Unsealed Search Warrants Reveal Troubling Details about Lev Tahor
By Jason Magder
Surete du Quebec investigators got help from Interpol and authorities in Israel to establish a criminal case against the ultra-Orthodox sect Lev Tahor. These are among several new revelations from search warrants unsealed by a judge on Wednesday. The warrants were issued by a Quebec judge to SQ investigators to search the homes of Lev Tahor members in Chatham-Kent, Ont., last Jan. 28. The warrants allege members of the community falsified government documents, and engaged in human trafficking. The community of about 250 lived in Ste-Agathe-des-Monts for about a decade before youth protection authorities were alerted to allegations of widespread abuse and neglect. The Department of Youth Protection in the Laurentians ordered the parents of 14 children to appear in court last November, but the community fled en masse to Chatham-Kent, Ont. Last March, the community relocated again to Guatemala, though two of its members remain in foster families in Toronto. The case against Lev Tahor began in April of 2012, after the SQ received a letter from the lawyer of Nathan Helbrans, the adult son of the group’s leader, Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans. Nathan had left the sect earlier that year, telling Israeli media his resistance to orders brought him in conflict with the community’s leaders. Several members twisted his legs until they broke, he said. Nathan Helbrans’s lawyer transmitted to the SQ a list of allegations of wrongdoing within the sect including: The use of physical force as a method of punishment during classes for children. Young girls of 13 and 14 years of age are tied up in basements when they disobey. Teenage children of 14 and 15 years old are forced to marry older men. Children are forcibly removed from their families and relocated with other families as instructed by Shlomo Helbrans for not being properly educated. Members of the community are forced to take psychotropic drugs. The community controls all money received by members from the government. Children from other countries are sent to the community to be married to members of the community, and they arrive under false pretences in order to evade immigration authorities. Over the course of their investigation, SQ investigators met with Nathan Helbrans as well as other former members of the community, and with concerned family members who live in Israel. The sect was started in Israel in the late 1980s by Helbrans, so many of the community’s members have Israeli passports and citizenship, as would their children. Helbrans resettled in Brooklyn in the 1990s, but he was deported after he was convicted of kidnapping a 13-year-old boy. He was granted refugee status in Canada in 2003, after claiming he would be persecuted in Israel were he to return, since he is against the establishment of the state of Israel. Two weeks after beginning the investigation, SQ Investigator Stephane Chartrand met with DYP worker Suzanne Tye, who told him she removed a girl from the community after meeting her in the hospital. The girl complained that she didn’t want to return, because she was promised to a man for marriage. She seemed scared, Tye said, and members of the community were constantly hanging around the hospital to ensure that she didn’t speak to authorities. The document also makes reference to a December 2012 incident in which a 17-year-old girl was taken from the community by ambulance to the Children’s Hospital in Montreal. The girl told nursing staff she was physically beaten by her brother, sexually assaulted by her father and married at the age of 15 to a man who was 30. However, investigators were not able to speak with her when they arrived, because she was not coherent.
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