New Milford, NJ—If the name Shlomo Helbrans rings a bell with some JLBC readers, it should. He has lately been in the news because of his Lev Tahor cult—with its burqa-clad women and accusations of child abuse by the Canadian authorities in Quebec. This is not Helbrans’ first serious brush with the law. He gained his notoriety in Bergen County when he kidnapped a bar-mitzvah aged boy from his secular Israeli parents in New Milford in 1992. It was a sensational story and is one of the cases that Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes is alleged to have soft-pedaled. It also inspired a book published in 2001 called THE ZADDIK: The Battle for a Boy’s Soul by Elaine Grudin Denholtz.

In 1992, Hana Reuven Fhima and her second husband, Jacky Fhima, secular Israelis, were living in New Milford. They had four children, including Shai, a son by Hana’s previous marriage to Michael Reuven, who lived in Israel. The Fhima family came to America and invested $60,000 to open a tile store in Paramus, but it failed. Marital problems ensued, and according to various newspaper reports, those problems included domestic violence and drug use by Shai’s stepfather, a situation that made Shai run away from home more than once and caused his mother to seek help from Shelter Our Sisters.

Media reports said that as the boy approached his bar mitzvah in 1992, his maternal uncle brought him to a local Bergen County synagogue to hear Helbrans speak. According to the New York Times, who quoted his mother, “‘The rabbi said, “I see light on your face; I want to know what big things you are going to do,”’ … The next day she said she received the first of dozens of calls from the rabbi and his associates, who pressed her to leave Shai at the yeshiva and move to Brooklyn from New Milford, N.J.”

Because Helbrans said he would provide bar mitzvah lessons, she brought her son to Williamsburg in February 1992. At that time, Helbrans told them that he was “loosely affiliated with Satmar.” (The Satmar spokesman, Rabbi David Niederman, in that same article, said that Helbrans “…has his own movement. He has his own constituency. But we don’t know too much about it.” He described Helbrans and his yeshiva as “a small, obscure group that arrived just before the Persian Gulf War, in part for fear of another Holocaust, in part because of continued pressure by the Israeli Government over its extreme anti-Zionist views.”)

After a tendentious “shuttle” period during the weeks before Shai’s bar mitzvah, when Helbrans pressured the Fhimas to sign their son over to him, Shai disappeared for two years. His mother and the authorities, including the FBI, searched for him. At one point, both her husband and her ex-husband were looking for Shai in Borough Park when a Lev Tahor hasid assaulted them with a knife and severed one of Fhima’s fingers.

The New York City Police Department and the FBI believed that Shai had been brainwashed and kidnapped and pushed for full prosecution of Helbrans. But Charles Hynes, who was running for State Attorney General at the time, tried to get Helbrans a plea bargain and community service. The appellate judge overruled him. Helbrans was sentenced to 6-12 years for kidnapping, but in 1996, was released after serving just two years. He moved to Monsey and opened another yeshiva until he was deported to Israel in 2000.

Where was Shai during those two years? He was first hidden in Monsey, NY and was eventually found in 1994 in a yeshiva in Paris. He came home, but soon after that, the Fhimas agreed to place him with Rabbi Aryeh Zaks in Rockland County, NY so that he could lead a more observant life. From the time around his bar mitzvah to the resolution of the trial, Hana Fhima left New Milford, lived for a time with Shelter Our Sisters, divorced Jacky and moved with her three other children to Ramsey. Today, according to newspaper accounts, she lives in Israel.

In a follow up in the New York Times in 2001, Shai, who reports say was born in 1979, said he had reconciled with his parents, was taking computer courses and was an observant Jew who no longer dressed like a hasid. Haaretz, in a recent two-part series about Lev Tahor, reported that he lives abroad and is no longer observant.

Now Shlomo Helbrans is back in the news along with Lev Tahor—his cult with members in Beit Shemesh, Jerusalem, Canada and the U.S.—and he is again being investigated for child abuse.

Where did Helbrans come from?

