Pulled In

We set out, watching how the urban scenery of Guatemala City is slowly replaced by the winding country roads that rise and fall in sharp twists and turns, cutting through the endless green expanses. We have a two-hour drive ahead of us, making it a good time to listen to Yoeli Marcus, who was with Lev Tahor basically from the time of its inception.

Yoeli was a young, outgoing bochur when he discovered Lev Tahor, and it captivated him. At the time, it wasn’t a squalid tent compound, Guatemala-style. It was a vibrant community called Rimanov in Quebec, Canada, located between Montreal’s frum community and the village of Tosh, established by Shlomo Helbrans, a charismatic Israeli baal teshuvah who at some point referred to himself as the “Rebbe of Rimanov.” Helbrans moved to the US in the early 1990s, where he served time in prison for kidnapping a 13-year-old Israeli boy who was sent to him for bar mitzvah lessons. He was released after two years, founded a yeshivah in Monsey according to his extreme brand of Judaism, and was deported back to Israel in 2000. He later settled in Canada, where he was granted refugee status, claiming his life was being threatened in Israel.

Helbrans and his followers eventually settled in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts outside Montreal, but amid allegations of child abuse and under threat of the children being removed and placed with Jewish foster families, the group fled, first to Ontario and then to Guatemala. Some made their way to Mexico, where Shlomo Helbrans met his death in 2017, when he drowned in a river that he was apparently using as a mikveh.

While internal memos revealed the mind-control Helbrans wielded among his followers (the obligation to negate one’s mind and subjugate soul, spirit, and will to the leader, to be ready at all hours of the day to do the will of the leader, and to relinquish all physical needs, including eating and sleeping, until the desires of the leader are fulfilled), strictures became even more radical and aggressive once his son Nachman Helbrans took over.

Punishments for young children would include being kept in a storage box for months at a time with no change of clothing or bathroom facilities, severe beatings and regular “malkos” flogging ceremonies, in which those guilty of infractions would be whipped with 39 lashes in a public ceremony. (Since 39 lashes at once can be fatal, the ceremony would be divided up.)

Eventually, life in the compound became unbearable, as food was scarce and living conditions wretched, as personal freedoms were completely negated and entire families became veritable possessions of the management. Still, members are brainwashed to believe that they are the only true Chosen People and that Mashiach will come only to them.

Although Nachman Helbrans is sitting in a US penitentiary, he still manages the sect from prison by phone.

“But I must tell you, it wasn’t like that in the beginning,” Yoeli Marcus, today the father of a large family, tries to explain. “My brother was accepted to the yeshivah there, and my father suggested that I visit him from time to time,” Yoeli relates. “I was the type who was drawn to chumras and to being very makpid about things. I loved the approach and really connected to it.”

Slowly, he became an ardent chassid of Shlomo Helbrans. “Shlomo was an unusual person with many talents,” he explains. “He knew a lot, he was familiar with all the shitos, and all the different streams, and he knew many seforim by heart. He was exceptionally charismatic, and he used his personality to captivate hearts — and to do many bad things.”

Already then, Helbrans was marrying off minors, doling out punishments, or “tikkunim,” and began suppressing all independence among the members. But then, Yoeli describes, it was all cloaked in the mantle of familial unity. The weddings were long-awaited joyous events. The whole community cooked for and participated in these weddings.

“There was a wonderful feeling of togetherness, of mutual obligation, and mainly the sense that we had the privilege of being part of a select minority that is carrying out the will of the Creator,” he says. “Reb Shlomo would always tell us — and we believed it with all our hearts — that all the tefillos of the whole world make their way to Shamayim specifically through Kiryas Rimanov.”

Yoeli admits that there were many decrees and chumras then, but nothing like the torturous stringencies in the recent years since Nachman Helbrans took over leadership. “Of course, there were gezeiros and tikkunim, and cruel physical punishments, but above all was the enchanting halo of the leader,” he reflects.

