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Authorities Wage War Against Child Sex Cult Plaguing Central America

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Despite liberal protestations, the evidence that the negligent immigration policy of the Biden administration has created a legitimate national security threat has become irrefutable. From criminal migrants murdering US citizens to an increase in narcotics trafficking fueling its own fentanyl-driven pandemic of overdose deaths, the imperative that the Trump administration has taken to follow through on its promise to secure the southern border is wholly merited. During the 2024 election cycle, Trump deconstructed the argument of supporters of a globalist open border policy by highlighting the innumerable problems it created.

Of those issues, drawing attentions to the horrors of human trafficking became crucial to illustrating the need for a completely revamped immigration policy. Trump's newly-appointed border tsar, Tom Homan, dispelled the criticisms of the mass deportations led by ICE with his no-nonsense approach by tearing apart the liberal narrative that has aimed to manipulate public perception of the operation by conflating it with comparisons to fascist purges like those led by the Third Reich. Homan has confronted legacy media that has convened once again to malign Trump's agenda with harsh truths about the reality of the chaos left in the wake of Biden's open border policy. His attention to the hundreds of thousands of children who have been victimized by human trafficking has conveyed the scale of its devastation and the given a face to the victims of its lethal consequences.

Homan's message amplifies that important focus on the human trafficking that has been emboldened by a failed immigration policy in the United States at its border with Mexico that was ignored for the last 4 years. While Mexican drug cartels and other organized crime syndicates have bore the brunt of the guilt led by this campaign against human trafficking, a much more obscure organization demonstrates how rampant those crimes have become across Central America. Lev Tahor, a fanatical anti-Zionist Hasidic Jewish cult, has been the subject of similar efforts to bring human traffickers to justice. Central American governments in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico have led a crackdown against the cult which has operated for decades across North America.

Members of Lev Tahor have been arrested and/or convicted on child sex abuse and human trafficking charges in the United States, Canada, and countries across Central America since fleeing Israel in the early 1990's shortly after its founding. Their ability to continually operate across North America highlights the importance of taking on human traffickers as part of comprehensive border security and criminal justice programs that the absence of which has allowed them to flourish.

Despite the controversy surrounding Lev Tahor and the court cases brought against its members, the esoteric nature of the cult has largely kept it hidden beneath the shadows of obscurity. It advantageously operated under that veil of virtual anonymity until late 2024 when Guatemalan authorities rescued 160 children from the cult following a raid of one of its compounds just southeast of Guatemala City, thrusting the cult into the global spotlight. The raid was conducted as part of an investigation into child sex abuse committed by the cult.

After the children were taken into protective custody, nearly 100 members of Lev Tahor broke into the facilities where they were being kept to abduct them. Several of the children were kidnapped by the cult members before being recovered by police in the following days. Eventually, all of the children were brought back into protective custody.

As part of the ongoing investigation, other members of Lev Tahor were also taken into police custody in an effort to determine the scale of abuse the children were subjected to. The cult members brought into custody have been defiant, refusing to cooperate with authorities during the course of the investigation. Authorities have been attempting to gather DNA samples from the cult members in custody to determine the parentage of the children in protective custody in order to further investigate their abuse in lieu of any cooperation from their parents.  “It is not yet possible to establish who their biological parents are and they do not have identification documents,” a statement from investigators said. “DNA tests will be carried out to determine who their parents are and subsequently obtain statements from them.” When those tests were attempted, members of the cult attacked investigators, breaking furniture and windows that led to injuries being sustained from the broken glass.

Uriel Goldman, one of the local leaders of Lev Tahor in Guatemala who was instrumental to the groups founding, vociferously denied the charges levied against the cult. Goldman stated that “the prosecution asked the court for five days to get more evidence, and already a month has passed and they have nothing against me or any of us." Goldman also boldly declared that “If one of the children taken from us dies, the Guatemalan government will fall."

The chaos that followed the December raid has served as a catalyst for more widespread action taken against Lev Tahor across Central America. One month after the raid, INTERPOL arrested Lev Tahor member Yoel Alter in connection to crimes he allegedly committed as the leader another compound run by the cult after Mexican authorities issued a formal request for his extradition on January 22nd. His arrest was made in relation to accusations of child sex abuse that allegedly took place at a Lev Tahor community that he led in Tapachula, Mexico. He is set to be extradited back to Mexico in order to face charges.

Alter's arrest took place less than 2 weeks after fellow Lev Tahor community leader Rabbi Eliezer Rompler was arrested in neighboring El Savador. Rompler fled to El Salvador from Guatemala following the December raid after fleeing to El Salvador from Israel to begin with. Rompler was indicted in Israel for physically abusing children as young as 9 years old while serving as the principal of a Lev Tahor school in Canada before escaping to Central America to find refuge among other members of the cult. The arrest that led to the indictment took place when he returned to Israel in 2020. Rompler was on house arrest while awaiting trial to be extradited to Canada to face justice but was able to flee Israel using a fake passport before proceedings could begin. He was apprehended attempting to enter El Salvador from Guatemala and now awaits extradition back to Israel to face the charges he was indicted on in 2020.