According to Haaretz, Shlomo Helbrans (also known as Rabbi Erez Shlomo Elbarnes, Erez Albaranes, Shlomo Helbran, and Rabbi Shlomo Halbernetz) was the only child born to a secular Zionist family in Kiryat Yoel in Jerusalem in 1961. He started his religious life as a teenage baal teshuva against his parents’ wishes and attended, among other yeshivas, Mercaz Harav, which he decided was full of phoneys. He joined with Breslov and Satmar hasdim for a while, married at 17 and moved to Tsfat. After living there for six years, and without being given smicha, he began calling himself rabbi, founded Braslav Yeshivat Hametivta and moved to Jerusalem, where he began to attract followers.

Around 1990 he and his followers left for the United States after claiming they were targeted by the Israeli government for their anti-Zionism, and settled in Brooklyn. There are reports that Helbrans hooked up with radical Islamists in Israel, which brought him to security forces’ attention. When the American authorities deported him to Israel in 2000, Helbrans claimed his anti-Zionist views endangered his life in Israel.

The Forward described Helbrans as “the founder of an aggressively anti-Zionist movement called Hisachdus Hayereim, or “Union of the God-Fearing.” They reported that he burned the Israeli flag in public on Israeli Independence Day, and that when Palestinians met in Lausanne, Helbrans wrote to them saying that Israelis “empower themselves by controlling who is allowed to vote, restricting most Palestinians and Anti-Zionists from voting, and by importing over two million gentiles from Russia and other countries to appear as the majority to the world. These racist actions have inflamed antisemitism in the entire world, causing great damage to Authentic Jews.” He also told Haaretz that he would not go as far as waving a Palestinian flag.

He applied for and was granted asylum in Canada, where, in the early oughts, he reestablished Lev Tahor in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Quebec with 30 families.

In 2011, two Lev Tahor girls, 13 and 15, were sent from the Bayer family—newly religious members in Beit Shemesh—to Helbrans in Canada for the Yomim Noraim. Their great-uncle, who knew Helbrans married off minors, called the Israeli authorities. Yeshiva World reported that the Canadians, working with the foreign ministry and Interpol, met the girls in Montreal, and then escorted them back to Israel in compliance with a court order right after Rosh Hashana and Shabbos.

Members of the extended Bayer family maintained that children in the Lev Tahor cult are stripped of all basic rights and asked that Lev Tahor be “outlawed, because it is a serious threat to the well-being of children.” Before the Israeli government handed the girls back to their parents, the Bayers were forced to sign a document that said they would not attempt to send them to Canada again. But in May of this year, the Bayers and their six children attempted to leave Israel, via Jordan, to join Lev Tahor in Canada. They were caught and sent back to Israel, where the parents were detained.

The Lev Tahor cases are now being addressed in the Knesset, where, last week, The Child Rights Committee, headed by MK Orly Levy-Abecassis of the Likud-Beiteinu Party, convened a meeting attended by representatives of the Ministry of Public Security, the Foreign Ministry, the Justice and Welfare Ministry, the Lev L’Achim organization, Interpol, the National Council for the Welfare of Children, and Helbrans’ victims.

The committee is investigating charges that Helbrans hit children with tire irons, forced people to take psychiatric pills; forced loving couples to divorce, forced little girls to marry old men (Helbrans believes that 13 is the ideal age for marriage); forced children to wear shoes that were too small as punishment; placed people in solitary confinement; denied them food and kept to a strange diet; issued monetary fines; placed infants with other families against the wishes of their parents for as long as two years.

Lev Tahor members do not believe in vaccinations; they believe sparing the rod spoils the child, and they do not seek medical help, even when their children are dying or while they are giving birth. Ma’ariv reported that a year-old “burqa” baby died in February 2013 in Meah Shearim because the mother refused to seek treatment for her child.

Last fall, Mishpocha magazine put the Lev Tahor women in their burqas on the cover. They reported that Lev Tahor women and other “frumka” women won’t let their husbands into their homes until their daughters are safely asleep; that the women don’t mind their husbands having other wives; that they impose chumrot denounced by poskim around the world, and scorn even the most ultra-Orthodox Haredi, Hasidic, Sephardic and Ashkenazic rabbis.

