Ontario, Canada – New Documentary Raises Skepticism About Lev Tahor And Its Leader Rabbi Helbrans; Cult, Or Not?

Ontario, Canada – A new documentary on the ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect Lev Tahor produced by the Canadian investigative program,The Fifth Estate, raises skepticism about the legal “refugee” status of its spiritual leader, Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, while presenting on-camera testimony from at least one former member who insists the sect is, in fact, a cult, and under the complete control of Helbrans.

In the CBC.ca feature video report, a Fifth Estate team was allowed inside Lev Tahor, where, early in its investigation, it captures a raid on the compound by police armed with search warrants.

A Lev Tahor leader, Uriel Goldman, is clearly both rattled and agitated as he confronts the police before quickly instructing a teenaged boy in Yiddish to “Go and close everything in the office. They could be coming right now. All the computers, please,,,Now! Everything away. Simply close everything!”

“It’s a sweet revenge from Quebec. This is our punishment. We left Quebec, we must receive a punishment,” Goldman screams at a police officer. “Shame on you for involving children!”

When asked by Lev Tahor’s attorney what that particular day’s warrants are seeking, an unidentified officer tells them, “Computers and hardware. We are conducting and investigation.”

Much like previous reports from inside Lev Tahor, The Fifth Estate team is treated to school lessons for girls taught in English, playtime among children using “brand new” toys, and lavish meals aimed at dispelling accusations that children are neglected and sometimes underfed.

The 7-minute mark features the extraordinary efforts by a Tel Aviv man named Oded , who is desperately trying to extract his sister Sima and her eight children from Lev Tahor because he believes it is a cult.

Oded shares photos of his sister in her teens, saying she was “completely secular, and had a nice life here. I used to take her out dancing.”

But Oded says that all changed after she went to New York in her teens.

“Two years after she had gone to New York, she sent a photo of a long-bearded person, and told us this is her future husband. We were quite surprised,” Oded says.

Oded says he spent years believing that his sister was happy, until 2011 when he visited Lev Tahor in Quebec.

“I kind of felt that something is not right about her situation,” Oded says, “We had some arguments. One of her sons died in 2009, and she never visited the grave. She insisted that it is against the rabbi’s orders.”

Through his own investigation, Oded learned that for three years his sister’s children were placed with other Lev Tahor families, and instructed that Sima not be allowed to see them.

“Former members told me that people are being punished, they are fasting, not eating for three days a week. Other punishments, like not allowing people to sleep at night…they’re like zombies…it is a cult, one-hundred percent cult. A very cruel, and most destructive cult,” Oded says.

Repeated requests by Fifth Estate team members to meet with Sima, were rejected, saying Sima did not want to meet with them.

A former member named Adam, 28, provides and audio account of his two-year experience inside Lev Tahor after marrying the daughter of Uriel Goldman, saying that he eventually wound up testifying before a Quebec youth service board on the abuse inside the sect.

“As I stayed in the community,” Adam says, “I stared having more and more doubt about the righteousness of what was going on. The rabbi encouraged everybody to spy on each other, both children and the parents and friends.”

Adam, whose job it was to help out in the school, says he was instructed to use physical abuse to keep children in line.

“One advise that I got was that whenever a boy would not do as he was supposed to, I should hit him with a wire hanger. Later I discovered that hitting was a regular punishment within the community.”

Adam confirms for Fifth Estate, that marriages are both arranged and conducted using girls under the legal age, saying, “My wife 15, almost 16.”

Adam was also instrumental in providing computer files after going to investigators, revealing marriage certificates and a list of names involved in underage marriages inside Lev Tahor.

Perhaps most importantly, Adam reveals what happens when a member considers leaving Lev Tahor.

Adam says when sect leaders found out he and his wife were considering leaving, he was immediately ordered to divorce his wife and sign an admission that he was suffering from serious mental illness.

“Also I had to subject myself to treatment for what they called “borderline personality disorder,” which Adam says is commonplace within the community and subject to cures prescribed only by Rabbi Helbrans, often including anti-psychotic medications.

After finally leaving in 2011, Adam says he and his wife went straight to the police.

“I have a belief that I am obligated to help Jewish children and Jews that are in trouble,” says Adam. “And I believe that the conditions that the people are living under in the community are damaging to them.”

