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“The defendants’ conduct—which included forced child marriages, physical beatings and family separations—is unthinkable,” stated the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. (March 28, 2024 / JNS) Three leaders of the Guatemala-based Jewish extremist group Lev Tahor (“pure heart”)—Yoil Weingarten, Yakov Weingarten and Shmiel Weingarten—were convicted of child exploitation and kidnapping. The three kidnapped a 12-year-old boy and transported a 14-year-old girl “outside the United States to continue a sexual relationship with her adult male ‘husband,'” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Southern District of New York said on Wednesday. “With this verdict, all nine Lev Tahor leaders and operatives charged for these heinous crimes have been held accountable,” the U.S. Justice Department stated. “The defendants’ conduct—which included forced child marriages, physical beatings and family separations—is unthinkable and has caused irreparable harm to children in their formative years,” it added. “Whether in the name of religion or any other belief system, subjecting children to physical, sexual or emotional abuse will never be tolerated by this office.” Lev Tahor, a cult that has been described as “the Jewish Taliban” due to its rigid dress code, was founded by anti-Zionist rabbi Shlomo Helbrans in Jerusalem in 1988.

JONATHAN BANDLER, ROCKLAND/WESTCHESTER JOURNAL NEWS / AOL In September 2018, Shimon Malka left his wife and parents and fled Lev Tahor, the insular, sojourning ultra Orthodox Jewish community then based in Guatemala. He was done with the group's food restrictions that left him weighing just 80 pounds, and had grown depressed and anxious over its increasingly strict way of life and treatment of minors. But two months later, the Monsey native said he agreed to take part in a plot by Lev Tahor leaders to kidnap the 14-year-old granddaughter and 12-year-old grandson of the group's founder. Their mother, Sara Helbrans, had fled Lev Tahor with several of her kids after disapproving of the forced marriage of the underage girl. Malka, now 24, was a key prosecution witness last week in White Plains federal court at the trial of Shmiel, Yoil and Yakov Weingarten, brothers and Rockland County natives who are the last of nine Lev Tahor members charged in the kidnapping and child exploitation plot. He claimed a significant role. Malka said he provided the girl, identified in court as "Jane Doe," with a secret cellphone to communicate with his brother-in-law, Shmiel Weingarten, in the days before the kids were taken. And he was with the family at a home in Woodridge, Sullivan County, celebrating the Sabbath early on Dec. 8, 2018, when he woke the boy, "John Doe," and led him out of the house to join his sister and meet up with a car that would take them away. Malka then went back to sleep and pretended to know nothing later that morning when their mother discovered the kids were missing. That morning, the kids were taken to a Super 8 motel in Monticello to change into non-Hasidic garb; then into Pennsylvania to the Wilkes-Barre Scranton International Airport where they were checked in using identifications of cousins. They flew to Washington, D.C., then to Chicago, and finally to San Antonio, Texas, before being driven across the border into Mexico. Jurors have seen video from the home of the children walking away as a car approached on the road. They have seen Shmiel Weingarten checking into the motel. And they have seen pictures of the kids at the Scranton, Pa., airport with their uncle, Nachman Helbrans, who took over leadership of Lev Tahor following the death of his father in 2017. Prosecutors have also introduced a Walmart receipt showing purchases of numerous items, including the Superman baseball cap the boy was wearing, the fur hat with earflaps Helbrans wore and the New York Giants sweatshirt Shmiel Weingarten wore when he checked into the motel. But even more than corroborating evidence of the children's removal, prosecutors used Malka to bring to life for jurors the Lev Tahor experience. Shimon Malka recalls Hanhala control in Lev Tahor Malka detailed strict control by a group of leaders that included Yakov and Yoil Weingarten, called the "Hanhala" in Hebrew and Yiddish, over every aspect of community life, from how members spent their day, the money they could keep and who they married. Malka said there were physical beatings, and sometimes burnings of children's hands, for those who disobeyed. And he detailed marriages between men and girls as young as 12 and 13, directives over when couples could have sex and how women could not refuse their husbands, and how the leaders required women to give birth in tents and not hospitals to hide underage pregnancies from secular authorities. The Weingartens, dressed identically in striped light blue robes and brimless black caps covered by brown shawls, are all representing themselves in the trial before U.S. District Judge Nelson Roman. They have objected frequently to terms, like "sect" and "compound" to describe Lev Tahor and the collection of tents, mango trees, farmland, school, synagogue and other buildings where they lived in Guatemala. They are concerned jurors will think of it as a cult, which is how many have described it in the past. They have challenged questions or testimony that referred to "kidnapping," insisting that the children were not stolen but saved from abuse. They have justified the conduct that appeared to violate Jewish law — phone calls, driving and flying on the Sabbath — as necessary to protect the children. On Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Samuel Adelsberg asked Malka straight out whether it was a kidnapping or a rescue operation. he brothers attempted to portray Malka as a liar seeking leniency. They challenged Malka's account that his and other children's hands would be burned as punishment, asking him to show his scars. He said he had none but that it had happened. Malka acknowledged that many of the group's practices related to marriage and sex were consistent with those in the ultra Orthodox world. But not marrying off underage girls and hiding their pregnancies from authorities, he insisted. Shmiel Weingarten at one point asked for a mistrial, saying the details about Lev Tahor were inflammatory and had nothing to do with the charges in the case. Prosecutors countered that they had to counter the defendants' claims of a rescue by showing exactly what the plotters wanted to return the children to. Roman denied the motion. Malka details kidnapping plot in court Malka said he was torn when approached in early December 2018. He was aware that Sara Helbrans had obtained a court order granting her full custody and barring the father, a Lev Tahor leader, from contacting the children. So he knew taking them from the mother was illegal. But Malka went along with the plan. In part because they convinced him the children should be reunited with the community and Jane Doe with her husband. And also because he expected benefits, particularly the chance to communicate with his wife and family still in Lev Tahor. Despite his direct involvement in separating the children from their mother and lying to investigators for the first several days, Malka was not charged. He reached a non-prosecution