A rabbi who served two years in prison for kidnapping is fighting to retain refugee status in Canada, claiming that he has a “well-founded fear of persecution” if forced to return to Israel.
In 1994 an American court in Brooklyn, N.Y., convicted Rabbi Erez Shlomo Elbarnes, 41, for kidnapping a 13-year-old boy. The child’s mother had enrolled him in Elbarnes’s yeshiva for bar mitzvah lessons.