The modus operandi of Alter, Eliezer, and other members of Lev Tahor follows a template etched in stone decades ago by the cult's founder, Rabbi Shlomo Erez Helbrans. The patriarch of Lev Tahor laid a foundation that his followers would build upon taking the cult into new heights of ignominy. Despite the sordid affairs Lev Tahor has constantly been involved in since its inception the cult has continued to operate, surviving changes in leadership even after its highest ranking members have been imprisoned for their crimes against children.

The cult was founded in 1988 by Helbrans, a native of Jerusalem and an acolyte of the Arachim movement which sought to reinvigorate Judaism across the increasing secularized landscape of Jewish culture. To better advocate for the return of religious studies among the secular Jews of Israel, Helbrans started his own yeshiva which he named Lev Tahor, meaning 'pure heart' in Hebrew. Its name would prove to be paradoxical, as the reputation that Lev Tahor would earn in the nascent days would prove to be diametrically opposed to the ideas of empathy and compassion that it espoused.

In Israel, the extreme orthodox views of Lev Tahor put it at odds with mainstream denominations of Judaism. Helbrans was a staunch anti-Zionist, a sentiment shared by many Hasidim based on their interpretation of the Tanakh. Those extreme views against the Zionist establishment served as the impetus for Helbrans to leave Israel and move to New York City in 1990 as he looked to escape what he described as persecution for his beliefs.

After Helbrans left Israel for New York, the controversy that prompted that move would follow him but for reasons completely unrelated to politics. Just 6 years after the founding of Lev Tahor, Helbrans was implicated in the disappearance of a 13-year-old boy named Shai Fhima Reuvan from a secular Jewish household who was brought to Lev Tahor to study in preparation for his bar mitzvah. Helbrans was arrested after the boys mother reported her child missing but was released soon thereafter due to fears the district attorney overseeing the case had about the political reverberations the trial would have among the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of New York City on the eve of forthcoming elections. Despite not being charged initially, the rabbi would eventually be arrested over Reuvan's kidnapping 2 years later after being recorded by wire speaking with the boy's father who was cooperating with the FBI unbeknownst to Helbrans.

While the victim argued that Helbrans had not abducted him and that he willingly ran away from home on his own accord, prosecutors painted a much different portrayal of the events that led to Reuvans disappearance. They argued that the boy was brainwashed by the rabbi and that his testimony about how he willfully ran away from home was the byproduct of being conditioned into believing the extreme religious views that Helbrans created Lev Tahor to preach. The prosecution's argument proved to be successful as Helbrans was found guilty of kidnapping charges.

Justice Thaddeus E. Owens, who presided over the trial, instructed its jury that under New York law a person could be convicted of kidnapping if they aided a minor under 16 from leaving home without their parents' consent. With that understanding of the statute in question at the trial, the jury returned a guilty verdict. Rabbi Helbrans was subsequently sentenced to between 4 and 12 years for the kidnapping, half of the maximum sentence of between 8 to 25 years. His wife, who was tried alongside Helbrans, was acquitted of kidnapping charges but convicted of criminal conspiracy, although her conviction would be dismissed by Judge Owens. Despite the convictions, Helbrans' attorneys were able to have his sentence shortened to between 2 to 6 years in prison on appeal. The rabbi would serve 2 years in state prison before being deported back to Israel following his release.

Once he returned to Israel, Helbrans was thrust back into the crucible that he fled America from. Upon his return, he faced similar charges relating to accusations made by families whose relatives joined Lev Tahor. The cult's outspoken anti-Zionist philosophy led to political persecution that led to Helbrans' seeking refuge in another country from Israel yet again. Deported from the United States, he looked elsewhere in North America. He was eventually granted refugee status in Canada where he brought members of Lev Tahor to with him. Helbrans' application for a refugee visa was aided by the testimony of the aforementioned Uriel Goldman, who told Canadian immigration officials that he had been tasked with spying on Helbrans as an intelligence officer within the IDF. Goldman has since denied this claim but given the Israeli government's opposition to the anti-Zionist platform of Lev Tahor, questions still remain about his connections to Halbrens and the motives he had to advocate on behalf of him.

By the time Helbrans had found refuge in Canada, the extreme tenets that he founded Lev Tahor upon came to light, giving credence to the accusations that it was a cult. Helbrans advocated for child marriage on the basis of Jewish scripture. The ideology behind Lev Tahor led to authorities in Quebec bringing child welfare charges against members of the cult for non-compliance of homeschooling standards. After an arduous legal battle in which the children were examined for signs of physical and psychological abuse, their parents and other members of Lev Tahor fled Canada to Guatemala in 2014 before the investigation could reach a conclusion.

