group members had to follow, most of the time he only saw his wife once a week.

"Due to malnutrition and poor diet, it was difficult for women to get pregnant," she says.

Lev Tahor also has his own interpretation of what

kosher

foods are and his diet is almost always restricted to some fruits, vegetables and bread.

Eventually, Amir and his "wife" had a child two years ago, shortly before he decided to escape.

Two men from Lev Tahor shop in a store in San Juan La Laguna (Guatemala), in August 2014. Jorge Dan López (Reuters)

"Lev Tahor is a cult that has thrived on the sexual abuse of children," says Hamilton, who has studied the group for decades.

The specialist explains that it all comes down to control and a hyperpatriarchal hierarchical order: women are seen as “recipients” to have babies and children as “collateral damage”, beings that must be “sacrificed” to satisfy the needs of adults and of religion.

In 2013, the Congress of Israel expressed concern about the degrading treatment of children and the misogyny of the group, which had been labeled a “dangerous cult”.

The congressmen attributed to Shlomo Helbrans, the founder of the sect, a

halacha

(decree) that said: "Everyone must understand that a woman is a very disgusting thing and must keep her away and torture her as much as possible."

From Guatemala to Kurdistan

A couple of decades earlier, when the sect began to be investigated in Israel, Shlomo Helbrans spread the theory that the Gulf War was going to be some kind of Armageddon and brought his community to the United States in the early 1990s.

In New York, the founder was convicted of the kidnapping of a 13-year-old in 1994, but only served two years in prison and was deported.

In 2000, the leader sought asylum for "persecution" and moved the group to Canada, from where they fled more than a decade later amid an investigation into child abuse and forced marriages.

They arrived in Guatemala in 2014 with the help of false names and passports.

History repeated itself in the Central American country: the authorities opened investigations and carried out raids, but the sect managed to remain unpunished. Members who left the group claim that the sect even grew much stronger in Guatemala: they increased their political influence, bought a huge camp equivalent to 250 soccer fields, and opened a civil association to avoid paying taxes.

In mid-2017, the community crossed the border into Mexico and settled for a few months in a hotel in Unión Hidalgo, a small municipality in Chiapas.

Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans was found dead in mysterious conditions, after drowning while performing a ritual on the Shujubal River in July of that year.

The founder's sudden death created a power vacuum that forced the group to return to Guatemala, where Nachman Helbrans took over as heir to the sect and further tightened control over the faithful.

It was in this context that the new leader went after his sister to kidnap his own nephews.

And also when brothers Levy and Israel Amir left the group.

Brothers Yoel and Mendy Levy, after leaving the sect.Mendy Levy

Yoel Levy says he planned his escape for more than five years. One night, he grabbed some clothes, wrote down the phone number of an acquaintance who had left the group, left a letter for his mother, and went on a hike to Guatemala City. “The moment you leave, you cease to exist. You don't have a family and you can't talk to anyone, ”he laments. His brother Mendy left a few days later. They never spoke to each other about their plans to flee, it was too risky. Within a few months, the brothers ended up on two ends of the world. Yoel ended up living with relatives in Israel and Mendy with a host family in Canada. His mother and eight siblings are still inside.

For Israel Amir, the hardest thing was leaving her son behind. The leaders of the sect confronted him several times when they found out that he wanted to leave the group and they blackmailed him that his son would pay the consequences if he decided to leave. "I have not seen my son in more than two years, the last time he was about six months old," confesses Amir, who has started a legal process and has traveled several times to Guatemala to try to get him back. The last one last October. The disappearance of his son was officially denounced in the Central American country and he has letters in Israel that accredit him as his legal guardian, but the sect has not handed over the child. "I know almost nothing about him, I just know that he is alive," he says with a broken voice.

The Levy brothers also filed a complaint in Guatemala in October calling for Lev Tahor to be persecuted as a criminal group for the physical, psychological and sexual abuse they commit, but they say the investigations are stalled. "The authorities have done nothing," accuses Mendy Levy. In the Central American country there are current alerts for the disappearance of minors related to the sect, some from just a few weeks ago, others from years ago. Despite the scandals, it has taken more than four decades to bring the leaders to justice. "The authorities have failed the victims," ​​says Hamilton.

During the trial in New York, it was revealed that, a month before its leaders were detained in Mexico, Lev Tahor had requested asylum and sworn "loyalty and submission" to the supreme leader of Iran. The request was unsuccessful. Since then, its faithful have been captured at the Guatemala City Airport and in Mexico, from where they have spread to Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey, Romania and Moldova, according to the press of those countries and US judicial summaries. The Levy brothers recently met in Guatemala for the first time in two years to demand justice against the impunity of the sect. Today, the two brothers are recovering the things that were taken from them: going to a supermarket, eating ice cream or having a girlfriend of their choice. "I'm just trying to survive and have a life," says Yoel Levy, before saying goodbye.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-12-19

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