agreement, requiring him to cooperate with the government and testify truthfully. This is the third trial at which he has given his account. His testimony helped prosecutors win convictions, first against Nachman Helbrans and Mayer Rosner, the father of Jane Doe's husband; then against his brother, Mordechay Malka, and cousin, Matityau Malka. Jacob Rosner, who was 19 when he married 13-year-old Jane Doe, and his brother Aron Rosner pleaded guilty and were sentenced to time served. Helbrans and Mayer Rosner are serving 12-year prison terms and the Malka cousins were released this past fall after serving shorter terms. The children were found by Mexican authorities later in December 2018 and reunited with their mother. The conspiracy allegations against the brothers include that they were involved in two later unsuccessful efforts to abduct Jane Doe in 2019 and 2021. Malka said Shmiel Weingarten handled logistics, was present during the kidnapping and communicated about it with Yoil by phone from Mexico. He said Yakov was also in Mexico and helped with passports, money and food once the children were brought there. Malka said Yakov also urged him to get out of the United States once they learned he had been contacted by investigators. That was too late however, as Malka was already cooperating and captured the conversation on a recording device as he sat with the FBI. Malka moves forward after break from Lev Tahor The Weingarten brothers, originally from Monsey, joined Lev Tahor in the years after their father, Israel, was convicted in Brooklyn federal court in the years-long sexual abuse of one of his daughters. He too represented himself and that trial was particularly notable in published reports for his cross-examination of the abused daughter. The girl’s siblings sided with their father, insisting that she had been brainwashed into accusing him. Sara and Nachman's father, Shlomo Helbrans, founded Lev Tahor in Israel and made headlines in 1993 when he served prison time for the brief disappearance of a boy whose secular mother had brought him to Helbrans for bar mitzvah lessons in Brooklyn. Helbrans moved Lev Tahor to Quebec, then Ontario, and then Mexico, frequently to dodge the courts and child welfare authorities when they initiated neglect investigations. He drowned in Mexico in 2017 and Nachman took over leadership, moving the group to Guatemala. Later published reports indicated they sought to move to Iran and also settled in Kurdistan and Macedonia. Shimon Malka, living again in Monsey, has remarried, and his wife watched from the gallery as he testified. They recently had their first child. He wiped away tears when he detailed his continued estrangement from relatives who remained in Lev Tahor. He said he was always taught it was better to die than to live outside Lev Tahor; that Hasidim outside the group were evil. He has learned that's not the case. "I managed to put all this behind me and live a Hasidic life," he said.

Mendy Levy hates talking about Lev Tahor. He's trying to move on from his traumatic upbringing in the cult. He's running a successful photography business in New York and Montreal. But he constantly worries about his family still trapped in Guatemala. That's why, he sat down with popular Jewish podcaster Yaakov Langer of Living L'Chaim to continue bringing awareness to the cause. The podcast is part of Mr. Langer's series called: Inspiration for the Nation. As you can hear from this podcast, Mendy is truly an inspiration!

Read Full Digital Article Here >> 'I Escaped Abusive Jungle Cult - Then Rescued My Son' Lev Tahor settled in Central America after coming under investigation in Canada (Photo: Epa-Efe) By Raffi Berg BBC News Online Middle East editor When Mexican police raided a self-styled Jewish sect, former members hoped it would spell the end of the group, which has been accused of crimes against children. Instead, the case collapsed and the sect recovered - but not before details about the cloistered community were exposed, including its plans for mass slaughter if outside authorities intervened. One former member, who recently fled, spoke to the BBC about his ordeal. Warning: This story contains details of physical and sexual abuse When Yisrael Amir got married, he and his bride stood under the chupah, the traditional Jewish wedding canopy, surrounded by members of their community. But what should be a couple's happiest day was for them a nightmare. Yisrael and his wife, Malke (not her real name), were both 16 and had met there and then for the first time. The marriage had been organised by leaders of the group which they had been brought into as children. The group is Lev Tahor, Hebrew for Pure Heart, which claims to follow a fundamentalist version of Judaism. Former members though, along with an Israeli court among others, say it is nothing but a cult. "We had no choice," Yisrael, now 22, tells me as we sit and talk in the back yard of his aunt's house, just south of Tel Aviv. "The rabbi called me into his office and said, 'Next week you're getting married. If you refuse you get punished'. "My sister was 13 and they forced her to marry a 19-year-old. She was crying. She cried so much they punished her by banning her from speaking for a year. She could not say a word - not ask for food, not ask for the toilet, nothing." Yisrael's aunt, Orit, has been deeply involved in the fight against Lev Tahor (Photo: Rafi Berg) This was part of life at the group's compound in Guatemala, where the legal age for 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 it faced allegations of child abuse. It has denied these claims. Yisrael says his sister could not speak properly after the year-long punishment ended. Such treatments are part of a catalogue of alleged abuses meted out by leaders and those in positions of authority in the group, according to Yisrael and other former members. These reportedly include beatings for minor infractions, with children forced to thank their tormentors for hitting them. But, according to Yisrael, there was much worse. "I saw every day Shlomo Helbrans [the founder of Lev Tahor] and another leader take boys in their room, boys as young as eight, then afterwards he sent them to the mikveh [ritual bath used for purification]. I didn't understand what he did with them. Now I know." Yisrael says boys and girls told him they were sexually abused - and raped. The BBC tried to speak to alleged child victims of rape who have left the group, but none were willing to talk. A US-based support group, Lev Tahor Survivors (LTS), told the BBC there are child rape victims among its members, while a source involved in an official investigation says Central American authorities have sworn statements from ex-members that rapes were committed. Shlomo Helbrans (left) founded and led the group until his death (Photo: AP) "Helbrans cast himself as a Messiah-like figure who could do what he liked because he was a holy man," says Yisrael. "He told us he had come from Heaven to 'mend' people and had supernatural powers and his followers believed him." One of the ways the group exerts control over its members, Yisrael says, is to remove children from their parents and place them with new "families". Biological parents are forbidden to have any further contact with them. This is what happened to Yisrael. At the age of 