HUIXTLA, Mexico — About 20 members of an excessive ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect subdued guards and escaped from a government shelter in southern Mexico where they had been detained since one of their leaders was arrested last Friday on charges of organized crime and human trafficking.
Composed mostly of young men dressed in long, loose robes, members of the Lev Tahor sect emerged from the compound on Wednesday night, climbing a guard from a personal security company who had fallen to the ground. The federal government’s shelter for youth and families in Huixtla houses migrants detained through immigration officials.
They boarded a truck waiting outside and headed to Mexico’s border with Guatemala. Local police, the National Guard and Mexico’s immigration firm said they had not been prosecuted.
On Friday, the government arrested Menachem Endel Alter of Jerusalem, leader of the Lev Tahor sect on charges of organized crime and human trafficking in Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border. Members of the sect said that at one point the leader had also been arrested, but the government has shown this.
Lev Tahor has had legal elsewhere.
Last November, two leaders of the organization were convicted of kidnapping and child sexual exploitation crimes in New York. They allegedly abducted two young men from their mother to return a 14-year-old woman to an illicit sexual relationship with an adult man. The sect is known to have members in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Guatemala and Israel.
The sect founded by Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans in Jerusalem in the 1980s. The organization fled to Canada and then Guatemala in 2014, after being heavily vetted by the Canadian government for allegations of child abuse and child marriage. Helbrans drowned in Mexico in mysterious cases in 2017 and his son took over the organization.
An opposition group, Lev Tahor Survivors, estimated the number of members of the sect at between three hundred and 350 people.
Lev Tahor’s movements, machinations and plans are murky. Several dozen members of the organization traveled through the Balkans earlier this year. Some members of the anti-Zionist organization applied for political asylum in Iran in 2018. U. S. Federal Court Documents The U. S. Supreme Court report in 2019 showed that cult leaders had pledged allegiance to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The organization has been described as a cult and as the “Jewish Taliban,” as women and women over the age of 3 must dress in long black dresses that cover the entire body, adding the face, in maximum cases.
Men spend most of their days praying and expressing portions of the Torah. The organization adheres to an excessive and idiosyncratic reading of kosher food laws.
Luke Tress contributed to this report.
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