The strange image ended up going around the world.
About 20 boys and girls from the ultra-Orthodox Lev Tahor sect, known as the "Jewish Taliban" for their extremist practices, literally pushed security guards and walked over them to walk out of a shelter in Huixtla, a small community in Chiapas, southern Mexico.
The girls, dressed in long white tunics, which covered them from head to toe and which contrasted with the night in the Chiapas jungle, drew attention above all.
But it's not just clothing that precipitates the group's comparisons to the Afghan regime.
The cult, founded in the eighties, drags accusations of child abuse, sexual abuse and human trafficking in Israel, the United States, Canada and Guatemala, that is,
in all the countries where it has been permanently established.
The story in Mexico was not very different.
Days before, the authorities had launched a wide-ranging international operation: the last big blow against the collective.
This escape in the dark, however, was a harbinger of how efforts that took two years to plan would be practically overboard within hours.
After receiving complaints from former members and investigations by a group of lawyers, former police officers and volunteers who have documented the sect's history of abuses to bring it to justice, some 80 Mexican agents were deployed on September 23 in Ejido Independencia, a small community in Chiapas, about 30 kilometers from the border with Guatemala.
It was the last point where the presence of the sect had been detected or, at least, a fraction of the 300 members it has around the world.
The elements of the operation would know that there were going to be many boys and girls, so a good part of the police contingent were women.
Given the lack of official information, it was first said that it was a camp in the middle of the jungle.
Sources who participated in the field explained to this newspaper that there were actually two or three rented houses, each one adjacent to the other, where the faithful had settled for more than six months.
Former agents of the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, advised those who intervened, especially to give them context of what Lev Tahor was and what difficulties they might encounter.
“When people talk about the Mossad, it is normal for people to let their imaginations run wild, but our participation was basically limited to that,” comments one of them.
especially to give them context of what Lev Tahor was and what difficulties they might encounter.
“When people talk about the Mossad, it is normal for people to let their imaginations run wild, but our participation was basically limited to that,” comments one of them.
especially to give them context of what Lev Tahor was and what difficulties they might encounter.
“When people talk about the Mossad, it is normal for people to let their imaginations run wild, but our participation was basically limited to that,” comments one of them.
Followers of the Lev Tahor sect, outside a shelter in Chiapas, southern Mexico, on September 28. ALFREDO ESTRELLA (AFP)
The raid against Lev Tahor had three objectives.
The first was the arrest of the group's leaders, who exercise tight control over practically all aspects of the followers' lives.
There were four targets initially, but two of them were missing at the time of the search.
The other two were arrested for crimes such as kidnapping and child sexual abuse, and transferred to a Chiapas prison after a judge issued an arrest warrant, according to local press reports.
The second was to free the people who were held by the sect, declared a "dangerous cult" in Israel.
Personnel from the Israeli Embassy were present at the operation, with the task of providing them with consular assistance in the event that they had problems due to their immigration status and had to be deported.
The third objective was to rescue a three-year-old boy who had been separated from his father, despite the fact that the authorities in Israel and Guatemala had decided that he had legal custody.
"I don't know anything about him, I only know that he is alive," said Israel Amir, the boy's father, in an interview with EL PAÍS at the end of last year.
Amir said that his family joined the sect when he was about 13 years old and that since he was not born into the group, it was very difficult for him to adapt, despite the fact that his parents were Orthodox Jews.
Like other teenagers in the cult, he worked as an assistant to members of the leadership and witnessed sexual abuse and physical punishment against other young people.
"The person he worked for would ask me to call children at night and stay with them to rape them," he assured during the telephone conversation.
When he was 16, the cult leaders decided he was of marriageable age to a girl he didn't know.
The practice of forced child marriages is another of the complaints that weigh on the group's commanders.
Beyond a religious custom, it was a survival strategy for the cult: expanding membership through arranged marriages and forcing the faithful to have several children.
“Lev Tahor is a cult that has thrived on the sexual abuse of children,” says Marcy Hamilton, an academic at the University of Pennsylvania.
For two years, the cult leaders supervised his “marital” relationship and pressured him to have more sexual relations with his “wife”.
The men and women of the congregation practically do not live with each other on a daily basis and Amir described the discomfort of both in intimacy, the couple had not seen someone of the opposite sex naked before getting married.
Finally, they had the child.
When the baby was six months old, Amir decided to run away.
He couldn't take it anymore and even faced threats against him and his son when they found out about his plans to leave.
"The hardest thing was leaving my son behind," explained the 22-year-old.
"I haven't seen my son in over two years," he added.