12, he was taken from their home in Israel, along with his six siblings, to join the group in Guatemala City by their father, Shaul. Yisrael says Lev Tahor had falsely promised his family that life in Guatemala would be paradise, with animals for the children to play with. Instead "it was a complete shock," he says. "Everyone was separated from each other. Children had to sleep on stone floors. We were woken up about 3am every day, then prayers all day long, no food, no water, no talking to other children. If the rabbi [Helbrans] lectured us, it would go on for hours. Sometimes I would fall asleep standing up. "Every single thing was controlled. You could only go to the toilet when they said you could." "We had no education. We did not even study Torah [holiest books of the Jewish Bible] or Talmud [a principal Jewish book of laws] because that would have opened our minds - just Helbrans' writings, which we had to learn by heart. We did not go to sleep until 11pm." The community based itself in the jungle, isolated from the outside world (surveillance photo)(Photo: Rafi Berg) The group was covertly watched by an undercover Israeli team and police (Photo: Rafi Berg) Yisrael says members were only allowed to eat certain vegetables and fruit. The leaders banned meat, fish and eggs, claiming that they may be affected by genetic engineering. This they said rendered them unkosher (prohibited under Jewish dietary laws). Yisrael believes the real reason was just to keep members weak by depriving them of protein. "Helbrans, though, ate everything he wanted - eggs, fish, meat. He said it was for his health, and you weren't allowed to question it." Helbrans died in Mexico in 2017, drowning in a river. His son, Nachman, described in US court documents as "more extreme" than his father, took over. "When I was taken there as a child, I just knew it all felt wrong but couldn't do anything," says Yisrael. "But later I just knew I had to get out." That point 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 get something printed in the town [Oratorio, to where the group had moved]. It was an internet store, and I remembered what a computer looked like from when I was a child back home. I didn't know how to use one, so I asked the store owner for help." After learning about Google, Yisrael asked the owner to look up Lev Tahor - and was shocked by what he found. "There were articles about this cult, and it confirmed what I thought." Among the results were reports about how his aunt, Orit, back in Israel, was fighting the group. "I thought that Orit had forgotten us," says Yisrael. "I didn't know she was doing everything to rescue our family." Yisrael found her email address and sent her a message. Orit says she was shocked to get it. They started communicating, with Yisrael returning to the store whenever he was sent on errands. Then using money he had secretly earned, Yisrael bought a mobile phone and rang his aunt. "When she heard my voice she was so happy," he says with a smile. "She told me she would come to take me out, and a few days after that I escaped." "One night I slipped out the gate and ran for 15 minutes through the jungle until I came to a highway. I stopped a bus and it took me to Guatemala City, about two hours away. I was frightened members would come looking for me. "Orit was waiting for me but I didn't recognise her, and at first I didn't know whether to hug her because she was not dressed like women in Lev Tahor, where touching the opposite sex [outside of marriage] was strictly forbidden." One of the hallmarks of the group is its requirement for females from the age of three to wear a full-body cloak, which it argues is for modesty. In public, females are seen to also cover their faces apart from their eyes. The practice has earned Lev Tahor the nickname the Jewish Taliban in media reports. At first Yisrael did not want to leave without his son, but Orit promised they would return for the boy, and they left Guatemala for Israel. By then 19, Yisrael had in effect been living an isolated existence for five years and struggled to adjust. "I had to start life from zero," he says, "to meet people, to make friends, to even learn the language again - it was very, very difficult." He and Orit returned to Guatemala several times to try to reclaim Yisrael's son, but to no avail. Then, last September, following an undercover operation by a four-man team (including former Mossad agents, an ex-police officer and a lawyer) from Israel, an elite police unit raided Lev Tahor's hideout in Mexico's Chiapas state, to where some of the group had relocated. Members were forced to live in squalid conditions at the base in Mexico (Photo: Getty Images) The raid had been authorised by a state judge who had examined evidence of criminal activity, including drug trafficking and rape, gathered by Mexico's Special Prosecutor for Organised Crime. This included an order which 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 some people come to take our children from us… we have to sacrifice lives so the cursed ones will not desecrate the spirit of our pure children… [in] the way it was instructed by our holiness [Shlomo Helbrans] before he died," a translation of the document reads. "It must be done in a way they [the children] don't suffer… nor disfigure their body… so they [women] will use what we will distribute [which] has to be given to the children immediately… without explaining to them what it is so as not to frighten them." It then instructs the women to kill themselves after they have killed the children. Children were immediately separated from adults as a precaution and the compound emptied. Nevo was among those brought out and was reunited with Yisrael. "I cried," Yisrael says, "but Nevo was calm. I'm sure he felt that I was his father." Yisrael flew back to Israel with Nevo after the boy was released in the raid (Photo: Yisrael Amir) Malke was also evacuated but refused to leave the group. She and two dozen others were held at a government shelter, but five days later they escaped. Two leaders arrested on the orders of the state judge on suspicion of human trafficking and serious sexual offences were freed by a local judge. Members of the group forced their way past guards while making their escape Yisrael's account of abuses by Lev Tahor has not been independently verified, but it parallels testimonies of other former members. A spokesman for Lev Tahor, Uriel Goldman, rejected the allegations. "I completely deny all the accusations," he told the BBC. "The greatest evidence we have is the words of the [local] judge in Mexico. After hearing all the evidence from A to Z, the judge decisively decided to close the case." Mr Goldman said the group was the victim of "a persecution". Although the finding by the local judge has not been set aside, 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 from the government shelter in Mexico, as well as the two freed leaders, have returned to Guatemala, according to the source. Some 8,000 miles (12,000 km) away, Yisrael continues to rebuild his life with Nevo at their new home on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Forbidden from using technology for years, he is now studying computer science at Bar Ilan University, with the aim of becoming a software engineer. "After that," he says, "the sky's the limit."

