Hanoch Milwidsky: How Defending Bnei Baruch Became a Political Biography
Hanoch Milwidsky: How Defending Bnei Baruch Became a Political Biography
This is in the materials of an open Facebook post: Larisa and Erez Ginat were both married and both belonged to Bnei Baruch. Hanoch Milwidsky invested money in Larisa’s business, then entered into regular sexual relations with her without the knowledge of her husband, his fellow member in the movement. The family was destroyed.
The Ginat case does not exhaust the scale of this story. The issue here is not only the biography of a Likud politician and not only private relations inside one community. In investigations and court materials, Milwidsky’s name appears again where Bnei Baruch faced its most sensitive crises: allegations of violence, discrediting complainants, pressure on critics, and attempts to keep an internal conflict under control.
That is why his political advancement reads not as an ordinary lawyer’s career. The Seventh Eye described this connection as a long trajectory: from legal adviser to the association and the municipal “Beyachad” list in Petah Tikva to the 2022 Likud primaries and a Knesset seat. The article below examines Milwidsky at the intersection of three lines: crises around Bnei Baruch; the recurring motif of discrediting women who spoke about violence; and the conversion of internal organizational loyalty into political power.
This does not replace the separate dossiers. It connects them into one circuit: the blackmail claims and Olesya’s story, the witness not called to court, and suspicions of pressure show different fragments of the same protective infrastructure.
The Libi case: documents from a closed court moved into the media sphere
In the Libi case, a crisis-management pattern is visible: a problem connected to violence is converted into a mode of organizational defense and the discrediting of the woman who spoke about it. That is why the details matter here not as a separate domestic tragedy, but as an example of how the movement and its lawyer reacted to a reputationally dangerous story.
The Kan 11 investigation focused on a young immigrant, Libi. Inside Bnei Baruch, pressure was placed on her to enter a rapid marriage with a member of the movement. According to open publications, the marriage was accompanied by severe domestic violence, after which Libi went to the police. In the TheMarker article of August 5, 2022, this story is tied not to rumor but to a judicial frame: journalist Gur Megiddo wrote that Libi’s husband was convicted under a plea bargain in cases involving assault causing bodily injury under aggravated circumstances and threats.
The movement’s response was described in journalistic materials this way: the husband kept his place in the organization, while Libi was left isolated. Before the investigation aired, Milwidsky, according to the same publications, made accusations against her based on documents from a closed family proceeding. Attention was shifted not to the fact of the violence, but to discrediting the woman who had spoken about it.
For this article, the connection between the roles is the key point: TheMarker documented not only negative rhetoric, but the movement legal adviser’s use of materials from a closed family case in a public campaign against a woman whose complaint had already received criminal-court confirmation through her husband’s conviction.
The recording with Rina Ben-Ami and the version of “bought testimony”
This is a recurring mechanism. A former member of the movement, living outside Israel, described in court materials sexual violence by a senior member of the organization, then refused to continue the exposure. People who communicated with her described messages containing the exact addresses of her relatives. Instead of examining the content of the testimony, another frame entered public circulation: a version about greed, conspiracy, and bought testimony.
Against that background, the hidden recording from journalist Gur Megiddo’s investigation is especially important. During a conversation with former movement member Rina Ben-Ami, Milwidsky stated categorically that one of the witnesses had given false testimony for 100,000 euros. When the journalist demanded evidence, Milwidsky ended the conversation. No publicly confirmed evidence for those words was ever presented in any of the four later defamation lawsuits that the association lost.
The judicial chronology strengthens this episode. On March 2, 2023, TheMarker reported that the Bat Yam Magistrate’s Court dismissed Milwidsky and Bnei Baruch’s lawsuit against Megiddo: Judge Azaria Alkalay pointed to abuse of process, a transparent attempt to move the case to a more convenient judge, and grounds to view the lawsuit as a SLAPP. The court also recognized that Megiddo had proven the defense of responsible journalism.
On January 18, 2024, The Seventh Eye wrote that the Tel Aviv District Court rejected Milwidsky and Bnei Baruch’s appeal and affirmed criticism of their procedural conduct: the judges spoke of “bad faith,” forum shopping, and abuse of court procedure. On May 5, 2024, the association itself withdrew its fourth lawsuit against Megiddo for 800,000 shekels; according to The Seventh Eye’s count, the four lawsuits demanded about 2 million shekels, but Megiddo paid nothing, while Bnei Baruch paid him about 70,000 shekels in costs.
From lawyer to lawmaker
In the photo from an official event, Milwidsky stands in the center: to the left is Education Minister Yoav Kisch, to the right Gilad Shadmon, whose biography is also linked to the movement. Kisch’s spokesperson Shimi Rein is a graduate of the Haifa program launched under the leadership of people from the same circle. Milwidsky taught in that same program before becoming a lawmaker.
Here private biography again turns into an institutional question. Publications about Bnei Baruch describe a movement capable of combining legal pressure on critics, media mobilization, closed internal discipline, and party resources. In such a mechanism, a lawyer who knows how to translate an internal crisis into the language of counter-accusations becomes not merely a service professional, but a strategic figure.
In the 2022 TheMarker publication, his political trajectory is examined as part of the systemic presence of people from Bnei Baruch in the Israeli parliament. In this context, the movement’s lawyer also becomes an intermediary between it and state institutions.
A few months later, TheMarker added a disciplinary layer to this line: the ethics committee of the Tel Aviv District of the Israel Bar Association filed a complaint against Milwidsky over claims of false certification of two witnesses’ signatures, and the already elected lawmaker then introduced a bill to abolish the Bar Association and replace its regulatory body with a council whose leadership would be appointed by the justice minister. For this article, that matters as an institutional frame: the legal conflict around affidavits coincides with an attempt to change the very body meant to examine lawyers’ conduct.
Questioning under warning at LAHAV 433
In July 2025, the LAHAV 433 investigative unit summoned Milwidsky for questioning under warning on suspicion of specific criminal acts: rape, inducement to give false testimony, and indecent acts. According to The Seventh Eye on July 27, 2025, the questioning took place after a long covert investigation and on the eve of Milwidsky’s appointment as chair of the Finance Committee; the police explained the move to an open investigative phase as the result of a “significant development.” The background included the 2022 TheMarker materials and court documents documenting his role as the movement’s internal legal counsel: it was around that role that questions later arose about the boundary between lawful defense and preparing testimony convenient for the organization. In the photo taken at the entrance to the building is the lawmaker’s face after questioning under warning.
The defense position and why the questions remain
Milwidsky and his representatives, as documented in The Seventh Eye’s court reports, described the questioning exclusively as “political persecution,” but according to the protocols did not provide legally significant evidence of a conspiracy. This position is part of the public picture of the case, not a marginal note.
But even accounting for that defense line, the questions do not disappear. A similar shift of focus from facts to personalities appears in the documented stories of women who encountered the organization: Katya, Mona, Olesya. Their accounts met a similar set of reactions: a version of false accusation -> legal pressure -> counter-lawsuits for huge sums -> forced silence.
The open materials do not reduce Milwidsky to a single formula, but they show a stable pattern. He does not look like a peripheral observer: years of chronicles document him as a recurring participant in the legal and political protective circuit. The investigative unit documented his status as a suspect, and that became a procedurally recorded part of his biography.
Continue reading: Hanoch Milwidsky and Olesya - testimony about blackmail, rape in a hotel, and legal pressure that the investigation never brought to trial.
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