Two senior members of the extremist Jewish group Lev Tahor were convicted of child sexual exploitation and kidnapping by a federal court in New York on Wednesday.
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A statement by the US Department of Justice said that Nachman Helbrans and Mayer Rosner were convicted following a four-week jury trial. They face a mandatory sentence of 10 years in prison and potentially, a sentence of life in prison.
The sentence for the case at the federal Southern District of New York court will be meted out later by a judge.
United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said, "The defendants, brazenly kidnapped two children from their mother in the middle of the night to return a 14-year-old girl to an illegal sexual relationship with an adult man. Today's verdict makes clear that our office – and our law enforcement partners – will not be deterred from achieving justice for victims of child sexual exploitation."
Court records show that the girl's mother had escaped from the cult's compound in Guatemala in 2018 and fled to the US. A Brooklyn court granted her sole custody of the children and barred the children's father, a leader in Lev Tahor, from communicating with them.
According to the DOJ's statement, in 2017, Helbrans had arranged for his 14-year-old niece to be "married" to an adult member of the Lev Tahor cult. They were never legally married since such a union would be illegal.
Helbrans and Rosner, who are both US citizens, devised a plan to return the young "bride" to her "husband." In December 2018, they kidnapped her and her 12-year-old brother from their mother from their home in Woodridge, New York. They smuggled the children across the US border to Mexico where the "couple" was reunited.
The pair then "immediately began a sexual relationship with the goal of procreation," as practiced by the cult whose leaders, including Helbrans and Rosner, "required young brides to have sex with their husbands, to tell people outside Lev Tahor that they were not married, to pretend to be older, and to deliver babies inside their homes instead of at a hospital, to conceal the mothers' young ages from the public."
Both children were recovered in Mexico after a three-week search involving hundreds of law enforcement personnel and returned to New York. According to the DOJ, Lev Tahor made several additional attempts to kidnap the children again in 2019 and 2021.
Several other cult members have also been arrested and charged in the case.
Williams praised the outstanding work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the New York State Police, the Sullivan County District Attorney's Office, United States Customs and Border Protection, the Rockland County Sheriff's Department, the Village of Spring Valley Police Department, Special Agents with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, the Department of State, the Transportation Security Administration, and our law enforcement partners in Mexico, Guatemala, Canada, and Israel.
Founded in the 1980s by Shlomo Helbrans, a Haredi anti-Zionist rebbe, Lev Tahor adheres to its own, ultraconservative interpretations of the Halacha, including practices such as black head-to-toe coverings for females beginning at age three, extremely lengthy prayer sessions, and arranged marriages between teenagers.
Lev Tahor members move frequently, with the majority of its members most recently fleeing the Guatemalan town of San Juan La Laguna in August 2014, prior to which they had fled government child welfare agencies in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, Canada.
The group has been described as the "Jewish Taliban," and it is believed to currently comprise 200-300 people, including adults born into the group and dozens of children.
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