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Moldovan Chief Rabbi: Lev Tahor Tried To Enter Syria, Lebanon Or Albania


Chief Rabbi of Moldova Rav Pinchas Saltzman spoke to B’Chadrei Chareidim on Sunday about the attempt of Lev Tahor members to enter Moldova.


“After the Iranian government refused to accept them, a first group landed in Moldova overnight Thursday,” Rav Saltzman said.


“I only found out about it after they landed and from that moment we began to make the most of our connections. We appealed to the Moldovan President, government ministers, and local security authorities.”


“Our appeal was accepted. Another group of Lev Tahor members landed in Moldova on Shabbos (!) and they were sent back. A second group that wanted to board a flight on Shabbos from Turkey to Moldova were not permitted to board the flight.”


I fled an extremist Jewish cult in Guatemala when I was 15 years old.


Mendy Levy was born in 2003 in Canada to parents who were members of Lev Tahor, an extremist Jewish cult founded in the 1980s. Shunned by members of other Jewish groups and facing a kidnapping scandal, its leader Shlomo Helbrans had moved Lev Tahor to Canada in the 1990s. Helbrans then moved the group to Guatemala in 2014, in the wake of child abuse investigations in Quebec.


Levy escaped the group in 2018 and now splits his time between Canada and New York. Shlomo Helbrans drowned in Guatemala in 2017. US authorities arrested his son, Nachman Helbrans, and other Lev Tahor leaders in late 2018 and 2021. They're currently on trial in federal court in New York on kidnapping and fraud charges, to which they've pleaded not guilty. Lawyers for Helbrans and other leaders didn't respond to Insider's requests for comment.


Leaders of anti-Zionist cult Lev Tahor to stand trial in New York


To get from Guatemala City to Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq, travelers can’t exactly catch a direct flight.


But that’s the route taken in recent weeks by some 70 members of a small Orthodox sect that has been trotting the globe for more than 40 years in search of a safe haven to practice a fundamentalist version of Judaism — one that has led the Israeli press to dub it the “Jewish Taliban.”


From Erbil, the group, whose sect is formally called Lev Tahor, had planned to cross a border into Iran and settle there, according to a group of activists who have been monitoring Lev Tahor’s activities. The activists include former Lev Tahor members who escaped, estranged relatives of the group and Hasidic businessmen concerned by allegations of child abuse in the sect. The activists asked to remain anonymous out of concern for their safety and privacy.


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