Leaders of Jewish Lev Tahor sect convicted of child kidnapping, sexual exploitation in U.S.

Montreal -

U.S. prosecutors say two leaders of a Jewish sect that has been previously investigated in Quebec have been convicted of kidnapping and child sexual exploitation.

Nachman Helbrans and Mayer Rosner, both U.S. citizens, are leaders of the sect known as Lev Tahor, U.S. authorities said. The two were convicted Wednesday of masterminding a plan to kidnap two minors, a 14-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy, from their mother in Woodridge, New York.

A release from the U.S. Department of Justice says the defendants smuggled the children into Mexico, where the young girl was returned to “an illegal sexual relationship with an adult man.”

“Nachman Helbrans and Mayer Rosner brazenly kidnapped two children from their mother in the middle of the night," said U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams in the release.

U.S. officials say Helbrans and Rosner took control of Lev Tahor around 2017 -- Helbrans became leader and Rosner was his top lieutenant.

Together, officials say, they pushed Lev Tahor to embrace “several extreme practices, including child marriages and underage sex.”

Officials also alleged that in 2017, Helbrans arranged for his niece, who was 12-years-old at the time, to be married to an 18-year-old man.

Officials say that after becoming religiously married the next year – the two were never legally married -- they “immediately began a sexual relationship with the goal of procreation.”

In the fall of 2018, the young girl’s mother reportedly fled the group’s compound and arrived in the U.S. in November. Officials alleged the defendants then devised a plan to return the girl, who authorities refer to as "Minor-1," to their Guatemala compound and her “husband,” who was then 20-years-old.

“Then, in December 2018, they kidnapped Minor-1 and her brother in the middle of the night from a home in upstate New York and transported them through various states and, eventually, to Mexico,” authorities said Wednesday in the release issued after Helbrans and Rosner were convicted.

“The defendants used disguises, aliases, drop phones, fake travel documents, an encrypted application, and a secret pact to execute on their kidnapping plan."

Hundreds of law enforcement officers were involved in the search for the two children; they were eventually located in Mexico.

Both Helbrans and Rosner face possible life-imprisonment.

Quebec youth protection services investigated Lev Tahor five years ago, amid allegations of child neglect in the community of about 200 people -- half of them children -- in Ste-Agathe-des-Monts, Que. 

A 2013 probe concluded that the community's housing was inadequate, the children's health needs were being neglected and they were not receiving a proper education. There were also allegations of underage marriages.

As a Quebec court ordered that 14 Lev Tahor children be placed in foster care in November 2013, sect members fled overnight, settling first in the southwestern Ontario region of Chatham-Kent. After Ontario courts took up the case, the group uprooted again, and by the summer of 2014, many had moved to Guatemala. 

-- With files from The Canadian Press.