Nachman Helbrans and Mayer Rosner, two senior leaders of the radical ultra-Orthodox cult Lev Tahor were sentenced to 12 years in prison last week, for orchestrating the 2018 kidnapping of a 14-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy in New York state, the US Department of Justice announced in a statement.
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Helbrans, 40, and Rosner, 45, were convicted in November 2021 of kidnapping, sex trafficking, and child sexual exploitation. Thursday's ruling also imposed a five-year suspended sentence on both men.
"No mother should ever have to wake up to find her children missing. And no child should ever be forced into a sexual relationship. Today's sentencing sends a clear message: those who kidnap and sexually exploit children will be prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law," said Damian Williams, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in a statement.
According to the Justice Department, the two children were kidnapped in December 2018 from their mother's home in Woodridge, New York. Court records show that the 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 a then-20-year-old member of the Lev Tahor sect. 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.
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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