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Lev Tahor: the fall of the "Jewish Taliban"

2022-04-14T18:54:48.098Z


After being caught in Mexico, two leaders of the ultra-Orthodox sect are sentenced to 12 years in prison in New York for the crimes of kidnapping and sex trafficking


Members of the Lev Tahor sect in the town of San Juan La Laguna, Guatemala, in 2014. Jorge Lopez (REUTERS)

The clue that betrayed the "Jewish Taliban" came from a prepaid cell phone.

The intercepted satellite signal from a disposable phone was the first clue that allowed finding two underage brothers who had been kidnapped by the extremist Lev Tahor sect in New York and remained captive in an unimaginable hiding place: San Miguel Tlaixpán, a community of less of 15,000 inhabitants in the State of Mexico.

Three and a half years after their arrest, the two highest-ranking members of the ultra-Orthodox group have been sentenced to 12 years in prison in the United States for the crimes of kidnapping and sex trafficking.

Nachman Helbrans, son and successor in power of the founder of the sect, orchestrated the detailed plan to kidnap the minors.

The victims, in fact, were the children of his sister Sara, who fled the group after the authoritarian turn Lev Tahor had taken under the change in leadership.

Helbrans' accomplice in the conspiracy to carry out the kidnapping was Mayer Rosner, his right-hand man and second-in-command of the group.

The cult leaders separately traveled thousands of miles to Woodridge, a small town 90 miles north of Manhattan where the children were staying, put them in a car and kidnapped them in the early hours of December 8, 2018.

They knew that if they wore their traditional dress, sober long black suits for the men and

burqa

-like black robes that cover the women from head to toe, they would be easy to catch.

So they bought disguises, used false names and passports, and made detours by land and air to cross the border into Mexico and avoid detection.

The main objective of the plan was to return the older of the two brothers, a girl who was then 14 years old, with her “husband”.

The husband who had assigned the community to the minor was Rosner's son, also involved in the kidnapping plot.

Thanking you for your support #AlertaAmberMx reports that the 12-year-old teenager CHAIM TELLER has already been LOCATED.

pic.twitter.com/BMcMqfSCoy

– AMBER Alert Mexico (@AAMBER_mx) December 28, 2018

In little more than four decades of existence, Lev Tahor has left a trail of accusations of forced marriages between minors, physical and sexual abuse of children, and human trafficking.

Their extreme practices have put them in the crosshairs of every country where they have settled and earned them the nickname "Jewish Taliban" in the Israeli press.

The kidnapping of the children was yet another episode in the sect's long chain of scandals: founded and declared a "dangerous cult" in Israel, exiled from the United States, escaped from Canada and settled in recent years in Guatemala and, briefly, in Mexico.

At the time of the kidnapping they were established in Oratorio, in a remote camp in the Guatemalan jungle, far from public scrutiny and with a fence guarded 24 hours a day.

The faithful live in such precarious and strict conditions that the youngest of the kidnapped minors, a 12-year-old boy, weighed 34 kilos, according to the disappearance file.

"I don't like to call them Jewish Taliban because I think being in Lev Tahor is even worse," said Yoel Levy, a 20-year-old who was born and grew up within the group until he managed to escape about three years ago, in an interview with this newspaper. last year.

"I suffered every day I spent in the sect," recalled Levy, who has denounced the organization for systematically humiliating and abusing him under the guise of religious precepts.

When Yoel was 16 years old, the community decided that he should marry another girl his age.

“They just tell you, 'You're going to marry her,'” he added.

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," said Mendy Levy.

The girls are subjected to various pressures to get pregnant from a young age and increase the number of parishioners.

Lev Tahor, which translates from Hebrew as pure heart, had about 300 members until before the trial.

After locating them in the security cameras of several transit hotels in Mexican territory and intercepting the phones of the group's leaders, an international operation was launched in which the FBI, the former Mexican Federal Police, state police and diplomatic personnel participated.

Helbrans, Rosner and four collaborators were arrested and eventually deported to the United States.

The children, frightened by the irruption of the international command in the safe house, hid in a closet and were not found by the agents.

It was not until the end of 2018 that the rescue took place at a motel in Tenango del Aire, 4,000 kilometers from where they had been kidnapped.

During that trip to Mexico, Lev Tahor's leadership made a request for asylum at the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran and swore submission to the Ayatollah, but the request did not materialize.

The group has started a diaspora around the world in the last three years: they have been identified in Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey, Romania and Moldova, and more recently in Bosnia and North Macedonia.

The strategy of the leadership has been to divide families and send different members to different countries, in order to avoid defections.

Lev Tahor's leaders have taken up their own defense in court, calling themselves victims of "religious persecution" and referring to the agents who arrested them as "Mexican bandits."

The parishioners who remain in the group have been expelled from practically all the places they have tried to reach,

Those same sources are optimistic about the ruling given a couple of weeks ago in the Court of the Southern District of New York, but they regret that the sentence has fallen short.

Lev Tahor faces another trial in Guatemala, which has received wide media coverage, but is largely stalled.

The latest alerts of the disappearance of minors in the Central American country at the hands of the sect were issued just a few months ago.

Shlomo Helbrans himself, the creator of the organization, was convicted of kidnapping another young man in New York State in the 1990s.

The founder died under strange circumstances in July 2017, after drowning while performing a ritual in the Shujubal River, in Chiapas, southern Mexico.

Still in the middle of the judicial process in the US, other members of the sect tried new kidnappings against Helbrans's nephews on two occasions, but failed.

"No child should be forced to have sexual relations," read a statement from the US Department of Justice.

"These sentences send a clear message: those who kidnap and sexually exploit children will be prosecuted and punished to the fullest extent of the law," he adds.

After the imprisonment of the leaders, the future of the group is unknown and it is most likely that several members seek to continue discreetly, now with the spotlight of the press further away.

But also more and more people who were in the community come out of the isolation and abuse to which they were subjected with the hope of living in freedom, far from the clutches of the "Jewish Taliban".

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Source: elparis

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