I ran for my life through Guatemala jungle to escape extremist Jewish cult where I was starved and witnessed horrific child abuse… now I’m fighting for my siblings to come home
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Yisrael Amir was only 14-years-old when he was snatched from Israel to Guatemala by his father using forged passports to live among an extremist Jewish cult.
The teenager and his five siblings were promised that their new life in Central America would be idyllic – that they would live in a big house in a good neighbourhood, surrounded by beautiful lakes.
But Yisrael soon found out that he had entered a psychological prison – where life would become about pleasing the tyrannical leader of a fundamentalist sect whose members have now been convicted of crimes against children.
Lev Tahor, Hebrew for ‘pure heart’, was founded in 1988 by Shlomo Helbrans in Israel, but the globetrotting group has slipped between the borders of the Jewish state, New York, Guatemala and Mexico to escape the authorities.
Yisrael escaped its grips in 2019, after five years of being subjected to horrors – including witnessing child abuse, being made to marry at 16, experiencing starvation and being coerced into taking psychiatric drugs.
Since then, many of its leaders have been arrested, and in a mission in December Guatemalan authorities finally managed to save some 160 children and 40 women from the sect during a raid on its remote farm.
Three of Yisrael’s siblings were rescued in the mission, and one – his brother – was returned to Israel in February. Now, at 25-years-old, he’s in the midst of a legal process to return the two others home, currently with Guatemalan authorities. The rest of Yisrael’s siblings are still members of the cult.
And even though the sect has been largely disbanded, there are still fears some of its dangerous leaders remain at large – ready to reignite Lev Tahor.
‘There are still children at risk,’ Yisrael told the Daily Mail. ‘And there are a few crazy leaders that are still not in jail and the real risk is that they will try and take the children and re-build Lev Tahor again in a new place.’
Yisrael isn’t the only one waiting for the return of loved ones from Guatemala, but the clock is ticking.
Even after the children were seized by the Guatemalan officials, some 100 Lev Tahor members tried to recapture the minors – breaking into the shelter and kidnapping the children before being hunted down again.
During the historic raid on their remote farm, surrounded by walls and a padlocked gate in the Santa Rosa department, it is understood that the skeleton of a minor was found.
The children were taken into emergency care due to suspicion of human trafficking crimes ‘in the form of forced pregnancy, mistreatment of minors and rape’, the prosecutor’s office said.
Dubbed the ‘Jewish Taliban’ for the dress code that requires girls as young as three to wear head-to-toe cloaks, the sect has been renounced by Jewish groups as fundamentalist – with the community in Guatemala disowning the group.
Lev Tahor’s adherents practise an ultra-Orthodox and militant form of Judaism, where members reject what is seen as the corrupting influence of modernity – including traditional medicine, education and technology.
But when Yisrael first arrived in South America as a young teenager, he thought he was entering a better life, even ‘heaven’.
The expectation was soon crushed when he was forcefully separated from his five siblings and parents, and given a new ‘cult family’.
On his first morning, he woke up in his dormitory – in the machine room of a Guatemalan tower block – and walked around, only to hear strange noises from the kindergarten room.
Peering through a hole in the door, he saw cult leaders hitting children as young as two and three. ‘There was blood, it was very extreme.’
He was shocked, felt like crying, and thought he might tell someone – but he soon got used to witnessing abuse on a daily basis.
‘The leaders used to abuse the young children to make them used to it, to make them understand that they are nothing, that they aren’t worth anything and they need to do everything that they told them to do,’ he said.
Yisrael said the leaders, including Helbrans, would routinely rape the young boys. His friends never disclosed the abuse at the time, but he’s since discussed with other cult survivors the horrors many kept secret.
It was during his time as secretary to one of the leaders when he witnessed the suspicious behaviour.
Content retrieved from: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14999521/I-ran-life-Guatemala-jungle-escape-extremist-Jewish-cult-starved-child-abuse-siblings-home.html.