Read Full Digital Article Here >> By Ryan Fahey-World News Reporter 4 Feb 2023 Former victim who escaped jungle paedophile cult shares details of monstrous abuse. WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT Yisrael Amir, now 22, was just 12 years old when his father ripped him away from his home in Israel with the promises of a heavenly life in Guatemala, but he instead arrived at a cult compound where leaders have been accused of raping children. A former member of an extreme Jewish jungle cult that has been accused of child sex abuse has spoken of its warped teachings - including plans for mass slaughter should outside authorities intervene. Yisrael Amir, now 22, was a member of Lev Tahor or "Pure Heart", which claims to follow a fundamentalist version of Judaism and forces women to cover their bodies from head to toe and carries out teen marriages. But former members and Israeli courts say it's nothing more than a "dangerous cult". The group settled in Guatemala in 2013 after being accused of systematic and widespread abuse of children in Canada. Yisrael and his wife were both 16 when they tied the knot, despite the legal age for marriage being 18 in the Central American country. His sister was one of a number of children married off when they were barely a teenager, Yisrael said. In the Lev Tahor cult, women and girls are forced to wear an all-covering black garment from the age of three(Image: i24NEWS English) The 22-year-old, who now lives in Tel Aviv with his aunt, told the BBC: "My sister was 13 and they forced her to marry a 19-year-old. She was crying. "She cried so much they punished her by banning her from speaking for a year. "She could not say a word - not ask for food, not ask for the toilet, nothing." Yisrael Amir, 22, says other children told him they'd been abused and raped by senior Lev Tahor leaders (Image: i24NEWS English) The cruel punishment left the youngster unable to speak properly after her 12 months penance of silence, Yisrael says. He said it was just one of a catalogue of methods the cult's cruel leader used to brutalise and molest his followers, including forcing the children to thank the adults who beat them for minor transgressions. But these were just the tip of the iceberg, Yisrael said. View of belongings of the Lev Tahor Jewish sect, inside a house they rented in the Ejido Independencia community in Tapachula, Chiapas state, Mexico on October 1, 2022. (Image: AFP via Getty Images) He added: "I saw every day Shlomo Helbrans [the founder of Lev Tahor] and another leader take boys in their room, boys as young as eight, then afterwards he sent them to the mikveh [ritual bath used for purification]. "I didn't understand what he did with them. Now I know." Yisrael added that a number of young girls and boys told him they were sexually abused and raped. The US-based Lev Tahor Survivors group counts multiple child rape victims among its members, and authorities in Guatemala say they have received sworn statements about the organisation's hideous assaults. Rabbi Shlomo Hebrans painted himself as a "Messiah-like" figure which allowed him to whatever he wished, Yisrael said. (Image: AP) Yisrael said one of the worst was leader Helbrans, who "cast himself as a Messiah-like figure". He used his religious esteem to claim he could "do what he liked because he was a holy man", Yisrael said. The group has a presence in both Guatemala and a smaller compound in Mexico, where police carried out a jungle raid last year. Cops found an order handed down by senior leaders, which told mothers to kill their kids with poison if social workers came to remove them. In translation, the document said: "If some people come to take our children from us… we have to sacrifice lives so the cursed ones will not desecrate the spirit of our pure children… [in] the way it was instructed by our holiness [Shlomo Helbrans] before he died. The compound in Guatemala(Image: i24NEWS English) "It must be done in a way they [the children] don't suffer… nor disfigure their body… so they [women] will use what we will distribute [which] has to be given to the children immediately… without explaining to them what it is so as not to frighten them." The women were then supposed to kill themselves after slaying their offspring. The threat was so serious that Mexican cops divided women from children on entering the compound. Recalling his early years in the cult, Yisrael said he was taken from home in Israel with his six siblings on promises of life in Guatemala being like paradise - with animals freely roaming for the kids to play with. The jungle camp (Image: i24NEWS English) But when he arrived, the kids were separated from other children, and their parents. They were then forced to sleep on hard, stone floors. They'd be woken up at around 3am before being forced to sit through a day of prayers without food, water or being allowed to speak amongst themselves. The religious curriculum consisted solely of reading Helbrans' writings, which had to be learned by heart. "We had no education. We did not even study Torah [holiest books of the Jewish Bible] or Talmud [the book of Jewish law] because it would have opened our minds," he said. Yisrael was just 12 when he was taken to Guatemala(Image: i24NEWS English) Members could only eat some fruit and vegetables, with meat, fish and eggs completely banned because Helbrans claimed genetic engineering had made them unkosher. Yisrael believes that it allowed senior leaders to keep the group weak by depriving them of protein. "Helbrans, though, ate everything he wanted - eggs, fish, meat. He said it was for his health, and you weren't allowed to question it," he added. Lev Tahor leaders deny breaking local laws, refute sexual abuse claims and say they've been targeted in current and previous investigations for their beliefs.

Leila Miller wrote an in depth investigative article following Yoel Levy's journey of strength, pain and hope. The article will be on the cover of the LA Times weekend edition. Read full digital article here >> (Español >>) RISHON LEZION, Israel — Yoel Levy had just woken up in his apartment outside Tel Aviv one Saturday last fall when he received a long-awaited phone call. It was his friend Israel Amir, who was in southern Mexico for a rescue operation. “I have my son!” Amir told Levy. The young men shared an extraordinary past. Both were raised in Lev Tahor, a fringe Jewish sect that has fled from country to country over the last decade, on the run from authorities and child abuse allegations. Branded a cult by the Israeli government, the group is thought to have roughly 300 adherents scattered around the world. Levy escaped five years ago, when he was 16. Amir fled a year later at 19, leaving behind the woman he said he was forced to marry — one of Levy’s aunts — and their infant son. Levy’s mother and eight of his siblings remained in the group, and he longed to see them again. He hadn’t spoken with any of them since running away, but he had been working with a private team of attorneys and former Israeli intelligence officers trying to break up the group and bring its leaders to justice. Now the plan had come to a head. Amir explained that at dawn the previous day, he had accompanied Mexican police, Yiddish interpreters and a former Mossad agent on a raid of two houses in the jungle. They brought out about 30 Lev Tahor members, including his son. Amir told Levy that he helped authorities identify two wanted men who were arrested on suspicion of human trafficking. He also spotted Levy’s 16-year-old brother. Levy went to his balcony and lighted a cigarette to calm his nerves. “I’m going to go there,” he told Amir. “I’m going to get him.” :: One of Levy’s earliest memories is his first haircut. It was a ritual ceremony led by Shlomo Helbrans, the founder of Lev Tahor and an intimidating figure to a 3-year-old raised to revere him. It took place in Helbrans’ apartment in Ste.