The members, though, were blinded. Yoeli would later reveal how he was witness to some very severe halachic transgressions that Helbrans committed regularly, yet managed to persuade him that he had a “kabbalah passed from person to person” that this was permitted in special circumstances known only to him.

Painful Separations

Yoeli’s phone rings, and on the line is Yoel Henich Helbrans. He inquires about our arrival time, and also has a rather disheartening update: There’s no water in the compound. Maybe soon, perhaps in an hour, it will be restored, but for now, there’s nothing. Neither Yoeli nor Eliyahu seem fazed by the news — they’re used to living in squalid conditions. But I, a pampered visitor from Belgium, am beginning to realize that this is not exactly going to be a luxury getaway.

As we draw closer, old, ramshackle houses dot the sides of the road. Entire families peddle their wares on the roadsides, selling mostly bananas and pineapples, and we stop to purchase a few for Shabbos. Reb Yoel Henich awaits us near the compound, along with Yitzchak Yaakov Malka, the man who essentially established this place. Over Shabbos, I would hear his personal and painful life story — but in the meantime, he is here, welcoming us with his broad smile. “There’s still no water, but it will be fine, b’ezras Hashem,” he promises.

I’m given a “guest suite,” sparsely furnished with a table, bed and a small nightstand. There is no winter in Guatemala, and the heat is unbearable. But soon Reb Yitzchak Yaakov arrives with a fan he’d purchased especially for me.

“The fan doesn’t really make it cool, but at least it will keep the mosquitos away,” he offers.

Shabbos is fast approaching, and it’s a good thing I’d used the mikveh back in the city. The nearby river is just not for me. I was, however, pleasantly surprised by the improvised beis medrash in the next building. The furniture was tasteful, the shelves were lined with seforim, and it looked like a regular shul. Over Shabbos, I’d get to know the people who gathered, as they began to share chapters of their lives that had been suppressed deep in their wounded souls.

Young bochurim with newly sprouted beards were wearing white socks, as per the custom of many chassidish married men. On the other hand, they wear broad-brimmed hats as opposed to shtreimels, which have long been banned by the sect, as they are considered too modern. In place of the traditional shtreimel, the married men wear something called a sudra, a hat wrapped with a scarf, and instead of a kapoteh they wear what they call “bigdei yesha.”

Yoeli Goldman, who has just rescued his wife from the cult, approaches the amud and begins saying Hodu in a tune of deep gratitude. Finally we sit down to the Shabbos seudah, which we’re eating in the shul, hosted by Reb Yitzchak Yaakov’s family.

In addition to my travel partners, we’re joined by Avraham, a ger who joined the cult but then left together with his family and son-in-law. We also had the pleasure of sitting with Avraham’s son Yisrael, a 14-year-old married minor whose wife is still in the cult. Next to him is Shalom Shachne, a young friendly teenager who doesn’t stop smiling, and who was not married off because he was long suspected of having “heretical” thoughts.

Shalom Shachne was thrown out of the cult’s compound last Hoshana Rabbah, together with his friend Yitzchak, who’s sitting together with him. Yitzchak, like many of his friends his age, is a married man of 15, whose wife and daughter are currently in the government facility. Yitzchak was married off very hastily — an emergency, they called it — just before the men in the cult set out on a mass self-imposed exile to Europe, as per the order of the leader. (Often, the men were not allowed to sleep in their homes, and some were sentenced to months of exile in places around the world. Others were banned from coming close to their homes except for Shabbos, but then there was no time to be home, because the mandatory tefillos and tishen would last until dawn.) The marriage was a way to ensure he’d come back, as his wife was held as collateral in Guatemala.

Shalom Shachne is still wearing the cult’s garb, a Yerushalmi caftan. That’s all he owns. He shows me a tear in the upper lapel of the caftan, which happened at a humiliating cherem ceremony held after he dared visit the rebels’ compound. He was seated on the floor and everyone spat in his face and tore at his clothes. His story is painful and complicated, but the bottom line is that he’s been stuck here for more than a year with nowhere to go.

