Fake Hasidic TikTok rabbi sentenced to 135 years for sexually abusing adoptive sons
Hayim Nissim Cohen, born Jeffrey Lujan Vejil, pleads guilty to sexual assault three years after arrest following allegations by one of 9 children
To over 300,000 TikTok followers, Hayim Nissim Cohen was a rabbi who had taken in nine adoptive sons and documented their Jewish lives. But after one of the children spoke out about the sexual abuse that was happening off-camera, that illusion came crashing down.
On Monday, Cohen, 40, pleaded guilty in a Houston state court to four counts of sexual assault of a child and one count of indecency with a child. He was sentenced to four 40-year sentences with no parole for the sexual assault charges and an additional 15 years for the indecency charge to be served concurrently, according to the Houston Chronicle.
“You realize you are never going to get out of prison, you’re going to die in prison?” Judge Danilo Lacayo asked Cohen in Court, according to local CBS affiliate KHOU.
“I know you understand everything I’ve said to you from the beginning to the end,” Lacayo said. “You ran an interesting con, sir. You violated all these boys and you’re here today facing justice.”
The crimes came to light in February 2023, when Cohen’s 17-year-old adopted son called in to a podcast and reported that he had been sexually abused by Cohen since age 11. Child protective services intervened, and the six youngest children were removed from the home, according to KHOU.
Cohen was arrested in 2023, at a time when he had allegedly been faking a chronic illness. In social media posts, he can be seen using supplemental oxygen and a wheelchair, but when detectives took him to two hospitals, they found nothing wrong with him.
***Hayim Nissim Cohen, Father of Our Unique Family, Pleads Guilty to Sexually Abusing Multiple Adopted Children, Sentenced to 40 years in Prison***
Jeffrey Vejil, who adopted the name Hayim Nissim Cohen to masquerade as a Jew and adopt 9 children who he subsequently sexually… pic.twitter.com/HDii6kKPuD
— ZA'AKAH – Crying Out for the Silenced (@ZAAKAHNY) April 7, 2025
He claimed in interviews to have grown up speaking Yiddish as a Hasidic Jew in New York City, but legal documents show that he was born Jeffrey Lujan Vejil in Odessa, Texas, in 1984. An individual with the same name graduated from Odessa High School in 2005, and a newspaper article from the same year placed him in the city.
He legally changed his name multiple times in 2009 and 2010, eventually landing on Hayim Nissim Cohen. He has used “many different names and aliases,” court documents said. Some of his other names or alleged aliases include Chaim Nissim Vejil, Gabriel Jeffrey Vejil and Gabriel Rosenburg.
There is no evidence that he converted to Judaism, and he never claimed to have converted, except when he requested to adopt a Jewish name in court.
At times, Cohen claimed to be a rabbi. He also said, despite evidence to the contrary, that his nine adopted sons came from Jewish families. At the trial, he was still sporting payos, the sidecurls grown by Hasidic men, though he did not appear to be wearing a kippah.
Sherry Chandler, a lawyer for a child abused by Cohen in 2019, has told The Times of Israel that “he changed their names in the adoption process and had them grow their hair and dress them. He claims they speak Hebrew or Yiddish but I don’t think any of them do.”
“He’s clearly not a rabbi. I think he woke up one day and said, ‘I’m Jewish,’ and went to Dallas County and had his name changed,” said Chandler.
One of the adopted sons, Avshalom Cohen, was also arrested in 2023 and charged with sexual assault and human smuggling.
Luke Tress contributed to this report.
The Times of Israel Community.