Nachman Helbrans, a member of the Jewish fundamentalist group, Lev Tahor, talks about the groups move from Quebec to Ontario amid a child neglect investigation, while at a motel in Windsor Ont., where they are temporarily staying.
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It is one o'clock in the afternoon, but it seems the electrical goods store in Rishon Lezion, where I arranged to meet the interviewees, is about to close: an iron shutter closes the entrance up to two-thirds of its length. I bend through the lower third and see them inside. The members of the families whose loved ones were sucked into the black hole of the "Pure Heart" sect are hiding, scared. "You don't know what you're getting into", they will tell me shortly. "Keep in mind that they can hurt anyone. Even you."
Orit Cohen's relative is in the sect with his wife and six children. A relative of Oded Tweek is there with her seven children. Hali's family member (pseudonym) is in the sect with his four children. After the evidence of the acts of violence and abuse and the long hand of the cult leaders, I am beginning to fear. It seems that the only insurance certificate against harm to me, if indeed they are dangerous people as they are attributed, is to simply write about it.
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Read this article in Hebrew: https://www.israelhayom.co.il/article/44923
Updated: Jul 19, 2022
Charles J. Hynes, having once embraced silence on the question of his vigor in prosecuting sex abuse in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, cannot stop talking now.
In columns, in interviews, and even in an exchange with former Mayor Edward I. Koch, Mr. Hynes, the veteran district attorney in Brooklyn, has insisted that he is one tough prosecutor. He will handcuff and arrest anyone who tries to intimidate an ultra-Orthodox family into silence.
“I will not put victims at risk,” he told The Forward.
If he allows ultra-Orthodox rabbis to act as gatekeepers, determining which child was and was not molested before turning to prosecutors, and if he agrees to keep secret the names of the molesters, who could argue with the results? Since 2009, he says, his office has prosecuted 99 sex abuse cases in the ultra-Orthodox community. (When my colleagues Sharon Otterman and Ray Rivera diced Mr. Hynes’s numbers in a series of articles, they found at least one quarter of his prosecutions had little to do with child sex abuse.)
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