-Agathe-des-Monts, a resort town north of Montreal that had become the group’s latest refuge. Helbrans had taught at a Hasidic school in his native Israel before he started Lev Tahor in the 1980s, taking the name — which means “pure heart” — from a psalm. Keeping with his belief that Jews shouldn’t inhabit Israel until the arrival of the Messiah, he moved the group to New York. He ran a religious school in Brooklyn but got into trouble after the family of a 13-year-old student reported the boy missing and accused Helbrans of brainwashing him. The boy reappeared two years later, saying he had left his family by choice, but in 1994 Helbrans was convicted of kidnapping and served two years in prison before being deported to Israel. He left for Canada shortly after and won asylum on the grounds that he had been a victim of persecution in Israel for his religious opposition to the country’s existence as a Jewish state. Levy’s mother and father had followed Helbrans to New York, where they got married, and then to Canada. They settled in a neighborhood with about 50 other Lev Tahor families, including his maternal grandparents and their other children. Levy, born in 2001, was his parents’ second child. Yiddish was the group’s language of choice and the only one Levy spoke well. Boys and girls studied in separate schools and did not intermingle. A few people had jobs outside the community, but families relied on child welfare payments and charity. Levy’s father was often away soliciting donations. In some respects, the group was like many ultra-Orthodox sects. Even its rejection of Zionism was not unique. But Lev Tahor took modesty, gender segregation, dietary restrictions and rejection of secular culture to extremes. Members were expected to marry in their midteens. Store-bought chicken was banned out of the belief that genetically modified animals were not kosher. English was not taught. While men wore traditional ultra-Orthodox garb, including wide fur hats known as shtreimels, the dress code for women was highly unusual: long black robes that led some media to call the group “the Jewish Taliban.” Children were taught to look at the ground while walking to school to avoid seeing non-Jewish neighbors or secular temptations such as swimming pools. Unlike Hasidic sects that connect to God through dancing, music and other expressions of joy, adherents of Lev Tahor lived somberly. Even laughing was discouraged. Extremism veered into alleged abuse. The group would often separate children from their parents and place them with other families, according to several former members. Levy knew little about his parents and had tense relationships with his siblings. In Lev Tahor, children were raised to turn each other in for rule-breaking — which could lead to beatings. Nearly every day someone in Levy’s class was subjected to corporal punishment, with a teacher once joking that he needed a mechanical hand to slap children for him. Levy said his cousin was beaten with a stick for glimpsing a neighbor’s pool as he walked to school. None of this seemed extreme to Levy — at least not yet. It was the only life he knew. When he was around 8, Levy decided he liked the idea of wearing glasses, so he pretended his vision was faulty. When Levy was caught in the lie, Helbrans said that he would be punished with “a few pats.” The entire school was called into a room with a stage where Levy says a teacher beat him with a belt for what seemed like half an hour. When it was over, Levy kissed the teacher’s hand as the children had been taught. He struggled to walk, and his mother cried when she saw him. Later, with the community under investigation by Quebec authorities, Levy recalled, a teacher instructed him and his classmates to answer “no” if asked whether they were ever hit. “It doesn’t count as a lie,” said the teacher, explaining that it’s what God wanted them to do. :: One Saturday in 2013, just before Levy’s 12th birthday, his mother told him the community was moving because authorities were coming for the children. His family boarded a rented bus the next night to rural southern Ontario. It was Levy’s first time on a highway and he was too excited to sleep, looking out the window at passing semis. A few months later, the group took off again, and Levy found himself on an airplane to Guatemala. He was growing more curious about the outside world and in small ways beginning to question things he had been taught. When a man next to him ordered hummus and crackers, he felt a sudden craving, wondering why they weren’t kosher. In Guatemala City, Lev Tahor members lived in two office buildings. Levy’s family squeezed into two rooms with bunk beds and mattresses on the floor. A floor below him was 14-year-old Amir, whose family had recently arrived from Israel. There was a courthouse across the street, and the sight each morning of a van delivering handcuffed detainees raised more questions for Levy about Lev Tahor. He wondered whether his own life was any better than the lives of the prisoners. In 2016, after a police raid reportedly conducted at the behest of Israeli authorities searching for a missing child, the group picked up again. This time members headed to a forested property Lev Tahor bought a couple of hours outside the city in a region called Santa Rosa. Families lived in huts made of tarps, wood and tin. Every week, Levy was required to provide a detailed report of his schedule, including how long he had spent eating breakfast and talking with his siblings. Still, he managed to pick up some Spanish from Central Americans who had converted to Judaism and joined the group. Then tragedy struck: Levy’s father got sick over the Sukkot holiday. Lev Tahor leaders initially forbade him to go to a hospital, insisting his family’s faith in God would save him. By the time he got there, it was too late. He died of septic shock and was buried in a clearing near the compound. Yehoshua Levy was 45. It wasn’t long before Lev Tahor moved again, dispersing to southern and central Mexico in an attempt to evade Israeli authorities who leaders said were zeroing in on the group. Then came another death — one that would upend the community. In July 2017, during a ritual cleansing in a river, Helbrans, then 54, was swept away. Everyone returned to the group’s base in Guatemala, and Helbrans was buried near Levy’s father. Helbrans’ son took control of Lev Tahor. Nachman Helbrans proved to be a harsher leader than his father, banning meat, fish and even the local mangoes. Children as young as 12 were pushed into arranged marriages, according to multiple former members of the group. At 16, Levy was on the older side when the new leader matched him with a girl the same age. Levy didn’t take the news well, but an uncle told him, “It’s your match and you need to take it. You can’t say no.” He was engaged that night. He couldn’t stop thinking about how miserable his life had become. Nachman Helbrans had forced Levy’s mother to remarry and placed most of her 10 children with other families. Levy had been sent to live with one of the leaders and became his personal assistant. Defying orders to stay away from his mother, he would sometimes come to the entrance of her hut. If he was lucky, she would open the door for a few minutes. Other times he could hear her sobbing on the other side. Both Levy and his brother Mendy said a Lev Tahor official beat them for trying to visit her. One evening in fall 2018, with his wedding still pending, Levy decided to flee. He found the telephone number of a convert who had left the group. Then he sneaked into his mother’s hut to call for help. Later at his home, he stuffed some clothes into a trash bag and anxiously waited until everyone fell asleep. About 2 a.m., he returned to his mother’s hut and slid a short letter under the entrance. “I’m going and I’m not planning to come back,” it said. Levy stepped lightly over the crackling leaves. At the compound’s gate, he told an armed guard he had permission to leave because he needed documents in Guatemala City. The guard let him pass. He hitched a ride to a hotel where the convert picked him up. When he called his mother that morning, she wept. “You should come back,” she begged. “It’s the only Jewish place.” :: Levy spent his first few weeks of freedom in a community of Central American converts who had left Lev Tahor. One gave him a smartphone. Googling for the first time — in Yiddish, Spanish and the little English he knew — Levy