Key figures from a controversial ultraorthodox Jewish sect with roots in Quebec were arrested this week and charged with kidnapping.
Nachman Helbrans, the purported leader of the group known as Lev Tahor, was detained in Mexico with Mayer and Jacob Rosner and deported to New York, where they were arrested by American authorities. Days earlier, on December 23rd, another senior member of the group, Aron Rosner, was arrested in New York City.
The men are accused of kidnapping the children of a woman who had left the sect recently because of the extremism of its leadership. 14-year-old Yante Teller and her 12-year-old brother Chaim were reportedly found in the Mexican town of Tenago del Aire, and are currently in Quebec under the care of the regional health authority in the Laurentians.
They will be sent back to the U.S. soon to be reunited with their mother.
Founded in Israel and based in New York for much of the 1990's, Lev Tahor had been based in Quebec from 2003 until five years ago, when provincial youth protection advocates began investigating allegations of child neglect among the sect of around 200 people, based at the time in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts. The probe concluded that the children's health was being neglected, as was their education -- most of them could only speak Yiddish -- and a court ordered 14 children be placed in foster care.
That caused the sect to flee overnight, settling first in Chatham-Kent, Ontario, and then in Guatemala by the summer of 2014. Reports emerged last year that the group had moved once again, this time ot the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.