When Mendy Levy was 15 years old, he had never thrown a baseball, seen a stuffed animal, watched television or held a cellphone.
Born into the extreme fundamentalist Jewish sect of Lev Tahor, he was, he told The Post, raised to distrust outsiders and to believe that Children’s Protective Services wanted to take Jewish children from their families and have them brought up as gentiles.
But the teenager reached his breaking point in September 2018. Lev Tahor’s leader, Nachman Helbrans (whose late father, Shlomo Helbrans, founded the group), allegedly commanded Levy to marry his 12-year-old first cousin.
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