discovered YouTube and learned that the U.S. president was a man named Donald Trump. One day he found out that his brother Mendy — who was 15 and recently engaged to his first cousin — was trying to flee Lev Tahor. Levy and one of the converts picked him up at a hotel in Guatemala City. The brothers flew to Quebec with help from the Canadian Embassy. They were taken in by Tosh — a Hasidic community just outside Montreal — and each lived with his own foster family in apartments across from each other. Levy’s English improved dramatically with episodes of “Friends” he watched on his phone — at first not realizing that the characters were actors. He learned that the world was made up of many more countries than the ones where he had lived. He also developed a taste for hamburgers and a passion for watching soccer. He began to feel he had been brought up on lies, one of the biggest being that the only true Jews belonged to Lev Tahor. Wondering why God would let such a group exist, he slowly rejected religion, shortening his traditional earlocks and using his phone on Shabbat. He found work at a Jewish community kitchen but was fired for not taking prayer breaks. Many nights, Levy would spend hours scouring the internet to see what the outside world knew about Lev Tahor. One of the most detailed accounts he found was a 2014 documentary by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that described how members — including his own family — had fled their homes in Quebec days before a judge, acting on allegations of neglect, ordered 14 children into foster care. The documentary also featured a former member who told authorities that he was 25 when he married a 15-year-old and that he was advised to punish boys by hitting them with a wire hanger. Shlomo Helbrans also appeared on camera, saying, “I never marry children against the law.” In halting English, he also downplayed the use of corporal punishment: “To say that no child never receives ... a slap of his hand, never and ever, is false. But what I can do declare very strongly is that physical punishment of children, we can use in our community a lot less than the Western society.” Levy also learned that in December 2018 Nachman Helbrans had been detained by Mexican authorities working with the FBI and deported to the United States. Federal prosecutors charged him and three others with kidnapping two children in New York and smuggling them to Mexico after their mother — Nachman’s sister — fled the group. How was it possible, Levy wondered, that Lev Tahor had not been shut down? :: Several months into his new life, Levy flew to Israel to meet relatives he had never known. His paternal aunt, Idith Baba, and her husband were worried he wouldn’t know where to go when he landed, so they received special permission to wait for him on the tarmac. “Yoel! Yoel!” they shouted. He seemed shocked by their hugs. The next day at their home outside Tel Aviv, Levy asked to go to a barber to get rid of the rest of his earlocks. It was a Friday, and Passover was starting that night. “I’ll take you Sunday,” his uncle said. Levy insisted: “I want to do this now.” As he spent time with relatives, Levy began to learn more about his parents. His father, Yehoshua, was 17 when he met Helbrans on a bus in Israel in the late 1980s. He had long been curious about religion and soon was studying in a yeshiva in Jerusalem. There he met one of the earliest followers of Lev Tahor — the father of his future wife, Odel. In 1990, Levy’s father told his family that he was following Helbrans to New York. Yehoshua was 27 when he married Odel. She was 15. After a relative read that Lev Tahor was being called a cult, the family begged him to return to Israel. But he said he was happy. Now, three decades later, Levy was growing closer with his long-lost relatives. He decided to move to Israel. It meant leaving his brother Mendy, who found himself unable to shake the belief — instilled by Lev Tahor — that it was a sin to live there. Levy found work at a pharmacy, and though it pained him to talk about his life in Lev Tahor, he started giving interviews on Israeli television as his Hebrew improved. By then Amir, Levy’s friend, had escaped from Lev Tahor and moved to Israel too. Amir wanted justice. Tipped off that a former administrator at the Lev Tahor school in Quebec was visiting Israel, he filed a police report, and the man was arrested. Levy joined his friend in helping police build a case. Prosecutors charged Elazar Rumpler with child abuse and assault — including overseeing the beating Levy said he had received onstage all those years ago. But in late 2020, Rumpler fled to Guatemala and the case was put on hold. Rumpler has denied the allegations. In a letter to Israel’s Justice Ministry, Levy asked authorities to work with other countries to have Rumpler arrested. “It is your responsibility to save my siblings and my mother,” he wrote. “Please do not stand by.” He never received a response. In the meantime, other efforts were underway to help people get out of Lev Tahor. One was a website with a hotline set up by some Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, who considered the sect “a perversion” of their faith. Working anonymously to avoid compromising their efforts, they aimed to help Lev Tahor adherents recognize that the sect violates Jewish principles. In fall 2021, members of the Brooklyn group traveled to Guatemala and met with the country’s president to tell him about Lev Tahor. They also flew Levy and other former members to meet with prosecutors there in hopes of building a case against the sect’s leaders. The other effort was organized by Amir and some of his relatives in Israel, who assembled a volunteer team of former Israeli intelligence officials and lawyers to try to extricate his son from the group. One member of the team, an ex-Mossad agent named Daniel Limor, visited Guatemala on multiple occasions. He flew a drone over the Lev Tahor settlement to take photographs and got onto the property by posing as a businessman interested in buying it to put up a solar farm. In early 2022, Limor watched the group disperse toward Mexico and began coordinating with officials there. The effort resulted in a warrant for the arrest of four Lev Tahor adherents in the state of Chiapas that included statements from former members about rampant abuse and neglect. One told authorities that when he was 7 he was sexually abused and that his father — under orders from Shlomo Helbrans — once beat him until he fainted. Amir testified that babies had died because their mothers gave birth without medical attention and that he was not allowed to see his parents or siblings for two years even though they lived two floors above him in Guatemala City. When his 13-year-old sister didn’t want to marry a 19-year-old, she was prohibited from speaking to anyone in the community for a year and developed a stutter, Amir told officials. In September, Amir arrived in Mexico a few days before the raid. As police barged into Lev Tahor’s homes, men, women and children screamed. Officials eventually brought out Amir’s son. His wife was there too, but she refused to leave Lev Tahor. She and a few other members were detained by immigration authorities. Levy’s 16-year-old brother — the one Amir had spotted — and about 18 others moved into a Mexican government shelter. :: To Levy’s relief, after more than three decades, Lev Tahor finally appeared to be falling apart. Nachman Helbrans was in prison, sentenced in March to 12 years for kidnapping as well as child sexual exploitation; prosecutors showed that after abducting his 14-year-old niece, he reunited her with her adult husband. Several other members were also convicted in the case. Finding refuge had become Lev Tahor’s priority, with some families traveling as far as northern Iraq or the Balkans. At one point the group contemplated seeking asylum in Iran. Levy felt optimistic that he would soon be reunited with his 16-year-old brother. His mother and other siblings were still missing, but he dared to hope it would only be a matter of time before they would be out too. But four days after the September raid, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, calling