Lev Tahor's Canadian exodus to Central America was the final chapter in the saga of Shlomo Helbrans' life. In 2017, the rabbi died from drowning in a river in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Accounts of his death differ, shrouding his demise in mystery. Some believe Helbrans drowned by performing ritual immersion in the river while others believe he committed suicide to escape yet another arrest after fleeing Guatemala to Mexico. In the wake of his death, his son Nachman Helbrans succeeded him as the head of Lev Tahor and somehow ushered an era of more extreme leadership over the cult.

Nachman Helbrans would follow in the footsteps of his father down a path of sin and debauchery. Like his father, Nachman would inevitably find himself on trial in New York City. Instead of state charges, he would be charged by federal prosecutors in the Southern District Of New York on 6 charges including child sex exploitation and kidnapping. Helbrans and his co-defendant and fellow Lev Tahor member Mayer Rosner were charged for the kidnapping of 2 siblings from their New York homes in 2018. One of the children was a niece of Helbrans, who was the victim of a plan concocted by the Lev Tahor leader to facilitate a child marriage. Helbrans had forced his 13-year old niece marry a 19-year old member of his cult while in Guatemala.

The child marriage that Helbrans forced his niece into was the final straw in a prolonged  cycle of abuse that served as the impetus for the girl's mother, Helbran's own sister, to flee from Guatemala to upstate New York his her daughter and son. After they fled, Helbrans and Rosner devised a plan to kidnap the girl to return her to the cult. In December of 2018, the two kidnapped Helbran's niece and nephew and smuggled the siblings across the US border with Mexico to reunite the 14-year old girl with her 20 year-old "husband."

Helbrans and Mayer were arrested for the kidnapping after a three-week search recovered the kidnapped siblings in Mexico. Despite Helbrans' arrest, members of Lev Tahor attempted to kidnap the children on two consecutive occasions in 2019 and 2021, leading to charges being brought against several other members of the Jewish cult.

Despite the brazen guilt, Helbrans showed no remorse for his crimes, echoing his fathers' accusations of the charges being brought against him as being part of an antisemitic conspiracy as he read from a copy of the Talmud to draw comparisons of his prosecution with the persecution Jews were subjected to by the Roman Empire. Helbrans also evoked the Holocaust during his sentencing hearing. His protestations proved to be futile as he and Rosner were sentenced to 12 years in prison after being found guilty of every charge they faced.

During the trial, prosecutors detailed how the cult leader “required young brides to have sex with their husbands, to tell people outside Lev Tahor that they were not married, to pretend to be older, and to deliver babies inside their homes instead of at a hospital, to conceal the mothers’ young ages from the public." Another 3 members of Lev Tahor involved in the 2018 kidnapping, brothers Yoil Weingarten, Yakov Weingarten and Shmiel Weingarten, also received 12-year sentences 2 years after Helbrans and Rosner's 2022 conviction.

Presently, Lev Tahor has approximately 300 members comprised of just 50 different families across the world. As concerted efforts to investigate its members for allegations of child sex abuse and other crimes have increased, its members have sought refuge in places like Iran. The Iranian government granted an asylum request from its members in 2018, in part due to their anti-Zionist beliefs in exchange for swaring allegiance to Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. However, those members were apprehended by Iraqi officials en route to Iran before being deported to Turkey.

Once in Turkey, dozens of the members left to wander perilously across the Balkans in an effort to find a refuge that seems as if it will never come. Unlike in its early days, the group now is infamous for the crimes its members have been found guilty of. That infamy makes settling surreptitiously like it has in Central America and ostensible impossibility as its members have been shunned across Europe. “The media portrayed them as child kidnappers, so people got scared in the neighborhood. But ultimately they understood they are a closed community, who don’t interact with the locals,” according to Igor Kozemjakin, the leader of the sole synagogue in Sarejevo after Lev Tahor members briefly stayed in Bosnia and Herzegovina as their visa's granted them a 90-day stay by virtue of being citizens of the United States. After that 3-month period, the cult members left to Montenegro.

Although its members have effectively been exiled from almost everywhere they have sought refuge, the cult still maintains a presence in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Guatemala despite its reputation. Its ability to build a horrific legacy of child sex abuse conveys the scale of human trafficking that has been able to be perpetrated when governments turn a blind eye to it or are outright are complicit in it themselves. The dire need for criminal justice reform to take a zero-tolerance approach against these crimes leaves countless lives hanging in the balance, highlighting just how high the stakes are when it comes to confronting some of the most grievous crimes imaginable.

via January 28th 2025