But now it’s Shabbos, and the energy shifts. Even these young fellows don’t want to be depressed on Shabbos. We make Kiddush and Hamotzi, and enjoy the homemade food — everything here is prepared from scratch, because there’s nothing to buy or get anywhere. But it’s all in very good taste. The fish is tuna fillet, as salmon is still prohibited as per the takanos of Lev Tahor. So are chicken and eggs, as they might be genetically modified, but beef is plentiful here, shechted by a shochet sponsored by some good Jews. The Knishta Chada, I learn, hasn’t been quick to throw off those takanos.

“That’s the wisdom of this place,” Reb Yitzchak Yaakov explains. “People who’ve been in Lev Tahor their entire lives can’t transform their lifestyle in a day. Even if they’re physically outside the cult, their brains, in a way, are still largely there.” The girls in his family, he says, still have their Lev Tahor clothes. The disengagement is a slow and often painful process, he says. “It’s tossing out entire chunks of your faith that they stuffed you with for so many years.”

We try to sing, but the Yiddish-speaking ex-cult members with their long peyos don’t know most of the niggunim we are all familiar with. They were never allowed to listen to music, except for during the weddings that took place in the compound. But they seem to feel comfortable in this setting sharing parts of that life, explaining how disconnected they were from so much of what is part of our normative Jewish experience.

Rebel with a Cause

Yitzchak Yaakov Malka is a member of one of Lev Tahor’s founding families. Some have already fled, and some Yiddishized their name to Kenig. Yitzchak Yaakov spent most of his life in Lev Tahor, and with his outgoing, independent nature, was often accused of the “crime” of being too materialistic.

“I once expanded my little hut, which was actually just a tent surrounded by plastic sheets,” he relates. “But I wanted a little more room, so I smoothed the muddy floor with a bit of cement. One day, I got a summons to the hanhalah.”

[The hanhalah, the leadership circle, are the ones who decide which “tikkunim” the “sinners” will be subject to. They often incite brother against brother, husband against wife, and children against their parents. Two of them, Yaakov Nochum Weingarten and Chaim Tzvi Malka, are now in prison — Weingarten is serving a 12-year sentence in the US, while Malka was recently arrested in Guatemala.]

“I got to the hanhalah in the middle of the night,” Yitzchak Yaakov Malka continues. “They made me wait an hour outside, and then, once I was standing before them, they gave their verdict: ‘You are too balabatish. You need an urgent tikkun.’

“What is my tikkun?” I asked worriedly.

“‘Very simple,’ they said. ‘Right now, tonight, you have to go to the home of the reish mesivta, Moshe Yosef Rosner, and offer him your renovated tent….’

“And that’s what I did. The next day, the house was in his hands and we moved into a different shabby tent.”

It was a method that was intended to destroy the drive for self-sufficiency. Nothing belonged to you. Not your house. Not your possessions. Not even your closest family. You were not allowed to have your own money. They called it “communism d’kedushah.” Members were forced to write confession letters that were then used to harm their shalom bayis or to instill strife between parents and children.

No one was above the law — except for the hanhalah. Shalom Shachne relates how his melamed in cheder was punished together with him. The melamed came late, and it was decreed that he stand in a corner, in humiliation, together with the students who also came late. Not that they learned all that much in this cheder, he notes wryly. In Lev Tahor, people in their twenties don’t even know which side to open the Gemara from. A large part of their time is dedicated to studying Shlomo Helbrans’s seforim, which are a jumble of kabbalistic texts and various quotes, all converging on the proof that he was the great tzaddik of this generation, and that they needed to cleave to him without asking any questions. Every member had to study these seforim according to a particular monthly schedule and then fill out a rigorous task sheet tracking their progress.

One person had purchased a volume of Shas on his own, and the hanhalah was furious. But he actually got off easy. He wasn’t decreed exile, affliction, or even lashes. He just had to hand over the Shas to the library of the beis medrash.

