Warning: This story contains details of physical and sexual abuse.
When Mexican police raided a self-described Jewish sect, some of its former members hoped it would mark the end of the group, which has been accused of crimes against children.
However, the entire case collapsed and the cult rebounded: though not before details of the secretive community were exposed, including an alleged plot for mass murder if outside authorities intervened in the group. A former member who recently escaped from the group spoke to the BBC about his situation.
When Yisrael Amir got married, he and his wife stood under the Chuppah, the traditional Jewish wedding canopy, surrounded by members of their community. But what was supposed to be the happiest day for a couple turned out to be a nightmare for them.
Yisrael and his wife, Malke (not her real name), were both 16 years old and had just met. The marriage had been arranged by the leaders of the group they had been forced into as children. The group is Lev Tahor, which in Hebrew means pure heart, and which claims to follow a fundamentalist version of Judaism.. However, former members, as well as an Israeli court, among others, say it is nothing more than a cult.
“We had no choice,” Yisrael, now 22, tells me as we sit in the backyard of his aunt’s house in south Tel Aviv. “The rabbi called me into his office and told me: ‘Next week, you get married. And if you refuse, you will be punished.'”
“My sister was 13 and they forced her to marry a 19-year-old. She cried. She cried so much that they punished her by forbidding her to speak for a whole year. She couldn’t say a single word, not even to ask for food, not to ask for a bathroom, nothing.”
In Guatemala
This was part of life at the group’s compound in Guatemala, where the legal age of marriage is 18 for both men and women. Most of Lev Tahor had settled in the Central American country in 2013 after fleeing Canada, where he faced allegations of child abuse. The group has denied these accusations.
Yisrael says that her sister couldn’t speak properly after the one-year punishment ended. Such treatments are part of a catalog of alleged abuses committed by leaders and those in positions of authority in the group, say Yisrael and other former members. These reportedly include beatings for minor offences, with children being forced to thank their tormentors for beating them.
But, according to Yisrael, there was something much worse.
“I saw every day that Shlomo Helbrans [el fundador de Lev Tahor] and another leader would bring children to his room, eight-year-olds, and then send them to the mikveh [baño ritual utilizado para la purificación]. He didn’t understand what he did with them. Now I know.”
Yisrael says that boys and girls told him they were sexually abused and raped.
The BBC tried to talk to the alleged child rape victims who left the group, but none were willing to talk. A US-based support group, Lev Tahor Survivors (LTS), told the BBC there are victims of child rape among its members, while a source involved in an official investigation says Central American authorities have affidavits of former members saying rapes were committed.
“Helbrans presented himself as a Messiah-like figure who could do whatever he wanted because he was a holy man,” says Yisrael. “He told us that he had come from heaven to ‘repair’ people and that he had supernatural powers, and his followers believed him.”
One of the ways the group exerts control over its members, Yisrael says, is by separating children from their parents and placing them with new “families.” The biological parents are prohibited from having contact with them again.
“You could only go to the bathroom when they said you could”
This is what happened to Yisrael. At the age of 12, his father, Shaul, took him and his six siblings from their home in Israel to join the group in Guatemala City. Yisrael says Lev Tahor had falsely promised his family that life in Guatemala would be a paradisewith animals for children to play.
Instead, “it was a complete shock,” he says. “All separated from each other. The children had to sleep on stone floors. They woke us up around 3 am every day, then we prayed all day, without food, without water, without talking to other children. If the rabbi [Helbrans] He gave us sermons, it lasted for hours. Sometimes I fell asleep standing up.”
“Every little detail was controlled. You could only go to the bathroom when they said you could.”
“We had no education. We didn’t even study Torah [los libros más sagrados de la Biblia judía] or the Talmud [un importante libro judío de leyes] because that would have opened our minds; only Helbrans’s writings, which we had to memorize. We didn’t go to sleep until 11 at night.”
Yisrael says that members were only allowed to eat certain vegetables and fruits. The leaders banned meat, fish and eggs, claiming that they may be affected by genetic engineering and therefore were not kosher, meaning that they were prohibited under Jewish dietary laws. Yisrael believes the real reason was to keep members weak by starving them of protein.
“Helbrans, however, ate whatever he wanted: eggs, fish, meat. He said it was for his health, and you couldn’t question that.”
Helbrans died in Mexico in 2017, drowning in a river. His daughter, Nachman, described in US court documents as “more extreme” than his father, took over.
“When they took me there as a child, I knew everything was wrong, but I couldn’t do anything,” says Yisrael. “Later I knew I had to get out.”