Lev Tahor a cult, said in a press release that its consul in Mexico had tried to talk with members at the shelter but was rebuffed. “They have currently refused to leave the sect and move into Israeli custody,” it said. Two days later, Levy got a call from a reporter at an Orthodox Israeli news site seeking confirmation that the Lev Tahor members had escaped from the shelter. “What?” Levy exclaimed. The journalist sent him a video that showed Lev Tahor children and adults wearing long robes and head coverings push past guards at the facility and disappear into the night. Levy called Amir, who eventually was able to confirm it: They were all gone. Levy forced himself to breathe. Going to Mexico would now be pointless. The final blow came when he learned that Mexican authorities released the two men they had arrested during the raid. An attorney representing them said they were freed because a judge determined there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute them. Mexican prosecutors did not respond to interview requests and the Israeli Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the escape. In a videoconference with The Times, Avraham Dinkel and Uriel Goldman, Lev Tahor members who said they were living in Guatemala, insisted that the group had done nothing wrong and was being persecuted for its opposition to the modern-day state of Israel. “There are people in the Orthodox Jewish community, in the Israeli government, that are hell bent on destroying our community, at whatever cost,” said Dinkel, a Canadian who joined the group around 2014. He denied that Lev Tahor members view themselves as the only real Jews, but said their form of Judaism is not “watered down” and follows the letter of the Torah. The two men also denied that the group uses corporal punishment. They acknowledged advocating for early marriage — “usually” not as young as 13 — but said nobody is forced. As for claims that children are separated from their parents, the men acknowledged that Levy and his siblings were sent to live with other families, but only because that is what their mother wanted. “Nobody is taking away children,” said Goldman, an Israeli who joined Lev Tahor in 1990. “I’m not going to live in a community where people do things against the Torah and against the law.” Levy and his brother Mendy “were very rebellious children” who are only seeking attention and “celebrity status,” said Dinkel, who denied that the sect bore any responsibility for the death of their father. Their mother, he said, lives happily in Guatemala, where most of Lev Tahor is now based, and teaches other women how to cook and raise children. “She is one of the most powerful ladies,” Goldman said. She “is free to go,” Dinkel said. “We’re all free to go. Nobody is being held back.” Dinkel and Goldman said that they were in Greece when the raid occurred and that they got in touch with members in the shelter to coordinate the escape. The plan had been for everyone to run toward an exit as food was being delivered. After several taxis picked them up, they fled back to Guatemala. “If they were actually victims of Lev Tahor, would they escape their so-called rescuers?” Dinkel said. :: After three years in Israel, Levy felt stuck. He had a small circle of people he loved, including Amir and his son, now 3. But without a high school diploma, he struggled to find a decent job. Last week he boarded a plane to New York en route to Montreal, where he planned to start a new life near Mendy. Levy, now 21, thinks constantly about the rest of his family and wonders whether he will ever be reunited with them — or whether they even want to leave Lev Tahor. In June, he and Mendy made their own trip to Guatemala on a special mission: to visit their father’s grave and to begin arranging the return of his body to Israel. Except for a guard watching over the property, the former Lev Tahor base had been abandoned. The guard didn’t say where everybody had gone — only that they were being unjustly persecuted. Traditional fur hats were scattered in the dirt. Levy stood for a photograph in front of a wall that had once been part of the synagogue. The brothers returned the next day, armed with a machete in case the grass hid where their father was buried. Levy hoped to pray and take photographs that he could share with officials or a lawyer. The guard refused to let them pass. -- About the writer: Leila Miller is a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times based in Mexico City. She joined the newsroom in 2018 and spent several years working on the criminal justice team. She was also part of the team that was a 2020 Pulitzer finalist for its coverage of the Conception boat fire off the Channel Islands. Born in Argentina but raised in Los Angeles, Miller is a graduate of Oberlin College and Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

NEW YORK — A co-conspirator in a sprawling kidnapping case against the Jewish Lev Tahor cult was sentenced to home imprisonment in a US federal court on Friday. The case has led to the group’s unraveling, seen most its leadership hauled away to prison and scattered its members across several countries. Aron Rosner was sentenced to time served plus one year of supervised release, with the first nine months in home confinement, for his role in the abduction of two children from their mother’s New York home in 2018. Continue reading on Times of Israel website

Teen-aged Lev Tahor teacher asks school principal to clarify his intention in requiring educators to beat children daily, in newly leaked audio. New Video to Educate People About Cults and Lev Tahor “I want to know what the principal meant to say when the principal said that ‘petch (a beating) needs to be given daily’?” That’s a question asked by a distraught 17 year-old Lev Tahor teacher trying to do his job correctly. The audio is included in this newly released YouTube video created to help educate the orthodox Jewish community about cults. “We recovered the whatsapp voice-note from a source inside the cult,” said Dovid, a member of Lev Tahor Survivors. “The raw audio is a disclosure of Lev Tahor’s horrific methodology. And it’s just the tip of a toxic iceberg.” "Lev Tahor Survivors investigated the origins of the new audio leaks and have verified the following details," said Dovid. FACTS EXTRACTED FROM AUDIO LEAKED 1. The voice of the young teacher is that of a young man who’s clearly struggling with his directive. (We are withholding his name due to his age.) 2. The teacher's boss, Moshe Yosef Rosner, is the principal of the boys and girls schools within the cult. The audio was sent to him on April 9, 2022 - shortly before the Passover holiday. 3. Sending such audio is a change of norm for the cult. Members of the cult are required to send a detailed handwritten daily report to the leadership. The audio was sent instead of the written report because the teacher was in a different country at the time. The teacher was in a Mexico hideout along with approximately 30 other cult members. The leadership sent selective members to Mexico that were vulnerable to extradition due to family and/or guardians being outside the cult seeking to rescue their loved ones. 4. Moshe Yosef Rosner was in Guatemala at the time the message was sent to him. Ironically, the principal, Moshe Yosef Rosner was arrested a few months later in Mexico - but released due to "lack of evidence." MORE ABOUT THE FILM The film also includes a previous audio leak of a former Lev Tahor member recalling a speech given by Yaakov Nachum Weingarten (currently awaiting trial on kidnapping and abuse related charges) instructing mothers to execute their children if the authorities come to remove them from the community. Yaakov Nachum Weingarten is considered the unofficial Rebbe, spiritual leader, of Lev Tahor. He married Moshe Yosef Rosner’s daughter when she was 15 years-old and he was 20. (His older brother Yoel, also married an underage Rosner girl when he was 26.) The film parallels some characteristics of the infamous cult, People Temple, and their ultimate mass suicide at Jonestown. "The reason we made this film", starts Dovid from Lev Tahor Survivors, "is to define