Yitzchak Yaakov describes how he and his wife were once summoned to the hanhalah, which presented them with dozens of letters that other members of Lev Tahor had written against them. When Yitzchak Yaakov received an outside gift of a used twin stroller, he was quickly hauled before the hanhalah to be scolded for continuing his “rebellious” ways, and then ordered to give the stroller to another family.

After a long period of deliberation, Yitzchak Yaakov finally left the cult — on the day he was informed about the engagement of his 12-year-old daughter to a chassan that the hanhalah had matched her with. During the two hours that remained until the planned l’chayim, he packed up his family and escaped — to the other side of the road.

Looking for a Way Out

Davening is late on Shabbos morning at the Knishta Chada, and when I arrive in shul, the only one sitting there is Avraham the ger, learning enthusiastically from an ArtScroll Gemara translated into Spanish. In fact, his first transgression was that he purchased his own translated Shas. Lev Tahor was the only organized Jewish group he knew about when, together with a group of likeminded friends (known in Lev Tahor as “the geirim,”), he decided to convert. He has no foreign passport that would help him emigrate, but despite the uncertainty, he’s a happy person who serves Hashem wholeheartedly and is grateful for what he has, even the old ratty shtreimel he was able to get ahold of.

We hear Krias HaTorah from Chumashim that are unique to Lev Tahor. The text is the same, but the division of chapters is unique, à la Shlomo Helbrans, who explained it as a move “to uproot the questionable division of the parshiyos of previous generations.” and of course there are acknowledgments to the “wonderful and distinguished safra rabba, Rabbi Yoeli Marcus, who helped out.” Yoeli Marcus was one of Helbrans’s scribes and helped him write a large part of his seforim, even recording Helbrans’s Torah in writing. Today, Marcus serves as one of the primary spokespeople in opposition to Lev Tahor, and has embarked on a mission to extricate his four children and their mother, the daughter of Lev Tahor’s chief spokesman Yoel Goldman.

Yoel Henich Helbrans is our Shabbos day seudah host. He tells us how he was born in Monsey, and therefore knew another type of Yiddishkeit than what’s practiced in the ghettos of Mexico and Guatemala. As long as his father was alive, Yoel Henich was somehow able to reconcile the doubts and questions that popped up in his mind, but after his brother Nachman took over the leadership, the radicalism was stepped up to what he calls “an unfathomable level of insanity.”

For a long time, Yoel Henich was on the lookout for a way out. Ultimately, he found himself here, trying, together with Yitzchak Yaakov, to manage this compound and help others in the same situation. So far, more than 70 people have already passed through this station en route to freedom.

In addition to being a Helbrans son and brother, he is also a son-in-law of Moshe Yosef Rosner, who leads the sect’s day-to-day operations. As such, he is also the brother-in-law of 17-year-old Eliyahu, who is seated with us. With three generations of the main Lev Tahor families intermarrying, everyone here, it seems, is intertwined by a network of family connections and related in multiple ways.

There was one fellow, they tell me, who was asked to serve as a melamed in the cheder. When he refused, he was sent to exile for an entire year to America, where he was forced to collect money for Lev Tahor and had a “chaperone” to make sure he was not violating the rules.

If it was so terrible for them, I keep asking, why didn’t people leave? First of all, they explain, it was very difficult, technically. They couldn’t leave the compound without a permission note from the hanhalah. Second, they were completely brainwashed and truly believed what they were told: that life outside the chaburah is one prolonged Gehinnom. Moreover, they had been conditioned for years not to express independent opinions.

Yoeli Marcus shares a story to prove the point: “It was the end of Yom Kippur in the Lev Tahor shul,” he relates. “It was already nearly midnight, and still, the davening went on. Not that afterward there was much to eat, but I was quite weak and made my way towards the exit of the shul. I wanted to run home, make Havdalah and break my fast. One of the members of the hanhalah was standing near the door, and he noticed me and figured out what I intended to do. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I have no problem. You can go home. But know that if you do this, you might be expelled from the chaburah.’ That was the most serious threat in my eyes. Do you think I went home? Of course not — because who wants to risk being thrown out of the chaburah?”

