In January 1908, he was arrested under the name Meer Wallach by French police while carrying twelve 500-ruble banknotes that had been stolen from a bank in Tiflis during the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery that took place on 26 June 1907. The Russian government demanded his extradition, but France's Minister for Justice Aristide Briand ruled that his crime was 'political', and ordered him to be deported. He went to Belfast in Ireland where he joined his sister Rifka and her family. There, he taught foreign languages in the Jewish Jaffe Public Elementary School until 1910.