a cult to our Jewish Orthodox community.” "The orthodox and Chasidic community have, unfortunately, become accustomed to being labeled a 'cult' in popular culture and mainstream media. So when they see Lev Tahor being persecuted as a cult in the media, some in our community mistakenly identify with them and come to their aid." “The film was created with a lot of research on cults and includes interviews of Mendy Levy, Rabbi Yaniv Assis, Rabbi Shea Hecht as well as Lev Tahor leaders Uriel Goldman and Shmiel Weingarten.” MORE ABOUT THE PEOPLE INTERVIEWED Rabbi Yaniv Assis Israel “Rabbi Yaniv Assis visited the cult when they lived in Canada,” said Dovid from Lev Tahor Survivors. "He was in touch with Lev Tahor for over a half year before deciding to investigate them up close.” "Rabbi Assis left his family in Israel to live in the Lev Tahor community for a month. When the month was over, he traveled back to Israel. After being apart from the cult for a few days he was able to see clearly that something was wrong. That's when he started his research on cults." “It was like my eyes were covered by an invisible blindfold,” he said, referring to the time he spent living with the community. “It is our hope that the younger generation will have their eyes opened and see that what they consider to be normal is inhumane and against halacha (Jewish law). They need to know that it is possible to live as a good frum yid (religious Jew) in a safe, happy and abuse-free environment.” Lev Tahor Survivors produced a previous film where Yaniv catches up with a survivor, Yoel Levy, that moved to Israel Rabbi Shea Hecht New York, USA “Rabbi Shea Hecht is the chairman of the National Committee for the Furtherance of Jewish Education (NCFJE), a multi-faceted charity that protects, feeds and educates thousands.” “Rabbi Hecht has been a pioneer in penetrating cults to successfully extricate members to return them to their families.” “I often feel regret that I didn’t do enough to stop Lev Tahor,” said Rabbi Hecht. “Years ago, there was a former member that told me that he spent a week with the cult’s founder, Shlomo Helbrans, and he was together with him 24-hours a-day and noticed he never put on Tefilin. That was a big red flag because putting on Tefilin every morning is a basic staple in Orthodox Judaism.” His book, Confessions of a Jewish Cultbuster, is available on Amazon. Mendy Levy Canada “Mendy Levy was born and grew up in the Lev Tahor cult. He escaped the cult in protest of the leadership setting him up with his 12-year-old cousin to be married.” Said Dovid from Lev Tahor Survivors. “He has spent his time on the outside trying to save his brothers and sisters still in the cult by bringing awareness to the plight of the blind followers.” Lev Tahor Survivors produced a film telling Mendy’s story that garnered close to 6 million views on YouTube Uriel Goldman Location Unknown Uriel Goldman has been the steady hand behind Lev Tahor since the beginning. He always figured out a method in their madness - bringing in millions of dollars for the Lev Tahor leadership through many legal and illegal methods. He is currently the highest ranking leader that’s not behind bars. Lev Tahor Survivors produced a film telling exposing Uriel Goldman Shmiel Weingarten New York Federal Prison Shmiel Weingarten joined Lev Tahor as a young teenager together with a few siblings after his father was sentenced to thirty-years behind bars for commiting severe sexual abuse. Shmiel is currently in New York Federal Prison awaiting trial on international kidnapping charges together with his brother. MORE ABOUT LEV TAHOR Over the last 30 years, Lev Tahor has been making headlines amid allegations of child and sexual abuse, abduction, drug use, forced teenage marriages, and more. Former members have shared in the media how every aspect of their lives was controlled by the Jewish cult’s leaders. Lev Tahor started in Israel in the 1980s, then moved to Canada. They have continued to evade authorities by moving across several continents, and following convictions to leading figures for child sexual exploitation and kidnapping, they have split into locations as they try to evade authorities while seeking asylum in Iran. Cult leaders Nachman Helbrans and Mayer Rosner are currently serving a 12-year sentence in prison for his role in the forced marriage of Helbrans’ 13-year-old niece Yante Teller to Rosner’s 19-year-old son Yaakov. In 2018, Teller escaped the cult’s Guatemalan compound with her mother and a younger brother. Helbrans and Rosner then kidnapped the children on a Friday night from a home in upstate New York and spent the next day traveling with them to Mexico. Rabbi Yaniv Assis, who visited and studied the cult, described Lev Tahor as “a mob” in a new short film released by Lev Tahor Survivors, which is dedicated to breaking down the cult, helping those who are looking to leave and holding its leadership accountable for abuse. “It's organized crime, mafia,” said Rabbi Assis. The film delineates the differences between a religious group and a cult. Rabbi Assis is optimistic that revealing the truth about Lev Tahor will counter the cult’s narrative and inspire others to break free of its grasp. “We hope the authorities take action to rescue the children,” added Dovid Lev Tahor Survivors spokesperson. “And the Jewish community applies pressure to members still supporting the cult.”

Two leaders of the extreme ultra-Orthodox Lev Tahor cult, who were arrested in Mexico on suspicion of human trafficking and sex crimes last week, were set free due to “lack of evidence,” their lawyer said. The two suspects have been identified in previous media reports as Menachem Mendel Alter, an Israeli citizen, and Canadian national Yoel Rosner. They were detained following a raid last week on the Lev Tahor compound in southern Mexico and were facing up to 20 years in prison for the alleged crimes. Continue reading at https://www.timesofisrael.com/leaders-of-lev-tahor-cult-released-from-mexico-jail-due-to-lack-of-evidence/

Two leaders of the extreme ultra-Orthodox group Lev Tahor were released from a Mexican prison due to a "lack of evidence,” it was reported on Sunday, following their arrest in a raid several days earlier. Court documents identified the two suspects as Menachem Mendel Alter from Israel and Canadian national Yoel Rosner. The two were detained in southern Mexico on suspicion of alleged human trafficking and sex crimes and faced up to 20 years in prison. Yaret Jimenez, the lawyer for both men, told Mexican news agency Efe that her clients were "100 percent acquitted." Continue reading at https://www.ynetnews.com/article/rk3sulpgi

The Lev Tahor cult members who were arrested last week managed to escape the detention facility they were being held in on Thursday after using extreme violence against enforcement officials. The approximately 20 members of the cult were arrested in Mexico during a raid conducted by Mexican police together with a delegation of Israelis. "They wouldn't let us leave", said David Rosales, a member of the cult, after the escape. "This is a violation of freedom and religious rights." Continue reading at https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-718653

HUIXTLA, Mexico — About 20 members of an extreme ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect overpowered guards and escaped a government shelter in southern Mexico where they had been held since one of their leaders was arrested last Friday on organized crime and human trafficking allegations. Mostly made up of children wearing long, flowing robes, members of the Lev Tahor sect pushed their way out of the complex Wednesday night, climbing over one guard from a private security company who had fallen to the ground. The federal government’s shelter for children and families in Huixtla usually receives migrants detained by immigration officials. They climbed aboard a waiting truck outside and headed toward Mexico’s border with Guatemala. Local police, the National Guard, and Mexico’s immigration agency said they did not pursue them. Continue reading at https://www.timesofisrael.com/lev-tahor-members-break-out-of-mexican-shelter-escape-in-waiting-vehicle/