They wrote that the burqa women “…discount the well-publicized proclamation of the Eidah HaChareidis, which condemns ‘a group of women who have uprooted daas Torah … who don’t send their children to proper schools, who don’t give them medical treatment even if their lives are in danger, and who have instituted unmentionable practices regarding marriages, etc.…’

“The Badatz convened and issued this public condemnation because of accumulated reports involving cases of perverted behavior among adherents of the ‘cult.’ Yet a closer reading of the text does not refer to their controversial mode of dress per se, although privately these rabbanim have had to mediate situations where wives have insisted on taking on extreme modesty stringencies against the wishes, and to the embarrassment, of their husbands.”

Now Helbrans and his followers are in the news because of their defiance of child protection authorities in Quebec, who want to place 14 children, including a 16-year-old and her infant, in foster care for 30 days. They say these children need to be medically and psychologically evaluated.

The investigation began in 2013, because there were “concerns about the children’s education and welfare, match-making efforts and young ages of girls given in marriage, as well as allegations of abuse and mind control.” The Windsor Star reported last week that there were also indications of neglect, garbage-strewn homes and physical and mental abuse of the children and some of their parents. Lev Tahor children were only being taught Hebrew and Yiddish and unable to communicate with authorities in case of emergency. The girls’ education was inferior to what the boys were getting and basic math was not being taught. Among the “rules” reported by former members was one that permitted babies to be diapered only twice a day.

Violence is also used to control people. Helbrans’ wife, Malka, fled to Israel last June after being beaten by her husband’s Hasidim for objecting to the cult’s rampant child abuse—she said that even children as young as six months old are not spared.

When Canadian authorities moved, so did Helbrans. Last month, Helbrans and approximately 40 families—with 137 children between them—fled Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts in three buses. They said they were headed to Iran or south of the Mason-Dixon Line in the U.S. But a few weeks later they settled in Windsor, Ontario, where the rules concerning home schooling are a bit more lenient than Quebec’s, and they will start their community from scratch. And no one will stop him, despite the evidence reported in court documents and by eyewitnesses in scores of newspaper articles and muti- and social media in the last decade.

Most of it shows little that is pure of heart inside Shlomo Helbrans or the Lev Tahor cult. Even the most haredi poskim agree on that.

In 2011, Israel’s Edah HaChareidis issued a “sacred call to Jewish homes,” about the “frumka” women of Lev Tahor and other cults, saying: “With great grief, we have heard testimony about the actions of a group of women who have uprooted the rule of Torah from Israel and, of their own volition, act in ways that uproot education and Torah from Israel. They do not send their children to Talmud Torah or other schools, and withhold medical care from them even when their lives are at risk. They also do things that are unfit to be heard, violating the strictest prohibitions regarding married life and the marriage ceremony … We therefore warn Jewish women and girls not to be drawn after them or follow their customs. One must avoid their leaders and teachers because they are destined for disaster, God forbid.” “Frumka” is what these burqa-style dresses are called in Israel.

When the current Sephardi chief rabbi, Avraham Yosef, was the chief rabbi of Holon, he said on the Kol Beramah radio station: “I asked my father about the shawl that women are wearing and in which they look so strange on the street, so that everyone who passes near them turns his head, because it is a bizarre thing. I am not even talking about the ones who cover their faces with veils or those who dress little girls in a similar manner [the Lev Tahor women dress that way]. I was with my wife at an event and suddenly, like a group of penguins, a mother appeared with her four daughters, one of them maybe 10 years old, all of them covered up. These things are not only far from Judaism, but they also do not respect women.”

Many of the men and women who follow Helbrans have secular backgrounds. In Israel, he was also accused of kidnapping his followers, and parents, siblings and extended family of Lev Tahor members have complained to the Israeli government. These baalei teshuva are Helbrans’ most vulnerable victims.

“As newcomers to the intricacies of Orthodoxy, they lack the kind of grounding and feeling for tradition enjoyed by most religious people who grew up in religious families,” said a spokesman for Edah HaChareidis. “Even the strictest rabbis who require women to wear black head coverings and black stockings understand that a woman must allow herself to be a woman.”

Yet there are people who find it difficult to refute Lev Tahor, especially from the women’s point of view, and believe that Helbrans and his “frumka” women are setting a future trend for observant Jewish women. Haaretz reported that hundreds of women are beginning to go “frumka.”

That leaves one with two questions: “Where does Helbrans get his money?” and “How does Helbrans get away with it?” In the meantime, Caveat Emptor.

By Jeanette Friedman (with combined services)