From there began a legal battle for custody of the child,
Sources close to the case comment that at least one other family traveled to Mexico two weeks ago to try to convince their relatives to leave the group, but they were unsuccessful.
The children released from the sect were taken to the shelter in Huixtla, in charge of the National System for the Integral Development of Families (DIF).
In the six days that they were in the center, the young people rioted and attacked the security personnel of the center.
Other Lev Tahor members who spoke to local press journalists, who had probably never heard of the cult, said they were victims of "religious persecution" and blamed the Israeli government squarely.
Similar to the position of ultra-Orthodox groups, Lev Tahor has anti-Zionist positions for a religious argument:
A child from Lev Tahor looks over a fence at a shelter in Chiapas, Mexico, on September 28. JOSE TORRES (REUTERS)
To understand the images in Chiapas, we must review the history of Lev Tahor.
After several clashes with the Israeli authorities, the sect settled in the United States until its founder, Shlomo Helbrans, was charged and convicted of kidnapping in New York in the 1990s.
When Helbrans was released from prison, he sought asylum for "religious persecution" and moved the community to Canada in 2000. In 2013, Canadian authorities opened an investigation for child abuse and forced marriage.
It was a case similar to what was experienced in Mexico, but it was more spectacular because it lasted for months.
Several children were separated from their parents due to concerns about their welfare, although they were allowed to continue to have contact.
The situation was traumatic for the younger members,
that they knew practically nothing outside the group and had been indoctrinated into the idea that the "Gentile world" was equivalent to hell.
Frightened, the children were instructed to lie to the authorities under the promise that they would see their parents again.
Amid maneuvering inside and outside the law, the congregation seized custody of the children, absconded, and settled in Guatemala in 2014. It was a political scandal in Canada.
Already in Guatemalan territory, the story was the same.
There were several raids against the group for the same complaints and the reaction was the same: they said they were "persecuted."
In 2017, after new problems with the law, the group hid for seasons in Chiapas, where Helbrans died under strange circumstances, drowned in the Shujubal River while performing a religious ritual.
Nachman Helbrans, his son, took over and adopted even tighter controls over the community out of fear that his leadership would be challenged.
The yoke to which he subjected the faithful was so heavy that his own sister deserted and took refuge with her children in a small town north of New York.
The new leader decided that he was not going to sit idly by and hatched a bizarre plan to kidnap two of his nephews and take them back to Guatemala at the end of 2018.
In a plot worthy of Hollywood, the kidnappers of the dome used disguises, false identities, strategies to avoid being caught and different means of transportation to cross into Mexico with the two children, who were then 14 and 12 years old.
The oldest was "married" to the son of one of the participants in the kidnapping.
After the collaboration of the FBI and federal and state agents in Mexico, Helbrans and her accomplices were trapped in a safe house in San Miguel Tlaixpán, a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City, and deported to the United States.
The children were recovered in the community of Tenango del Aire, days later.
Just last April, Nachman Helbrans and Mayer Rosner, his right-hand man, were sentenced to 12 years in prison for kidnapping and other crimes.
They also said they were victims of “religious persecution”.
Members of Lev Tahor at the La Aurora airport in Guatemala City in 2021.
After the legal gale against the sect, the community has been on the verge of killing half the world.
Cells of the group began a pilgrimage through almost a dozen countries in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa: from Iraqi Kurdistan to Moldova.
In fact, during the 2018 kidnapping, members of Lev Tahor submitted an asylum request to the Iranian Embassy in Mexico, in which they swore "loyalty and submission" to the supreme leader, but it was unsuccessful.
Chiapas has been a recurring destination for the group, due to its proximity to Guatemala and the porosity of the border, through which they have passed several times without being detected.
After the children's departure, which occurred without the Mexican authorities clarifying the situation, a judge decided to release the two detainees, Menachen Enden Alter and Moshe Rosner (relative of Mayer Rosner), a day later due to lack of evidence.
“100% acquitted”, celebrated his lawyer after the decision.
Sources familiar with Lev Tahor's criminal history accuse acts of corruption, although they have not been able to verify them.
The community presumably returned to Guatemala, where the largest contingent of the sect's diaspora remains.
The Embassy of Israel did not make any public position.
The strange case of the "Jewish Taliban", rejected by practically all currents within Judaism for their extremism, came as a sudden blow, but as days went by it faded from media coverage.
Ultimately, the great fiasco is the latest chapter in a story that seems to repeat itself over and over again, in which Mexico has appeared as the setting on more than one occasion.
One of the people behind the efforts to call the sect to account remains optimistic: "It's not the same, now more and more people know who these criminals really are."
Lev Tahor's plot continues.
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