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.

‘He had two rooms, one inside the other. Every night, he’d call another boy, nine or 10 years old. He spent maybe one hour with him inside his room. And then he told them: “You need to go to mikveh [a Jewish ritual bath].”’

The male cultists aren’t the only abusive figures in the community. 

In one horrific document issued by a cult leader, seen by the Daily Mail, Lev Tahor mothers are ordered to kill their children – apparently with poison – before killing themselves, should hostile authorities from Israel, the U.S. or Guatemala try to take them away.

The death should not be ‘done in a cruel manner’, a translation from Hebrew says, and women must be sure to say a short confession before the act: ‘May it be my will that my death and the death of my children be an atonement for all my sins.’ 

The mothers are prohibited from uttering ‘even half a word’ to the minors about the ritual – ‘so as not to frighten them or cause them fear’. Instead, the women should administer the poison ‘without explaining to them what it is’. 

The abuse wasn’t only physical, but mental too – akin to a form of ‘brainwashing’, Yisrael said.

‘We were not free to do the things that we wanted to do – it’s a prison.

‘We had to fill a document about what we did every single minute of the day – from the second we woke up until we went to sleep.

‘We had to describe to the leader what was going on inside: what we were thinking about, the things that we did – the bad and the good – our thoughts. And then he used to call on everybody to investigate them, asking: “Why did you do that?”’ 

The children would be forced to start their days early – at 3 am every morning – and spend the full day in synagogue, praying in the morning and the afternoon before going to sleep at 11 pm.

‘In between, we listened to lectures from the leader. We used to study his books only. And for one hour in the morning, everyone would close their eyes and just think about the leader and how we can be closer to him.’

The leaders not only controlled how the children spent their time, but what they ate.

Yisrael remembers being banned from consuming meat, bread or eggs. They could only eat fruit and vegetables and matzot – a kind of unleavened flatbread – as the leaders claimed anything else was unkosher (prohibited by Jewish dietary laws).

When asked if children were starving, Yisrael said: ‘Absolutely.’

Since being freed, he’s gone from 45 kilograms to 65 kilograms.

‘People were very weak. Children stayed very small and there were a lot of health problems,’ he said.

To make matters worse, the children weren’t allowed to be vaccinated or go to hospital to see doctors.

Instead, the leaders would provide ‘psychiatric pills’, which made Yisrael drowsy and dizzy, unable to leave bed. A leader convinced him he had ‘problems’ because he asked too many questions – and administered the drugs as a ‘cure’. 

When he was just 16 years old, Yisrael was forced to marry his wife – also a teenager – despite the fact that they had never spoken because girls and boys were strictly separated. Refusing wasn’t an option.

‘There is no such thing as saying no to something that Shlomo Helbrans says,’ he said. A week after the order to marry, he and his wife were exchanging vows.

At the ceremony, standing under the chupah – the traditional Jewish wedding canopy – Yisrael knew enough was enough.

‘I thought to myself: “How can I escape from here?” I started to understand and to plan and to realise that I don’t want to live here.’

One of his sisters, who was routinely physically beaten by her ‘cult family’, was forced to marry a 19 year old when she was only 13. ‘She didn’t want to, and she used to cry and bite her finger nails,’ Yisrael said.

She started confiding in the other girls about how she was dreading the wedding – and so the leader punished her by forbidding her to speak for one year, forcing her to communicate with her hands.

Such elaborate punishments were commonplace in the cult. In a separate incident, another child was reportedly locked up in isolation for a year, fed only bread and water. 

As Yisrael was suffering in the grips of Lev Tahor, his aunt, Orit Cohen, was busy fighting for his freedom in Israel.

The 55-year old mother had been following the development of the cult since her brother became involved with Lev Tahor – before he managed to whisk away his six children to the jungle in Guatemala.

As soon as she discovered her brother’s plans to send the children to live with Helbrans – a rabbi who had already been accused of beating children – she ‘started the war’ against the cult, researching its methods, speaking to journalists, and campaigning for its disbandment worldwide. 

In 2017, she gathered enough evidence to convince an Israeli judge to officially deem the sect a ‘dangerous cult that severely damages the physical and emotional well-being of the children’, gaining custody of her nieces and nephews.

