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Shlomo Helbrans (left) was the group’s founder and leader until his death
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- Author, Raffi Berg
- Rolle, BBC News Middle East Editor
1 hour ago
Attention: This story contains details of physical and sexual abuse that some readers may find sensitive.
When Mexican police launched an operation against a Jewish sect, its former members hoped it would spell the end of the group accused of crimes against children.
But the lawsuit was not pursued and the cult recovered until details emerged about their cloistered community, including their plans for mass murder should authorities intervene.
A former member who recently fled told the BBC about the trials he faced.
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Yisrael’s aunt Orit was fully involved in the fight against Lev Tahor
When Yisrael married Amir, he and his bride stood under the chuppah the traditional Jewish wedding tent surrounded by members of their community. But what should have been the happiest day of the couple’s life turned out to be a nightmare.
Yisrael and his wife Malke (name changed) were 16 years old and had met for the first time on this occasion. The wedding was arranged by the leaders of the group that raised her since childhood.
The group is called Lev Tahor (“Pure Heart” in Hebrew). He claims he follows a fundamentalist version of Judaism. But its former members and an Israeli court claim it is just a cult.
“We had no choice,” says Yisrael, now 22, as we sit and chat in the backyard of her aunt’s home south of Tel Aviv, Israel. “The rabbi called me to his office and said, ‘You’re getting married next week. If you refuse, you’ll be punished.’
“My sister was 13 years old and she was forced to marry a 19yearold boy,” he says. “She cried. She cried so much that they gave her a yearlong ban on speaking. She couldn’t say a word couldn’t ask for food, couldn’t ask to go to the bathroom, nothing. “
Yisrael says her sister can’t speak properly after her oneyear sentence is up.
All of this was part of life on the group’s premises in Guatemala, where the legal minimum age for marriage is 18 for both men and women.
Most of Lev Tahor’s members settled in the Central American country in 2013 after fleeing Canada, where they were accused of child molestation a smaller number went to Mexico. The group denies the allegations.
According to Yisrael and other former members, such treatment is part of a repertoire of alleged abuses by leaders and other authority figures within the group. This abuse is said to include caning for petty offenses in which children are forced to thank their abusers for hitting them.
But according to Yisrael, there was much more.
“I saw Shlomo Helbrans every day [o fundador do Lev Tahor] and another chief brought boys into his room, boys as young as eight, and then he sent them to the mikveh [ritual de banho usado para purificação]”, he says. “I didn’t understand what he did to them. Now I know.”
Yisrael claims boys and girls told him they had been sexually abused and raped.
The BBC tried to speak to alleged child rape victims who had left the group, but none of them wanted to speak to the report.
An American selfhelp group, the Lev Tahor Survivors (LTS), told the BBC that there were child rape victims among its members.
A source involved in a police investigation reported that the Central American authorities have issued affidavits from former members that rapes have been committed.
credit, personnel file
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Yisrael returned to Tel Aviv with her son Nevo after the boy was released by the police.
“Sometimes I slept standing up”
“Helbrans presented himself as a messiah who could do whatever he wanted because he was a holy man,” says Yisrael. “He told us that he came from heaven to ‘correct’ people and that he had supernatural powers. And his followers believed him.”
One of the ways the group controls its members, according to Yisrael, is by separating children from their parents and placing them in new “families.” The biological parents are then prohibited from any contact with them.
That’s what happened to Israel. At the age of 12, he and his six siblings were brought to Guatemala City from his home in Israel by his father Shaul to join the group.
Yisrael says Lev Tahor made false promises to his family that life in Guatemala was paradise, with animals for the children to play with. But actually “it was a complete shock,” he said.
“Everyone was separated from each other,” reports Yisrael. “The children had to sleep on the stone floor. We were woken up at around 3 a.m. every day, then there was prayer all day, no food, no water and no talking to other children.”
“If the leader [Helbrans] Give us a lecture, it would take hours. Sometimes I slept standing up,” he says. “Everything was checked. You could only go to the toilet if they allowed it.”
“We didn’t get any training. We haven’t even studied the Torah [os livros mais sagrados do judaísmo] or the Talmud [o principal livro das leis judaicas] because that would have opened our minds just the writings of Helbrans that we had to memorize,” Yisrael continues. “We stayed up until 11 p.m.”
Yisrael claims that members are only allowed to eat certain vegetables, greens and fruits. Guides banned meat, fish and eggs. According to them, these foods can be genetically engineered, which would make them no longer kosher (they would no longer be allowed under Jewish food laws).
Yisrael believes the real motive was simply to keep the limbs weak without protein intake.
“But Helbrans ate what he wanted eggs, fish, meat,” he says. “He said it was for your health and you couldn’t question him.”
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The community settled in the jungle, isolated from the outside world.
