National Post (National Edition)
A CULT, A KIDNAPPING AND A COURT CASE
BROOKLYN MAN IN CUSTODY AFTER CHILDREN OF EX-LEV TAHOR MEMBER SECRETLY TAKEN TO MEXICO
U.S. authorities have charged a Brooklyn, N.Y., man in the elaborate kidnapping of two grandchildren of Shlomo Helbrans, the late founder of the fundamentalist Jewish Lev Tahor sect that worried Canadian child protection authorities for years.
An FBI agent claimed in a Dec. 24 court filing that the two children, a 14-yearold girl and 12-year-old boy, were kidnapped Dec. 8 from a home in Woodridge in upstate New York and taken to Scranton, Pa. Disguised in typical children’s clothing — unlike the black garb usually worn by Lev Tahor members — they were put on a flight and a few days later observed at a hotel in Mexico City, in the company of Lev Tahor members.
The Associated Press named the children as Yante and Chaim Teller. The court filing does not name the children or their mother, but it describes her as the daughter of the controversial founder and former leader, Helbrans. The New York Post identified her as Sara Helbrans, 32, Shlomo’s daughter, and said she decided to flee after she was ostracized for objecting to her 13-year-old daughter being married to an older man.
The Times of Israel reported Shlomo’s son Nachman was among five Lev Tahor leaders arrested last week in Mexico.
Helbrans founded Lev Tahor, Hebrew for “Pure Heart,” in Israel in the mid1980s. The group moved to New York in 1991, fleeing the Armageddon Helbrans believed would come with the first Gulf War.
He was convicted in 1994 of kidnapping a 13-year-old boy who had been sent to him for religious instruction. He served his sentence, and was deported to Israel. He was in Canada by 2000, granted asylum against persecution for his anti-Zionist beliefs in Israel, where the group was colloquially known as the Jewish Taliban, in part for the dress code imposed on women and girls.
Helbrans died by drowning at age 55 last year in Mexico during a ritual immersion in a river. His successor as leader is more extreme, according to the mother of the kidnapped children, who told the FBI she spoke out against extremism before deciding to flee. It is not clear if this refers to her brother Nachman or his fellow leaders.
In November, the children’s mother was awarded sole custody of the children, and the father was issued an order of protection that banned him from having contact with them. The FBI agent said the mother had been a “voluntary member” of Lev Tahor in Guatemala, but fled six weeks ago after it grew more extreme and moved to Mexico.
“The mother indicated that it was not safe to keep her children there,” FBI agent Jonathan Lane wrote in a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court, which refers to widely reported concerns about “physical, sexual and emotional abuse.”
The kidnapping occurred in the dead of night.
Lane said he had reviewed surveillance camera footage showing the children leaving the Woodridge house at 2:56 a.m. and getting into a car parked on the shoulder of the road.
This was a rental car, he discovered, and a tag found inside led to a clothing store, which turned up surveillance images of two men in traditional Hasidic clothing. Lane said he believed they purchased hats and other clothing that would otherwise be inappropriate for observant members of Lev Tahor to lessen the chance of the men and children being spotted at the airport. The boy, for example, wore a Superman hat.
Aron Rosner, 45, of Brooklyn, is being held without bail, accused of providing financial assistance to members of Lev Tahor in the international abduction scheme.
The FBI alleges Rosner transferred money on several occasions that assisted members of Lev Tahor in the kidnapping, mostly small amounts less than US$1,000. He also is accused of speaking with several “coconspirators about hotels in Mexico as well as purchases of flights, bus tickets, credit cards and food,” according to the criminal complaint.
Rosner is the brother of one of the new Lev Tahor leaders.
Quebec youth protection officials say an unspecified number of children who were with the ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect, often called a cult, have recently returned to the province.
Myriam Sabourin, a spokeswoman for the regional health authority in the Laurentians region, north of Montreal, told The Canadian Press the children were under the authority’s care and were being provided services appropriate to their unique cultural background.
The group lived for many years in seclusion in Ste-Agathe-Des-Monts, Que., but when they were informed of a child protection investigation, they moved in the middle of the night on November 18, 2013, to near Chatham, Ont. An official human rights report later criticized Quebec authorities for being too slow to intervene.
An Ontario court eventually declined to order the children into care. There were highly publicized fears of a mass suicide if the children were to be seized, and some even tried to leave before the case was decided, heading for Guatemala via Trinidad and Tobago. Within a year, they had all fled en masse to Guatemala. After about three years, the group moved to Mexico, reportedly after being the target of persecution in Guatemala. There was a dawn raid in 2016, for example, but no children were seized.
The concerns of Canadian authorities included broad claims of social isolation and emotional abuse, and, as a judge in Ontario once described, “forced marriage of children under 16 years of age, the failure to provide adequate education for the children, inappropriate discipline of children by use of force, and neglect of the parents in the physical care of the children.”
Girls, for example, were forced to wear stockings day and night, which led to fungal infections.