At first, people in the Israeli establishment thought she was ‘crazy’ for raising alarm bells about Lev Tahor. ‘Nobody listened to me – not in the Knesset [the Israeli parliament], not in the courts, nobody believed me.’ 

But she didn’t give up on saving her family, and has spent more than $250,000 travelling back and forth to Guatemala on multiple occasions on her mission to free her family. 

Back in 2011, she stopped her brother from snatching the children from Israel to Canada, and in 2021 she prevented 150 members of the cult from escaping from Guatemala to Iran – alerting the authorities at the right time.

When her nieces and nephews were abducted, she knew she had no way of communicating with them. Nevertheless, she wrote countless posts about the cult on her Facebook, in the hopes that ‘maybe, someday, they will see it’. 

Back in South America, Yisrael’s desire to leave Lev Tahor only grew when he had his son, Nevo, two years after he was married.

He was separated from his child most of the time, but managed to take him away at weekends.

‘We weren’t allowed to give attention to babies – to hold them, to play with them, to teach them, to give hugs, to help them not to cry,’ he said.

But when Yisrael did get to see Nevo, the time was precious, giving him ‘power and hope for the rest of the week’.

Yisrael was given more responsibility in the cult than others, and was tasked with going out and fetching supplies from the town Oratorio, southeast of Guatemala City.

On one of these excursions, he visited a computer store and decided to look up Lev Tahor on Google – to finally find out the truth about the community he had lived in for so long.

Immediately, articles appeared, about the allegations against the cult, and his aunt’s tireless mission to return him and his siblings home.

A few months later, he managed to get his hands on a phone, and he and Orit together came up with an escape plan. 

Originally, the idea was that Yisrael would escape with his son, his sister and his brother – but the leaders caught onto the plan and he had no choice but to leave alone, vowing one day to return for his loved ones.

The day of escape arrived in 2019, when Yisrael ran for his life through the forest and onto a bus to Guatemala City where he eventually reunited his aunt and uncle.

Describing the moment of escape, Yisrael said: ‘On the one hand, I got freedom and a good life. But on the other hand, my son stayed there.’ Initially, he refused to leave Guatemala without him, but it was too dangerous to stay – as the leaders wanted him dead.

Then began three years of hard work with his aunt, trying to plan the mission to return his son to safety.

Orit assembled a remarkable team – of former Mossad agents, an ex-police officer and a lawyer – to raid Lev Tahor’s new hideout in Mexico’s Chiapas state, where Nevo was located.

‘I was afraid that he wouldn’t know me because three years had passed, and he was maybe only half a year old when I escaped. But it was amazing – and I felt like I knew him like all this time, through the three years.’

When they reunited, Nevo was weak and small for his age – his growth having been stunted by the bad conditions and little food. But now, as a six-year-old in Israel, he is healthy again, and Yisrael describes him as his ‘amazing boy’.

Some 60 Lev Tahor children remain in Guatemala, in the hands of the authorities after having been seized from the sect. One by one, they are being returned home – and Orit is working with the Israeli government to ensure the survivors have everything they need – including accommodation, clothes and food. 

Helbrans, the cult’s founder who was convicted for kidnapping a teenager for two years in 1994, drowned in a river in Mexico in 2017 – leaving his son, the more extremist Nachman, to take over Lev Tahor. 

In 2022, Nachman was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment in the U.S. for six convictions including child sexual exploitation and kidnapping, after he arranged for his 13-year-old niece to be married to an adult from the cult, who was 19.

A spokesperson for Lev Tahor, Uriel Goldman, has previously denied the allegations and said the group was the victim of ‘a persecution’.

Yisrael and Orit are now eagerly waiting for the return of their remaining loved-ones from Guatemala, and are confident one day they’ll be a family again.

Once back in Israel, Yisrael began his life anew after five years of isolation, completing a degree in computer science to become a software engineer. He’s just moved to a new flat in Tel Aviv and is thriving – enjoying a vibrant social life and precious time with his son. 

‘After this journey, life slowly became easier. It’s a big story, but life continues. What doesn’t kill you makes you makes you stronger.’

Orit, who balanced being a mother of three during over a decade of resolute campaigning against Lev Tahor, considers Yisrael a fourth child – and Nevo her grandchild. 

‘People always told me: ‘What are you doing? You didn’t have a life.” But now I have another child – and I always wanted four children. This is my reward.’