US court convicts 2 members of extremist Lev Tahor cult for international kidnapping

Two members of the extremist Jewish Lev Tahor cult have been convicted of kidnapping charges by a New York federal court after a three-week jury trial, US authorities announced on Thursday.

Cousins Mordechay Malka, 27, and Matityau Malka, 30, were found guilty of charges related to conspiracy and international parental kidnapping for their role in the abduction of two children from their mother’s New York home in New York in 2018.

The Malkas, both US citizens, were convicted by the Department of Justice’s Southern District Court of New York in White Plains, north of New York City. US Attorney Damian Williams and the FBI announced the conviction in a joint statement.

Both defendants were found guilty of all charges, including conspiring to commit international parental kidnapping, unlawful use of identification and entering the secure area of an airport under false pretenses. Mordechay Malka was convicted of two counts of international parental kidnapping, and his cousin found guilty of one count of attempted international parental kidnapping.

The most serious convictions carry a maximum sentence of five years in prison; the lesser individual charges have a maximum sentence of three years in prison for each count.

International parental kidnapping is a federal crime that refers to a parent or another individual taking or holding a child outside the US to obstruct another person’s custodial rights. The Malkas did not kidnap their own children, but were involved in taking two siblings away from their mother.

The Malkas are being held in Westchester County Jail north of New York City and will be sentenced in September.

Williams praised the FBI, US Customs and Border Protection, the Department of State and an array of local law enforcement for their help in the case, as well as law enforcement partners in Israel, Mexico, Guatemala and Canada, all countries where the cult has lived.

The authorities said the Malkas and their co-conspirators used disguises, aliases, drop phones, fake travel documents, encrypted technology and organized a secret pact to carry out the kidnapping scheme.

Their two co-conspirators, Nachman Helbrans, the leader of the cult, and Mayer Rosner were convicted in October 2021. The court sentenced them in March to 12-years imprisonment for six convictions, including child sexual exploitation and kidnapping.

The members of the cult were convicted of kidnapping a 14-year-old girl and 12-year-old boy from their mother in the village of Woodridge, in upstate New York. They smuggled the children across the US border into Mexico to reunite the girl with her adult “husband,” with whom she had married in a religious wedding a year prior.

Around 2017, Helbrans had arranged for the girl, his niece, to be “married” to an adult from the group. The girl was paired with the man when she was 13 and he was 19, although they were never legally married since such a union would be illegal.

The pair then “immediately began a sexual relationship with the goal of procreation,” in line with the group’s usual practice, the US Department of Justice said in a statement last year.

The girl’s mother, who is Helbrans’s sister, escaped from the group’s compound in Guatemala in 2018 out of fear for her children’s safety 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.

Helbrans and Rosner then devised a plan to return the girl, then 14, to her then-20-year-old husband. In December of 2018, they kidnapped her and her 12-year-old brother from their mother and smuggled the children across the US border into Mexico to reunite the girl with the “husband.”

The children were recovered in Mexico, and the kidnappers arrested, after a three-week search involving hundreds of law enforcement personnel, and returned to New York.

Three months later, Lev Tahor allegedly attempted to kidnap the girl a second time. In that incident, Matityau Malka approached the girl in Brooklyn several times and gave her cell phones to communicate with the kidnappers, court documents said.

In April, Yakev Weingarten and his brother Shmiel Weingarten were extradited from Guatemala and arraigned before a US federal judge in New York. Yakev Weingarten took the reins of Lev Tahor after Helbrans was imprisoned.

An opposition group, Lev Tahor Survivors, put the cult’s membership at between 300 to 350 people. The group is currently spread out, with some members in Guatemala, and others in Macedonia and the US.

A member of the opposition group told The that he believes Lev Tahor is headed by around 15-20 “abusers,” and the rest are being held mostly against their will. Many of the opposition activists come from religious Jewish communities, which have also taken in some Lev Tahor members who fled from the group.

Lev Tahor, an extremist ultra-Orthodox sect, was founded by Helbrans’s father, Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, in Jerusalem in the 1980s. The group fled to Canada and then to Guatemala in 2014, after coming under intense scrutiny by Canadian authorities for alleged child abuse and child marriage.

The younger Helbrans took the reins of the group in 2017, when his father drowned in Mexico under mysterious circumstances.

Lev Tahor’s moves, machinations, and plans are all murky. Several dozen members of the group have been bouncing around the Balkans in recent months. Some members of the anti-Zionist group applied for political asylum in Iran in 2018. Documents presented at a US federal court in 2019 showed that leaders of the cult swore allegiance to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The group has been described as a cult and as the “Jewish Taliban,” as women and girls older than 3 years old are required to dress in long black robes covering their entire body, leaving only their faces exposed.

The men spend most of their days in prayer and studying specific portions of the Torah. The group adheres to an extreme, idiosyncratic reading of kosher dietary laws.