Women in Laitman's Teaching: The Doctrine in His Own Words
How Bnei Baruch treats women is usually told by former female participants. Here the case is different: Michael Laitman speaks himself. Not in leaked correspondence and not in a private conversation — on camera, as a teacher explaining to his students how the world is built. Below are three fragments from video recordings in which he sets out his view of women, virginity, and infidelity.
These are his own words — a primary recording, not a media retelling and not the claim of former students. So the system’s standard answer — “these are blackmailers and disgruntled ex-members” — does not stick to these fragments: it is the leader speaking.
Video Recordings
The three fragments below come from an investigation by journalist Gur Megiddo (the full recording is publicly available); the same material also appears in the breakdown of the silenced testimonies.
“He Is Owed Many Women”
In the first fragment, Laitman describes male power as a right to sexual possession.
Laitman: A man who dominates — and this dominance truly belongs to men — must therefore also present himself as a man, as a great one, with great potential for sexual satisfaction, and many women are his due. And he must show everyone that he is strong not only in dominance, but also like some big ape that really has male potency, yes, with dozens of little monkeys beside him. That's it.
This is the same public language of dominance found in the official text “Football — You Are Sex!”, but now without the metaphor: power is equated directly with sexual possession, and women with a retinue of “little monkeys” around the strong male. No specific act is proven here — but this is the norm students hear straight from their teacher: the woman as an accessory to male power.
Reshimo, Virginity, and the “Imprint” of Previous Men
Next, Laitman steps outside Kabbalah altogether and holds forth as a “super-expert” — this time on genetics.
Laitman: Why do women have a special sign that this is a virgin woman? Because every man who has been with a woman leaves a reshimo of his own. And even if she has had ten men, in the child she bears, in the infant, there are reshimot from all ten previous men.
Nitza: What do you mean by reshimot?
Laitman: In that infant there are data — psychological, physiological, spiritual — from all the previous men she was with.
Nitza: That sounds very ambiguous. I can understand that we remember our previous relationships, but…
Laitman: We don't remember; it's not a matter of memory. I'm talking about something else here. It's a matter of genes, it's a matter of hormones, it's a matter of the inner impression within her flesh. And therefore, if a man wants to be sure that the child born from her will be only his, then he must take care to secure such a woman.
What Laitman passes off as biology is telegony: the idea that previous partners “imprint” themselves on a future child. Science refuted it long ago; genes do not work this way. What matters is the hierarchy he draws from it: a woman’s “purity” is measured by the number of her previous men, and the woman herself becomes an object the man must “secure for himself.”
On its own, the doctrine convicts no one. But it hands students a ready vocabulary in which intimacy with a man of “spiritual status” supposedly counts as a “step of ascent.” And it is not some anonymous chat user who supplies that vocabulary — it is the teacher himself, on the record.
In the testimonies, the same formula returns in the words of women — and that is already a different level of evidence. Ilanit Yezersky, a clinical social worker and former participant in the inner group in Petah Tikva, testified under oath in the Bat Yam Magistrate’s Court (September 2022): several women told her about sexual relationships with Laitman that were presented as part of “spiritual ascent.” According to her testimony, she asked Laitman about it himself — he first denied it, then admitted it and responded by saying that he had “harmed no one.” Victim “A” put the same logic into words in a Channel 12 interview: “He built individual relationships with each woman in order to achieve spiritual enlightenment.”
How that same formula already sounded in sworn testimony is gathered in the summary of the five complainants’ testimonies and the court statement of expert Rachel Lichtenstein.
For Her, One Man; For Him, Forgiven Infidelity
Laitman: Tens of percent of divorces we could have prevented if we had prepared them properly to accept the man's infidelity. We must understand that this will certainly happen in every family.
Placed side by side, the two fragments give one standard with two measures: a woman’s fidelity Laitman grounds in “genes” and an “imprint,” while male infidelity he declares inevitable and deserving of forgiveness. Control over the intimate and family life of participants is one of the persistent markers by which specialists describe high-control groups; the comparison of the documented record against these criteria is gathered in a separate breakdown.
From the Doctrine to the Documented Record
Laitman is a teacher, and what he says on camera is the content of his lessons, not a slip in a private chat. The same idea is visible further down the community’s floors: from his words on the recording to what women later described under oath.
A specialist named it first. Rachel Lichtenstein, director general of the Israeli Center for Cult Victims, testifying in court in January 2023, said it plainly: “The harm to women is caused not only by Laitman himself… His behavior trickles down to other men in the community.”
The testimonies describe the same thing more concretely. In the summary of the five complainants’ testimonies, two of them already speak of a system: one filed a complaint about “a system of intimate relationships with Laitman and other senior members … using their spiritual authority,” another testified that “senior members of the group exploited new joiners.” Mona recounted that she was required to have relations “with men from the inner circle,” and that this demand “was presented through their special spiritual status.”
And there is the level where all this has already entered police files. A man from the same circle, Knesset member Hanoch Milwidsky, is the subject of a documented LAHAV 433 investigation — but this is suspicion and an investigation, not a verdict.
Video, a specialist in court, the complainants’ testimonies, a police case — these are different levels of evidence, and they cannot be collapsed into one verdict. But lined up from the top down, they show one thing: the question of women in Bnei Baruch never reached Laitman himself as a full external investigation.