In 2014, Lev Tahor arrived in Guatemala, the latest stop in a 20-year international journey. The ultra-conservative Jewish sect cries that it is escaping religious persecution. But to those left behind — in Israel, New York, and Canada — the group is a dangerous cult ducking accusations of brainwashing, abuse, and child marriage.
By MAYA KROTH Illustration by PAUL RYDING
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Lev Tahor’s members, Goldman says in accented English, pray to HaShem (a Hebrew name for God) that Guatemala will be their final stop. He vehemently denies accusations of wrongdoing. “We don’t force anybody” to marry, he says. “Abusing people?... Tell me one name, let’s go to the family, let’s see!”
With its competing claims of prejudice and criminality, the story of Lev Tahor reveals how the complexities of religious freedom can make it tricky to distinguish between radical devotion and dangerous extremism. Given religion’s important role in societies, “there’s a tendency in Western culture to overly defer to religious entities … and to assume that nothing will go wrong,” says Marci Hamilton, a Yeshiva University law professor who has followed Lev Tahor’s trajectory.
However, the case also shows that even when the line between faith and transgression is clear, red tape can make it difficult — even impossible — for legal systems to protect people. “There’s no religious defense of violence,” Hamilton says. “The problem is that you have social, cultural, political, and constitutional factors that weigh in.”
“‘Extreme’ is too mild of a word” for Lev Tahor, she adds. “They are their own universe.” _________
Orthodox Judaism, which contains many subsects, is characterized by a strict adherence to guiding religious texts. Yet even within those devout strictures, Lev Tahor’s austere brand of faith is at the very conservative end of the spectrum, combining an obsession with spiritual purity with a virulent — and, in Judaism, rare — opposition to Israel.
Helbrans explained the origins of the group to a reporter who writes for Haaretz, Shay Fogelman, in a 2012 interview. Born to secular parents in Jerusalem in 1962, Helbrans said he was attracted to religion from an early age: As a young man, he ran a yeshiva and was mentored by Eliezer Shlomo Schick, a rabbi and prolific religious writer who was once investigated for officiating underage marriages. (Schick died in early 2015.) Helbrans founded the Lev Tahor yeshiva in the mid-1980s, espousing a belief that modernity corrupts the spirit. He designed strict rules, many of which hold fast today. Members must engage in several hours of intense prayer each day. Boys study the Torah, while girls’ education is limited. Dietary restrictions prohibit the consumption of chickens and their eggs (said to be genetically modified and therefore not kosher), leafy green vegetables (which might be contaminated by bugs), and milk from any cow that followers have not milked themselves. Speaking Hebrew, the Zionists’ tongue, is often eschewed in favor of Yiddish.
-- Helbrans bragged that he once persuaded a secular Israeli soldier to return to religion after meeting the man at a bus stop. “Every time I got on a bus, I looked for a ‘victim.’” --
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