One of the most difficult daily stressors was that there was practically nothing to eat. And the little that was available was forbidden by the hanhalah as the rules became stricter. Chicken and eggs were forbidden because they were genetically modified. Sugar, because the manufacturers grease it with treif oil. No hechsherim were good, because all the world’s rabbanim belong to a cult of infidels who did not merit to bask in the glow of Lev Tahor. Anything relating to plastic was forbidden because of its chemical compounds. So they ate certain vegetables and squash. Yitzchak Yaakov says he lost more than forty kilograms in recent years, the children’s legs became crooked, and the girls displayed worrying physical signs as a result of their malnutrition. The hanhalah often presented new decrees and issurim, always a few minutes before Shabbos, when there was no longer the option of cooking or baking something else.

“On Pesach we literally starved,” Yitzchak Yaakov says. “On Erev Yom Tov, each family got a bit of soap and a rag to clean the tent houses. When it came time for Yom Tov, all the women were called to the shul’s kitchen to cook the Yom Tov meal, which consisted primarily of potatoes and a bit of beets. The matzos were weighed carefully on Seder night, and the rest of Yom Tov, there were no matzos. The hunger was unbearable.”

Because of the harsh takanos, Reb Yoel Henich tells me, their work is not simple. “First of all, we’re trying to save their Yiddishkeit. Anyone who leaves just wants to immediately throw off the bitter, harsh Judaism of Lev Tahor, where there are no mitzvos, only warnings and punishments and hair-raising tikkunim. It’s hard for people who left to get up in the morning and put on tefillin or even to daven. In small doses, we’re trying to introduce them to the beauty of Yiddishkeit.”

Yoel Henich and his family could have left here long ago. They have American passports, and their two older children are already attending yeshivos in America. But he is here until the last of the survivors needs him. The community is temporary by design, and the goal is to be able to transfer them all to normative places within the chareidi world.

Communal askanim are funding some of the expenses of this place, but the rest is on their shoulders. As they have no source of livelihood, they are dependent on donations that don’t always come through.

By the time Shabbos was over, I was feeling both sad and inspired. Despite the fact that there was no milk or sugar, only honey, and the subpar conditions, spending time here elevated me far beyond the material world I take for granted. I connected not only to the stories of their scarred souls, but also to the suffering that has been decreed upon them. In my little room, lying on the old bed, facing the noisy fan that mostly just kept the mosquitos at bay, I couldn’t help but cry. The horrifying stories and the faces behind them gave me no peace.

Back to Babylon

The next day, we set out to visit the Lev Tahor compound itself. Let me provide a bit of background: Lev Tahor’s initial compound and primary location, once the group fled to Guatemala from Canada a decade ago, was located higher up on the hillside from where we are now. It was known as “Bavel,” and that’s what they still call it. Shlomo Helbrans had a special weakness for anything relating to Bavel, always talking about how the Geulah will come from there, with his followers understanding that he’d be the one to lead it.

The compound was essentially forest land that the group purchased with a small mortgage, then plowed and flattened. At some point, after Shlomo Helbrans’ death, Lev Tahor abandoned the site, and the members were instructed to disperse to Eastern European and Balkan countries, primarily to locations with Muslim orientation. Both Yitzchak Yaakov and Yoel Henich described their travails on these endless trips. They wandered through dozens of countries, living in squalid conditions — when Nachman Helbrans decided that if his people would be in Kurdistan for Rosh Hashanah, then Mashiach would come right away. Once the Bavel compound was abandoned, the mortgage was no longer being paid and the bank repossessed the property. When the men returned from their sojourn, they took up residence in a new location, where we’re standing now, and named it Hutzal, after another famed Babylonian city.

