Hanoch Milwidsky and Olesya: Blackmail Claims Against the Background of Years of Inaction
Hanoch Milwidsky and Olesya: Investigation of Blackmail Claims, Blocked Testimony, and Political Cover
Bnei Baruch Investigation · Entry point · Part 3 of 4
In 2021, Hanoch Milwidsky filed a lawsuit against those who were distributing an intimate image allegedly involving him. Under oath, he stated that the image was partly fabricated: the upper part was genuine, while the lower part had been edited to compromise him. The proceeding in the Bat Yam Magistrate’s Court (Judge Azaria Alkalay) showed that the opposing side’s attorneys were prepared to call a woman who, according to their version, had received the image directly from Milwidsky. As soon as the prospect of a technical examination of the file and witness testimony appeared, Milwidsky withdrew the lawsuit. TheMarker later separately examined this procedural knot: the question of the photograph already existed in 2021, long before the parliamentary statement about blackmail.
On September 5, 2022, two months before the Knesset elections, the Bnei Baruch structure went on the counterattack by filing a 2.87 million shekel lawsuit in the Lod District Court against former bodyguard Binyamin Rafaeli (“Boki”). The legal team was led by attorneys Tzvi Gelman, Erez Percy, and Dan Shavel. Two years later, in the fall of 2024, Milwidsky brought the same affair to the parliamentary podium and called the entire story a years-long blackmail.
But today this story cannot be read only as a story about a photograph and political rhetoric. Several lines converge around Milwidsky’s name at once: his long-standing role as legal counsel for the movement, episodes of pressure on victims, a civil proceeding from which a key witness was not allowed, and Olesya’s story, whose testimony could have destroyed not only a parliamentary career but also the protective contour around Michael Laitman.
In this article: Olesya’s testimony and the blocked video · Milwidsky in the Bnei Baruch structure · The civil proceeding and victim “A” · The photograph and the parliamentary scandal
Milwidsky and Bnei Baruch
Before reading his version of events, it is necessary to understand who is speaking. Bnei Baruch (“Kabbalah Laam”) is a closed movement with a rigid internal hierarchy, financial obligations, and a high discipline of loyalty. The organization has repeatedly been the subject of investigations by TheMarker, The Seventh Eye, and Galei Tzahal. Its spiritual leader Michael Laitman appears in the testimonies of former female participants in connection with allegations of abuse of authority and sexual exploitation, including the publicly documented testimonies of Mona and Katya Sukhova.
Leader of the Kabbalah Laam movement Michael Laitman. Photo: David Becher.
Milwidsky is not an outside observer in this structure. For many years he was the organization’s legal counsel: according to journalistic investigations, he took part in legal pressure on critics of the movement and in public defense of its leadership. As The Seventh Eye wrote on December 31, 2024, his municipal path through “Beyachad,” then the 2022 Likud primaries and his later parliamentary career, were part of a broader line of political advancement for people from Kabbalah Laam. In a 2022 TheMarker article, his political trajectory is considered part of the systemic penetration of people from this circle into the Israeli parliament.
Early Crises: Ginat, Libi, and the Logic of Discrediting
The collage distributed by Milwidsky’s opponents is built on a simple principle of comparison. On the left are beach selfies with identifying features marked. On the right is a WhatsApp screenshot: “Let me see your ass open for me with just the string…”, time 16:47, with an intimate image under the message. At the bottom is a photograph of the same person with Prime Minister Netanyahu at an official event.
Earlier, in 2014, Milwidsky was named in a similar allegation by an Israeli woman identified as “K,” who told Omri Maniv about a physical assault: according to her, he pinned her in a room and stopped only when she threatened to bite his neck. In court, Milwidsky answered with a conspiratorial version, linking the witness to the Crime Minister movement and hatred of Likud supporters. In 2021, the defense attorneys were ready to conduct a technical examination of the photograph. The examination did not take place.
Political career here does not close old roles; it continues them in another institutional form. This is especially visible where the figure spent years acting as an intermediary between a closed structure, courts, journalists, and women trying to speak publicly.
The same logic is visible in each documented case, from Katya Sukhova, whose information about contacting a journalist leaked to the organization before the article was published, to Mona, whose discrediting campaign the structure launched immediately after her public appearance. In all three stories, the movement’s reaction to dangerous testimony followed one scenario: the substance of the allegations was not refuted; the person was attacked. Milwidsky is not a peripheral figure in this scheme. He is its legal architect.
Victim “A” (Olesya) later said directly in a News 12 investigation: it was Milwidsky who instructed her before the court hearing on how to deny sexual relations with Laitman. This is not an indirect conclusion, but her version, later recounted in court materials and by The Seventh Eye. In the 2.87 million shekel defamation lawsuit that Bnei Baruch filed on September 5, 2022, in the Lod District Court against Binyamin Rafaeli, and in later publications, it was recorded that attorney Tzvi Gelman and Dr. Eli Vinokur, who translated the instructions into Russian, were present at that briefing meeting according to Rafaeli’s affidavit. As follows from the same court account, Olesya cried during the briefing, feeling that she was being forced to lie about a rape she attributed to Laitman. According to Rafaeli, the organization had to pay Olesya $20,000 for the false version of events in court; Bnei Baruch, Milwidsky, and Gelman denied those claims.
Three Images - One Face
The collage distributed by Milwidsky’s opponents is built on a simple principle of comparison. On the left are beach selfies with identifying features marked. On the right is a WhatsApp screenshot: “Let me see your ass open for me with just the string…”, time 16:47, with an intimate image under the message. At the bottom is a photograph of the same person with Prime Minister Netanyahu at an official meeting.
