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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.

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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.