Now, we’re going up the hill to Bavel. Yoeli Marcus is with us, as is Eliyahu, but it’s not easy for either of them.

“There,” says Eliyahu, “is the place where I married, a week after my bar mitzvah.” That’s where he spent his childhood years, and now, more than half a year after he ran away, his first return to this place is generating an emotional storm. Traumatic, painful childhood memories share space with a distorted mix of halachah, chumra, and a twisted reality. His older half-brother, Reb Mordechai, is at his side, trying to envelop him with love and support.

Yitzchak Yaakov and a few other former members join us. On the main road, leading to a turnoff from where you ascend to Bavel, we stop near the shack that Yitzchak Yaakov once called home. It’s a neglected little hovel, consisting on two rooms and a disgusting bathroom, which was home to both Yitzchak Yaakov and his eight children as well as another family. Outside is a cracked ceramic sink. “That was our kitchen,” he says.

But once we get to the top of the hill, we won’t see any more makeshift dwellings. The tents, caravans, containers and anything else that could be carted off were taken away by the bank.

This was still during the “golden age” of the “good” conditions at Lev Tahor. During the time at Bavel, a few members still had real houses, while most of the others lived in steaming hot tents that were actually poles covered with plastic sheets. Some had makeshift shacks with tin roofs. The hanhalah and their inner circle, however, lived in comfortable, air-conditioned converted shipping containers.

On the other hand, once in Hutzal, conditions were worse. Most of the families were housed in a huge warehouse-like structure at the center of the compound, which was ostensibly divided, but in actuality had no privacy nor basic boundaries of tzniyus. There were no bathrooms or showers there; a row of bathroom stalls was located a short distance away.

In the last period before the raid, there was neither gashmiyus nor ruchniyus within the confines of the cult’s walls. Life for the residents was miserable, squalid, and characterized by constant decrees and punishments. They all crowded together under the whip — physical and emotional — of the evil leadership that did not have one ounce of compassion. (Due to the religious and family nature of this magazine as well as the festive time of year, I have omitted dozens of unspeakable stories and deeds, serious Torah transgressions and abuses, that I heard from the breakaway group.)

At Hutzal, we find a locked gate. Yoeli and Eliyahu try to open it, but then we come face to face with two young men who were tasked with guarding the desolate site. They immediately summon their boss, who comes racing over in his jalopy. But there’s no need to go inside — we see everything from where we are. We see the large storage structure that housed the families, and Yoeli also points to the top of the hill, where we can see Lev Tahor’s Jewish cemetery. There are just a handful of graves there, but each one tells its own tragic story. Aside from the grave of Shlomo Helbrans, who drowned in Mexico but is buried here, there is also his daughter’s grave. Miriam Gittle Brachah was a 24-year-old young mother who died after having a severe allergic reaction to food her system couldn’t tolerate. Yoeli tells us the terrible story as he witnessed it. He was standing next to Nachman Helbrans’s tent when it happened, and overheard every word.

Just two weeks after their father drowned, newly-installed leader Nachman Helbrans wanted to give his sister a piece of challah with techinah, but she refused, as she had a severe allergy to sesame seeds. He began to rebuke her: “Do you really believe that challah that was cut with a knife that our father used can harm you? Don’t you believe that I’ve been empowered to continue his legacy as the new rebbe?” He then dipped the challah into the techinah and ordered her to eat it. Her body’s response was immediate. No ambulance was called, because it cost too much money, and also because there was no chance that challah cut by a knife owned by the leader would harm anyone. Just a few hours later, she was gone.

When the news spread that she had passed away, people were in denial, especially Nachman himself. Nachman finally ordered an ambulance, and his people instructed the doctor to resuscitate the young woman. The physician smiled bitterly. “I am a doctor,” he said, “but I am not G-d.”

Another headstone there belongs to a man named Shlomo Levy. It was Chol Hamoed Succos and he, like the other members, had to spend the whole day in shul, but he complained of pain and weakness.

