The Bizarre Story of The ‘Jewish Taliban’
One of the more bizarre stories to have hit the headlines in recent days was the unsuccessful attempt by police to arrest 20 members of a radical Jewish sect in Mexico.
Where to start with a story like this? We could talk about how their jungle base, 11 miles north of Tapachula in Chiapas state, was raided last Friday and two members were detained on suspicion of human trafficking and serious sexual offences.
We could talk about how the raid took place after an investigation and surveillance operation lasting months, carried out by Mexican and Guatemalan authorities with the assistance of a four-man team of former Israeli spooks.
We could talk about how, after about a week in captivity, the sect’s members managed to overpower the guards and vanished into the jungle.
But perhaps it is best to start at the beginning, with an ultra-orthodox Israeli man called Shlomo Helbrans in 1988. Helbrans had not been brought up religious by his secular Kurdish-Israeli parents, but had become observant himself at around the time of his bar mitzvah.
At the age of 26, he set up his own yeshivah, or religious seminary, in Jeruslaem, which focused on outreach to secular Jews like his parents. It was called ‘Lev Tahor’, or ‘Pure Heart’.
The heavily-bearded and black-hatted leader was evidently profoundly charismatic. He started introducing increasingly extreme interpretations of Judaism into his community, and took up a virulently anti-Zionist stance.
Among certain sects of the ultra-orthodox, anti-Zionism is not altogether unusual. According to their Weltanschauung, Jews may not return to the land of Israel until the Messiah comes. For this reason, they oppose the modern Israeli state (though many are content to live there).
I’ve interviewed some of these people in Jerusalem, and their extreme ideology is startling. In the service of their beliefs, they have cosied up to Palestinian leaders, Hamas and even the Tehran regime. Habrand was more extreme still. And that is an understatement.
After relocating his community to the United States, he exaggerated its customs and practices until they became more akin to the Taliban than any known Jewish group (his sect later became dubbed the ‘Jewish Taliban’).
Kosher rules were exaggerated to the extent that most of the sect’s food had to be prepared from scratch at home. A new method of prayer was established, involving the pronunciation of every word very slowly and clearly; as a result, prayer sessions lasted twice as long as normal ultra-orthodox services (which themselves can last several hours).
Before long, women and girls were being forced to wear burkha-like robes from the age of three. Men also started wearing Muslim-style brown robes and hoods over large black, brimless hats.
Transgressions were met with severe punishments, including beatings; one woman who had fled the cult reported being hit with a belt and a coat hanger.
Sexual abuse was rife. Under-age girls were married off to older men. One pregnant woman, who escaped two years after she wedded a 30-year-old man at the age of 15, said she had been both beaten by her brother and sexually abused by her father.
In 1994, Helbrans himself was convicted of kidnap after luring a 13-year-old boy to join his cult against the wishes of his parents. He served two years in prison and was then deported back to Israel; a few years later he relocated to Canada, successfully gaining refugee status on the basis of supposed religious persecution.
Helbrans’ charisma was accompanied by a sinister ability to control the people under his charge, both psychologically – he was known for administering various types of medicine and herbal remedies, thought to be drugs – and by ordering physical punishments.
He drowned in 2017 while taking part in ritual immersion in a river in Mexico, leaving his son, Nachman Helbrans, to assume leadership of the cult, which went from strength to strength.
One of the most fascinating aspects to the Lev Tahor sect has been its disregard for national boundaries. Although numbering fewer than 350 adherents, it has had a presence in Israel, the United States, Canada, Guatemala, Mexico, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Romania, North Macedonia and elsewhere.
This appears to be because the group settles in one location and then moves on elsewhere when the local authorities get wind of their activities.
In 2013, Canadian social workers discovered five Lev Tahor children sleeping in one dirty room on urine-soaked mattresses, with fungal infections on their feet. Within months, 15 members of the group moved on to Guatemala, with nine being apprehended in Trinidad and Tobago.
In their efforts to avoid scrutiny, the group’s leaders often head to the most obscure places. In 2014, they arrived at the small Guatemalan tourist town of San Juan La Laguna. Within a few months, they ran into trouble with the indigenous Tz’utujil community, which banded together to throw them out.
Wherever Lev Tahor pitches up, arrests and child protection enforcement follows, accompanied by reports of depraved practices. In 2018, Nachman Helbrans and a fellow cultist were found guilty of kidnapping two of Shlomo Helbrans’ grandchildren after their mother – who had tried to stop her 13-year-old daughter being married to an older man – had fled.
In March, the two men were convicted of child sexual exploitation and kidnapping and sentenced to 12 years in prison.
And in July, two apparent members were photographed reportedly fundraising in London, wearing their distinctive brown robes and hoods, together with oversized black skullcaps and ringlets.
A warning was sent out inside the Jewish community. Which brings us to the raid in Mexico. It began with a former member of the group, Yisrael Amir, who had escaped the cult’s base in Guatemala in 2020, leaving his one-year-old son behind.
In an effort to win back his child, he appealed to a former member of Israel’s Shin Bet, the equivalent of Britain’s MI5. A rescue operation was mounted, including four former Israeli spies – both from the Shin Bet and the Mossad – and elite police units.
The Lev Tahor community, which had been under intense investigation for kidnap in Guatemala, with nine members being charged and four so far convicted, had crossed illegally into Mexico in January, hiding out in the jungle. After months of surveillance, the raid was carried out. Yisrael Amir was reunited with his son, and both were flown back to Israel.
The cult members were held in the small town of Huixtla, southern Mexico. Until last Wednesday, that is, when they managed to get past the guards and stream out of the compound. Their whereabouts are now unknown.
What to make of all this? Happily, Jewish extremism – particularly of this sort – is relatively rare. There is no real Jewish equivalent of the Sharia, and no serious equivalent of Al Qaeda, Isis, the Taliban or the Iranian regime.
But every religion attracts its oddballs, lunatics and psychopaths. I’m not observant myself, but it feels to me as if the first two of the ten commandments – you shall have no gods other than me and you shall worship no idols – warn of the dangers of following any charismatic leader, whatever tradition they espouse. Thankfully, the authorities seem to be finally cracking down on this one.