3 Cult Leaders Sentenced In Child-Marriage Abduction Of 2 HV Children

HUDSON VALLEY, NY — Three more members of the extremist Jewish sect call Lev Tahor have been sentenced for kidnapping a 14-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy from their mother, who had fled the cult.

The Weingarten brothers, Yakov, Shmiel and Yoil, are U.S. citizens and senior leaders of the sect, which embraced several extreme practices, including forced family separations, child marriages, and underage sex. After being formed in Israel, the sect moved to Brooklyn, then to Canada and then to Guatemala.

Prosecutors said in 2017 Lev Tahor leaders arranged for a 12-year-old girl to be “married” to a then-18-year-old man. Though they were never legally married, they were religiously “married” the following year, when the girl was 13 and her “husband” was 19. Lev Tahor leadership, including the Weingartens, required young brides to have sex with their husbands, to tell people outside Lev Tahor that they were not married, and to lie about their ages. For example, Lev Tahor leaders instructed child brides to deliver babies inside their homes instead of at a hospital to conceal the mothers’ young ages from outsiders.

The children were the niece and nephew of Lev Tahor’s leader, Nachman Helbrans, The Forward reported.

In October 2018, the girl's mother determined that it was no longer safe for her children to remain in the Lev Tahor community, which was then living in Guatemala. She escaped from the group’s compound, arrived in the U.S. in early November, and was eventually joined by all six of her children, prosecutors said.

In November 2018, a Brooklyn family court granted her sole custody and prohibited their father, a leader in Lev Tahor, from communicating with the children.

After the mother settled in the Hudson Valley with her children, the Weingartens and their co-conspirators devised a plan to kidnap the girl, to return her to Guatemala and to her then-20-year-old “husband," prosecutors said.

In December 2018, they grabbed her and her brother in the middle of the night from a home in Sullivan County and transported them through various states and, eventually, to Mexico. They used disguises, aliases, drop phones, fake travel documents, and an encrypted application, prosecutors said.

At the time of the kidnapping, Lev Tahor leaders were seeking asylum for their entire community in the Islamic Republic of Iran, prosecutors said.

Following a three-week search involving hundreds of local, federal, and international law enforcement entities, the two children were found in Mexico and returned to New York. In or about March 2019 and March 2021, members of Lev Tahor again tried to kidnap them, but were unsuccessful.

All nine men accused in the case have been convicted or pleaded guilty — including Helbrans, whose sister, the children's mother, pleaded with the judge to show him mercy during sentencing, the Forward reported. Their father was the founder of the sect, according to the Forward.

Yakov Weingarten, 34, Shmiel Weingarten, 28, and Yoil Weingarten, 36, were sentenced to 14 years, 14 years, and 12 years in prison, respectively, for child sexual exploitation and kidnapping offenses. In addition to the prison terms, they were sentenced to five years of supervised release.

"The sentencing of the Weingarten brothers holds them accountable for kidnapping children from their mother in the middle of the night, including for the purpose of coercing a child into a sexual relationship with an adult," Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in an announcement about the sentencing. "This Office will do everything in its power to protect children and use every available tool to investigate and prosecute those who sexually exploit them."

Williams praised the outstanding work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the New York State Police, the Sullivan County District Attorney’s Office, U.S. 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.