“It’s all in the mind,” one of the hanhalah members yelled at him. “It’s because you are ‘balabatish’ and you want to have a good time in life, and that’s why you want to open a bakery, so you can get rich.” (The hanhalah had apparently asked him to open a bakery.) The hanhalah refused to let him see a doctor, and two days later, he was not in this world anymore. (Afterward, they permanently took his children away from their mother and forced her into a second marriage.)

They Want to Shmad Us

We return to Guatemala City on Sunday evening. A year ago, no one imagined that the end of the cult would ever appear on the horizon, that the compound would be closed down and the children would be moved to a government center, to be put in the care of rabbanim, askanim, and parents who would defect from the sect.

The next afternoon, I manage to enter the children’s facility in Guatemala City. The place is heavily guarded, and entrance is only through numerous gates and checkpoints, all manned by armed soldiers. I manage to attach myself to a delegation led by Rabbi Shea Hecht, a veteran cult-buster who is to meet with the senior director of welfare services in Guatemala. The meeting is also attended by Rabbi Yechiel Rosner of Monsey, who has been coordinating the fight against the cult for years, especially with regard to Rosner family members, and by Shimon Posen, a mild-mannered Satmar chassid who specializes in wholesale nutrition products. They want him to help them provide a solution to the special nutrition and kashrus needs of the minors being held here.

Gates open one after another, and at the end of it all, there’s a barred door with little children’s heads peeking out; their faces are drawn, eyes small and frightened and fluttering with fear. The little girls are covered from head to toe, and they shout their protests through a scarf that covers their faces.

As we approach, we’re met with a hail of catcalls: “Sheigetz, sheigetz! Go away from here!” They throw things at us. Posen is unmoved. “Why are you screaming at me?” he asks in the calmest tone he can muster. “Because you want to take us out of the chaburah!” was their coordinated response.

“What is the chaburah?” Posen asks innocently. “I’m just a simple Yid from New York. They told me that there are Jewish children here who don’t have what to eat, and I want to help them.” The children look at him skeptically. Posen takes out his cell phone and keys in a number.

“Do you want to speak to your mothers and see that I’m not lying?” he asks. They jump at the chance. They probably haven’t spoken to their parents for two months. Posen has come well prepared. A day earlier, he made contact with the mothers in the nearby protest camp, and was able to extract from them an agreement to cooperate with regard to feeding the children.

It worked. The children speak to their mothers, despite the vocal protests by the guards who don’t like the idea at all. The children’s suspicions begin to dissipate. Now, they want to just clarify why Posen’s peyos are behind his ears and not curled on his cheeks. Having no choice, Posen decides to take down his peyos in an effort to continue building trust with them.

“People come here, they want us to shmad,” they complain, voicing the protests they’ve so well learned. But Posen insists that he knows nothing about that. He just wants to bring them food. And then they break down and begin to cry: “We have no food. They didn’t give us breakfast yet. We want food. We want food.”

The authorities, to their credit, have tried to arrange food from the best hechsherim, but the orders that the children had received from the cult leaders was to avoid the food and even, chas v’shalom, to be moser nefesh if someone ordered them to “shmad,” in their view.

“But who is he?” they ask as they point to me. “He’s my assistant,” Rabbi Posen reassures them in his soothing baritone. “So what do you want me to bring you to eat?”

They start enumerating a long list, and I, the assiduous assistant, write it all down. Bread. Avocado. Oil. Salt. Peanut butter. “But not from America,” they warn. “The hechsherim there aren’t good.”

“Of course, of course,” Posen reassures them.

“Do you want to see our bedroom?” they offer.

“Sure,” we agreed. They lead us to a large hall that serves as a huge bedroom. From this point on, we just listen, Posen in one corner, and I in the other, as these children quote us the slogans they’ve been indoctrinated with, trying to persuade us that their lives are glittering and glowing, and that this is all a blood libel by those who hate the “chaburah.”