That moment came when his wife Malke had a baby boy, Nevo, two years after they were married.
“They knew where you were at all times, but one day the leaders sent me to print something in the town [Oratorio, a donde se había mudado el grupo]. It was an internet store, and I remembered what a computer looked like when I was a kid at home. I didn’t know how to use one, so I asked the shop owner for help.”
After learning about the existence of Google, Yisrael asked the owner to look for Lev Tahor, and was surprised by what he found. “There were articles about this cult, and they confirmed what I suspected.” Among the results were reports about how his aunt, Orit, in Israel, was fighting the group.
“I thought Orit had forgotten about us,” says Yisrael. “I didn’t know he was doing everything he could to rescue our family.”
Yisrael found his email address and sent him a message. Orit says that she was surprised to receive it. They began to communicate. Yisrael returned to the store whenever he was sent out on errands. Then, using the money he had secretly earned, Yisrael bought a mobile phone and called her aunt.
“When he heard my voice he was very happy,” he says with a smile. “She told me that she would come to take me out and a few days later I ran away.”
“One night I went out the door and ran for 15 minutes through the jungle until I came to a road. I stopped a bus and it took me to Guatemala City, about two hours away. I was afraid the members would come to look for me”.
“Orit was waiting for me but I didn’t recognize her, and at first I didn’t know whether to hug her because she wasn’t dressed like the women in Lev Tahor, where it was strictly forbidden to touch the opposite sex. [fuera del matrimonio].”
One of the hallmarks of the group is the requirement that women ages three and older wear a full-body cloak the use of which is argued for modesty. In public, it is seen that women also cover their faces in addition to their eyes.. The practice has earned Lev Tahor the nickname of the Jewish Taliban in the media.
kill instructions
At first Yisrael did not want to leave without her son, but Orit promised that they would return for the child and they left Guatemala for Israel. By then, at 19 years old, Yisrael had been living a secluded existence for five years and had trouble adjusting.
“I had to start life from scratch,” he says, “to meet people, make friends, even relearn the language; it was very, very difficult.”
He and Orit returned to Guatemala several times to try to get Yisrael’s son back, but to no avail.
Then, last September, after a sting operation by a four-man team (including former Mossad agents, a former police officer and a lawyer) from Israel, an elite police unit raided Lev Tahor’s hideout in the Mexican state of Chiapaswhere some members of the group had moved.
The search had been authorized by a state judge after examining evidence of criminal activity – including drug trafficking and rape – that had been collected by Mexico’s Special Prosecutor’s Office against Organized Crime. This included an order the BBC has seen from a leader of the group instructing mothers to kill their children, apparently with poison, if welfare services came to take them away.
“If people come to take our children from us… we have to sacrifice lives so that the damned do not desecrate the spirit of our pure children… [en] the way he was instructed by our holiness [Shlomo Helbrans] before he died,” reads a translation of the document.
“It must be done in such a way that they [los niños] do not suffer… or disfigure your body… so that they [las mujeres] use what we are going to distribute [que] It has to be given to the children immediately… without explaining what it is so as not to scare them.”
He then instructs the women to commit suicide after they have killed the children.
The children were immediately separated from the adults as a precaution and the compound was left empty.
Nevo was among those who were taken out and reunited with Yisrael. “I cried,” Yisrael says, “but Nevo was calm. I’m sure he felt that I was his father.”
Malke was also evacuated, but refused to leave the group. She and dozens of other people were held in government custody for five days before escaping. Two leaders arrested under state judge orders on suspicion of human trafficking and serious sex offenses have been released by a local judge..
The account of Lev Tahor’s abuses of Yisrael has not been independently verified, but it does match the testimonies of other former members of the group.
A Lev Tahor spokesman, Uriel Goldman, denied the allegations.
“I completely deny all the allegations,” he told the BBC. “The greatest evidence we have is the words of the judge [local] in Mexico. After hearing all the evidence from A to Z, the judge decided to close the case.”
Goldman said the group was the victim of “a persecution.”
Although the local judge’s ruling has not been overturned, a source with intimate knowledge of the case says they were not presented with the evidence gathered by the federal investigator.
All those who fled the government shelter in Mexico, as well as the two released leaders, have returned to Guatemala, according to the source.
Some 12,000 km away, Yisrael continues to rebuild her life with Nevo in her new home, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. After being banned from using technology for years, he is now studying computer science at Bar Ilan University, with the goal of becoming a software engineer.
“After that,” he says, “the sky is the limit.”
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-64527069, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-03-02 17:20:06
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