Documents presented last Thursday at a US federal court show that leaders of the fringe Hasidic cult Lev Tahor last year requested asylum from Iran and swore allegiance to its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
According to the documents, first reported late Saturday by Yeshiva World News, the ultra-Orthodox cult in November 2018 asked Tehran for “asylum, protection and religious freedom of the families of its loyal members in Cheshek Shlomo community.”
Four more alleged members of Lev Tahor, an extremist Jewish sect based in Guatemala, have been charged with taking part in a plot to nab two children who are living with their mother upstate and take them back to their father at the group’s compound.
Revealed in court papers unsealed on Friday, defendants Mordechay Malka, Shmiel Weingarten, Yoil Weingarten and Yakov Weingarten were charged with participating in a scheme to take the two children from their mother, who had fled the Lev Tahor sect.
A Lev Tahor cult member was arrested in New York, Wednesday night, and is being charged with kidnapping. Mordechai Yoel Malka was arrested upon his arrival at Newark Airport, as he arrived on a flight from Guatemala.
He was expected to be charged with identity theft, as he allegedly used a fake passport to fly to the United States, and kidnapping charges. Malka was allegedly the Michallel Shabbos who drove 14-year-old Yante Teller and her 12-year-old brother Chaim when they were kidnapped from Woodridge early on a Shabbos morning in December of 2018.