Slowly, not believing that the authorities were actually allowing this, I begin to take photos and to record. I notice a young woman — a girl, really — holding her baby. I focused my camera; perhaps this would come of use. Little did I know to what extent that would be the case.

“The whole world is laughing at our shtetl. They want to shmad us,” the children say. “At the end, Mashiach will come only for us, and the more pain we suffer in this world, the more Olam Haba we will have.”

“They want to make you shmad?” I ask.

“Yes. Exactly. They want to take us to Eretz Yisrael and to cut off our peyos.”

“Tell me some more about your shtetl.”

“It’s such a nice place. We had a good time. And we even had kosher lambs there.”

“What are kosher lambs?”

“They are not genetically modified. We also had a matzah bakery. And a bread bakery. And lots of time to play. And the melamdim, we had a good cheder with good melamdim.”

“So it’s all just lies?”

“Exactly. They’re just being moser. They suspect us for no reason. They never gave us even a smack, right?” they ask one another for reassurance. “There are bad people who broke off from the chaburah and they told on us to the authorities for no reason. Every little bruise that they find on us, they say that it’s from the beatings we got.”

“What is the chaburah?”

“The chaburah means the shtetl. The Rebbe saw that there was a need to establish a shtetl, a chaburah, for special people who want to serve Hashem. We had it so good. We ate breakfast, lunch, and supper, and we lacked for nothing.”

“We had a good family. A good father, a good mother, and they are just torturing us for no reason,” one energetic boy who appeared to be the self-appointed spokesperson declared. “They came one day and they grabbed all the mothers and the kids and threw us onto buses like bags of garbage, and all the kids were crying.”

For several long moments we stood and listened to them. There was nothing to explain and no one to persuade. These poor children, these captive souls, were brainwashed from the minute they were born. Rabbi Hecht says that the only option is to get them out of the cult for even a short time. Time and common sense, he says, will do the job. Very soon they will realize what kind of distorted world they lived in.

Only once I leave and meet up with my new friends from Shabbos do I realize that I was able to photograph the most precious thing of all. The photo of the young mother and her baby is the little family of 15-year-old Yitzchak, one of my new friends from Knishta Chada. It was the biggest gift that I could bring him after our shared Shabbos. He gazes at the photo, and tears roll down his face. He is not ready to give up on either of them, no matter what.

Even after I returned home and weeks passed, during which time the cult has crumbled even further and many more families have been rescued, I will never forget that special Shabbos — meager in material pleasures, but rich in spirit. And if I would have to choose one indelible scene, it would be this one, from the Shabbos morning seudah at Knishta Chada.

After some deep and meaningful sharing, Yoel Henich Helbrans asked to say a few words:

“It is related that the Tzemach Tzedek was once sent by his grandfather, the Alter Rebbe, to a town in Russia during the Yamim Noraim. The local shul belonged to the Cantonists, former Red Army soldiers who had been discharged after 25 years in the Czar’s army. Before davening, one of them went up to the bimah, raised his hands Heavenward, and said, ‘Ribbono shel Olam, we lack for nothing. We have government stipends. We are healthy. We don’t have children or family to daven for. So all we ask is, Yisgadal v’yiskadash Shmei Rabba!’

“Teiyereh Yidden,” Reb Yoel Henich continued, “many of us have nothing. Many of us no longer have close family. We came out from a very harsh place, without anything. Without parnassah, without a past, and with a very murky future. And yet, let us scream and daven to the Creator: “Yisgadal v’yiskadash Shmei Rabba!”

Yoel Henich hugged his brother-in-law, who didn’t know where his young wife was, and Yitzchak, who was longing for his baby daughter, and Yisrael, whose wife refused to leave the sect, and the ger tzedek who has no idea where to go from here, and Yitzchak Yaakov, who is stuck there with his eight children and doesn’t know what the new day will bring — and together, they look toward a future where they know only one thing: that they’re in Hashem’s hands from here on in.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1057)