The escape and rescue of the son
Helbrans drowned in a river in Mexico in 2017. It was taken over by his son Nachman, who was described in US court documents as “more extremist” than his father.
“When I was taken there as a kid, I just knew it all felt wrong, but there was nothing I could do,” Yisrael recalls. “But then I just knew I had to get out of there.”
The moment came when his wife Malke gave birth to a little boy, Nevo, two years after their marriage.
“They knew where you were all along, but one day the leaders sent me to get something printed in town. [Oratório, no sul da Guatemala, para onde o grupo havia se mudado]. It was an internet café and I remembered what computers looked like when I was a kid at home,” he recalls. “I didn’t know how to use them, so I asked the shopkeeper for help.”
After Yisrael found out about Google, he asked the retailer to search for Lev Tahor and he was blown away by what he found. “There were reports about this sect that confirmed my opinion.”
Among the findings were accounts of how his aunt Orit fought the group in Israel.
“I thought Orit had forgotten us,” says Yisrael. “I didn’t know she was doing everything to save our family.”
Yisrael found your email address and sent a message. Orit says she was shocked to receive it.
They began communicating and Yisrael would return to the store whenever he needed to run an errand.
Then he bought a mobile phone with the money he had secretly saved and called his aunt.
“When she heard my voice, she was so happy,” he says, smiling. “She said she would come get me and a few days later I ran away.”
“One night I went out of the gate and ran through the jungle for 15 minutes until I reached a road,” Yisrael recalls. “I flagged down a bus and it took me to Guatemala City, about two hours away. I was afraid the members would come looking for me.”
“Orit was waiting for me but I didn’t recognize her and at first didn’t know if I should hug her because she wasn’t dressed like the women in Lev Tahor where she was touching the opposite sex [fora do casamento] It was strictly forbidden.”
One of the characteristics of the group is that all women from the age of three must wear a coat that covers the whole body. They argue that this is done out of “humility.”
Women are also observed in public covering their faces except for their eyes. This practice earned Lev Tahor the nickname “Jewish Taliban” in the press.
Initially, Yisrael did not want to leave without her son, but Orit promised that they would return for the boy. Then they left Guatemala and went to Israel.
At the age of 19, Israel had actually led an isolated existence for five years and had found it difficult to adjust.
“I had to start from scratch,” he says, “meeting people, making friends and even learning the language again it was really hard.”
He and Orit returned to Guatemala several times to try and get Yisrael’s son, but to no avail.
Until in September 2022, after a covert operation involving a team of four from Israel (including former Mossad agents, the Israeli secret service, an expoliceman and a lawyer), an elite police unit invaded Lev Tahor’s hideout in the state of Chiapas to the south Mexico, where part of the group had moved.
The raid was authorized by a state judge who had reviewed evidence of criminal activity, including rape and drug trafficking, collected by Mexico’s special prosecutor for organized crime.
That evidence included an order the BBC from a group leader directing mothers to kill their children, apparently with poison, if social services came to pick them up.
“If some people come to take our children away from us… we must sacrifice our lives lest the cursed profane the spirits of our pure children… [na] as instructed by our holiness [Shlomo Helbrans] before dying,” says the translation of the document.
“It has to be done in such a way that they [as crianças] not suffer… without disfiguring the body… so that they [as mulheres] use what we will distribute [que] must be given to the children immediately … without explaining to them what it is, so as not to frighten them,” the document continues.
The order then directs the women to take their own lives after killing their children.
As a precaution, the police immediately separated the children from the adults and the site was evacuated.
Nevo was one of the children taken out and given to Yisrael. “I cried,” says the father, “but Nevo was calm. He knew for sure that I was his father.”
Malke was also dropped but refused to leave the group. She and two dozen others were held in government shelters, but escaped five days later.
Two leaders arrested by state judge’s order on suspicion of human trafficking and aggravated sexual abuse have been released by a local judge.
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The members were forced to live in substandard conditions on the Mexican compound
‘The sky is the limit’
Yisrael’s account of Lev Tahor’s abuse has not been independently verified, but it is similar to statements made by other former members of the group.
Lev Tahor spokesman Uriel Goldman denies the allegations.
“I completely deny all allegations,” he told the BBC. “The best evidence we have is the judge’s words [local] from Mexico. After hearing all the evidence from A to Z, the judge decided to close the case for good.”
Goldman claims the group was the victim of “stalking.”
The local judge’s conclusion has not yet been overturned, but a source with full knowledge of the case claims he did not have access to the evidence gathered by the federal investigator.
According to the same source, all the people who fled the state shelter in Mexico, as well as the two released leaders, returned to Guatemala.
Some 12,000 kilometers away, Israel continues to build his life with Nevo in his new home on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
Banned from technology for years, he is now studying computer science at Bar Ilan University in Israel. He wants to become a software engineer.
“After all,” he says, “the sky is the limit.”
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