In The Seventh Eye’s court account from April 16, 2025, this collage received procedural context. Milwidsky claimed that the photograph was a fake and a blackmail tool, while Rafaeli’s attorney Dudi Parhiya asked him a different question in the Lod District Court: whether the image was a frame from a video that, according to the defense version, he himself had sent to A. Milwidsky answered: “Nonsense,” denying both the authenticity of that version and the photograph’s connection to sexual relations with A.
The September 18, 2024 TheMarker publication adds an important fork to this: back in January 2021, Appelbaum’s side tried to raise the question of examining the image and possibly calling the woman who, according to its version, could confirm receiving the photograph from Milwidsky. The case never reached that examination: the proceeding was withdrawn as part of an agreement. Therefore, the parliamentary version about blackmail does not float in the air by itself. It appears on top of an already existing court episode in which authenticity was never checked.
June 19, 2023. Education Committee
On June 19, 2023, at a meeting of the Knesset Education, Culture, and Sports Committee, MK Ofer Cassif (Hadash-Ta’al) referred to the allegations already surrounding Milwidsky’s name. Milwidsky answered: “You support terror.” Cassif, according to available reporting: “Go rape another one.”
This exchange in the Knesset only returned public attention to what was already in the court field. TheMarker itself recorded that Milwidsky describes the events as blackmail, but for several years after the image appeared he did not file a police complaint over it; when the newspaper checked the status of the complaint, police would not confirm it without a case number, and a check through Knesset security showed that no complaint had been filed through it. For this article, the point is not to argue with the word “blackmail” itself, but to hold the gap between the loud parliamentary statement and the absence of a publicly visible examination that could clarify where the photograph came from. For comparison: the women whose complaints appear in the case, Mona and Katya Sukhova, never received a court hearing.
The Civil Proceeding and Victim “A”
It is especially revealing that, in parallel with the parliamentary statements, another, less spectacular but far more important contour continued to exist: a civil defamation case in the Lod District Court, accompanied by the association’s 2.8 million shekel lawsuit against a former employee. In this proceeding, the Bnei Baruch structure tried to defend its version of events while preventing the woman whose words form the basis of the criminal line from being called as a witness. The court refused to call victim “A,” even though her testimony is exactly what connects Laitman, pressure on a witness, and Milwidsky’s own role in a single story.
That made the conflict even more revealing. On one side, in the public sphere, Milwidsky spoke about blackmail and political persecution. On the other, in the very legal field where his version could have faced the key witness directly, the civil proceeding remained closed to her appearance. As a result, the question of who exactly would be able to speak on the record about his role became not only a legal question, but an institutional one.
Everything described above is the political and legal contour around Milwidsky. Below is Olesya’s story: the reason this contour existed.
Olesya. Moscow. Blocked Testimony
In July 2025, the central investigative unit LAHAV 433 summoned Hanoch Milwidsky for questioning under warning on suspicion of indecent acts, rape, and inducement of a witness. According to Olesya’s version as presented in publications about the case, Michael Laitman systematically abused her; then she was forced to give false testimony in court in favor of the organization. Milwidsky, according to the same version, drove her to a hotel in Petah Tikva and sexually assaulted her there as well. In the same month, his longtime partner in lawsuits, Tzvi Gelman, and Gordon College vice president Eli Vinokur were also questioned under warning in Lod in this case. Milwidsky defended himself with a version of “political persecution,” for which, according to court accounts, no evidence was presented, and stated in the trial over the organization’s lawsuit against Rafaeli that he had been “more or less a driver” for Olesya.
This is exactly where the July 27, 2025 TheMarker article adds the central frame: according to the newspaper’s assessment, the investigation against Milwidsky does not claim to reveal the full picture around Kabbalah Laam and Michael Laitman. That changes the weight of Olesya’s story. She becomes not only the complainant in a case against an MK, but also the point at which a broader mechanism could have been tested: who prepared the testimony, who translated the instructions, who protected Laitman, and why the line concerning the movement’s own leader remained at the edge of the investigation.
In the summer of 2024, the investigative team first sent a delegation to Moscow. The meeting with Olesya took place and was officially recorded. She described what had happened. On July 26, 2025, a video interview with Olesya for News 12 was released, in which she quoted Milwidsky’s phrase in his office: “We are having a professional conversation, and in the middle of it he says: ‘Let’s fuck, everyone does it.’” Earlier, she had stated directly that Milwidsky gets what he wants by frightening victims with violence.
Had her testimony reached a criminal court, it could have become central to assessing the suspicions against Milwidsky and checking the allegations against Laitman. The later attempt to call Olesya as a witness in the civil proceeding did not happen: the question of her participation remained in a separate procedural dispute, and the court did not open a new stage of testimony for her.
In the civil proceeding, this line remained without movement. But this is precisely where the entire structure of the protective mechanism becomes visible. Olesya’s story matters not only as a separate testimony, but as the point where an MK, a lawyer, translators from the inner circle, and an apparatus able to process dangerous testimony into a form convenient for the movement all converge. How this scheme worked around Galman and Vinokur is shown in detail in the investigation into the silencing of testimonies.
Milwidsky was reelected to the Knesset. In September 2024, he went to the microphone and said he was a victim of blackmail.
Continue reading: How Testimonies Were Silenced - the mechanism that kept the complaints of Katya, Mona, and Olesya inside the structure and prevented them from entering the criminal contour.
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