Opening the profile on Rabbi Helbrans, a top aide waxes about the rabbi’s “magnetic” aura,

“He starts talking to you and you are attracted to him like a magnet. I forgot where I was,” says Israel Elter, one of Helbrans’ first followers, and now a top assistant in Lev Tahor. “He’s very persuasive. He manages to present himself as a great man, a man who can read through other people and read their thoughts. He acts as if he’s a very pious man towards the rest of reality, but as I later realized, he’s the complete opposite.”

Professor Menachem Friedman, Israel’s top scholar on “extreme” Jewish groups, takes offense to Elter’s claims about Helbrans, saying that Helbrans’ boasts of “tens of thousands” of followers worldwide are fraudulent.

“That’s pure falsehood,” Friedman says laughing, “he has very very few followers. He’s not even a spiritual leader. He is not a great scholar, he attracts people on th margins because of his extreme ideas.”

On his time in Borough Park in Brooklyn, Helbran’s 1996 kidnapping case involving the teenaged Israeli immigrant Shai Fima is spotlighted, as are recent claims by Fima, now 24, that Helbrans and Lev Tahor paid him $5,000 to testify on Helbrans’ behalf during his refugee-status application hearing in Quebec in 2003.

Also under scrutiny in the Helbrans’ bid for refugee-status is testimony by Uriel Goldman, who told the Immigration and Refugee Board that as a military intelligence officer for Israel’s IDF, he was ordered to infiltrate Lev Tahor, lending credibility to Helbrans’ claims that he was being persecuted by the Israeli government.

When confronted with his testimony by the Fifth Estate, who informs him that they have been in contact with the IDF and that the IDF can find no record of his service, Goldman says, “I understand there’s no record, but I don’t want, whatever, but say no record, it’s most . . . for you as a journalist, it’s like someone saying ‘no comment. I understand why they say that. This was not a normal operation.”

Shai Fima, who declined to be on camera, did speak with Fifth Estate, telling them that to finally set the record straight, he wants everyone to know that Helbrans did, in fact, kidnap him, and that there is no doubt about it.

Another young man, Mende Markus, who does appear on camera, says that after being sent to live at Lev Tahor at age 11, he knows first hand how the sect operates.

“The way they make you listen is by slapping you or pinching you. Some extreme religious people will call that discipline, but it’s not discipline, it’s physical abuse,” says Markus.

Markus also notes that the competition to impress Helbrans’ among members is intense, saying, “these people there will do anything and everything for him. He [Helbrans] lives a beautiful life. He has beautiful chairs, beautiful silverware, all kinds of very fancy rabbi stuff, and the people in his community have nothing.”

Markus, who spent a lot of time with Helbrans, says, “He told me a lot I’m special, I’m holy, I’m smart and all that, but he uses those lines for everyone to get them to listen.”

Markus agrees with the term “brainwashing” when it comes to Helbrans’ control over Lev Tahor, saying, “He couldn’t care less about any of the God-stuff. It’s a tool for him to get people to follow him. And once they follow him the God part falls away, and he has pure mind control over the people.”

When he finally sits down with Fifth Estate, Rabbi Helbrans again denies all allegations, but does make some startling revelations.

When asked about the charges of physical abuse on the children, Helbrans says, “This is the truth, to say that no child ever receives a slap is false, but what I came to declare very strongly is that physical punishment of children we use is a lot less in our community than in the Western society.

When asked how many people he has diagnosed with “borderline personality disorder,” Helbrans says, “Only two, two peoples. But you see I did not diagnose them, but told them that they needed to go see a real doctor.”

When pressed about the use prescription psychiatric medication to control members’ minds, Helbrans immediately dispatches an aide to his “sleep room,” where the aide fetches and returns with a tray holding multiple bottles, which Helbrans declares ‘vitamins.’

“Not everybody taking only vitamins,” Helbrans explains, “when somebody suffering from nerves problem, to go to sleep or sometimes worse, so specially classic vitamin mix I subscribe to take, but if someone has to take medical treatment, I am very extreme about it if you have to take it.”

Finally, when asked about marrying underaged girls, Helbrans at first denies, but does admit that he has dispatched underaged girls to marry in U.S. states like Missouri where the age is 15.

“It’s happened,” Helbrans explains, “but we never marry children against the law. I marriage, maybe three stories, three stories, which families were married in America by judge, and afterwards they came back asking me to do the ceremony also.”

When asked if he sent the couples to America to marry, Helbrans says, “First off, people in my community are not puppets,” but when pressed to confront the moral implications of marrying underage girls, Helbrans becomes clearly agitated, spearing his finger repeatedly at his interviewer while pronouncing, “No, no, no…I will not accept this because you are wrong!”