Five Women Against Laitman: How the Cult and the Police Silence Testimony
Where you are in the dossier: Harm and testimonies Mixed evidence
Bnei Baruch Investigation · Entry point · Part 4 of 4
Hanoch Milwidsky was questioned under caution on suspicion of rape and inducing a witness to lie in her testimony. His teacher, Michael Laitman, was never questioned at all. Five women testified about sexual abuse by Laitman, and taken together, according to TheMarker, those testimonies make him the primary suspect. Laitman is a religious predator, shielded twice over: by the cult apparatus from inside, by police inaction from outside. It is the student they question.
A fresh complaint vanished inside the police. Complainant “C” (TheMarker), who had left the cult, wrote from abroad about a series of sexual assaults by Laitman; an officer confirmed in writing that the complaint had gone to the investigations department. She was never called in, and after the newsroom asked, the filing could “not be found.” The police had to be shown their own acknowledgement letter.
Women at the “Bnei Baruch” congress in Kazakhstan. This shot shows a large female environment and an atmosphere of “unity,” within which workshops (sadnaot) were presented as a practice of connection, alignment of speech, and submission to a shared framework.
The earliest testimony was buried a decade ago. Complainant “B” signed an affidavit: at congresses she was summoned to Laitman’s room, a man decades older, and she slept with him several times out of fear that the spiritual leader would reject her; in the affidavit, contact with him is called “disgusting to me.” She gave a filmed interview, then buried both the affidavit and the interview, explaining to acquaintances that her relatives abroad had been visited by threatening guests. The newsroom knows this woman’s identity, and her testimony is detailed in a separate article on Katya Sukhova.
The complaint about those threats was brought to police by the Israeli Center for Victims of Cults. Instead of investigating the men who went to the complainant’s relatives, police pursued a journalist and demanded the tape of the buried interview. Judge Oded Moreno refused, ruling that journalistic privilege prevented disclosure. The refusal protected the source, not the substance of the accusations. The threats were never investigated.
Complainants against "Kabbalah La'Am"
א׳
Testified about a system of intimate relationships with Michael Laitman, using his position as a spiritual leader. She further testified that Hanoch Milwidsky instructed her how to lie in court in order to deny a relationship with Laitman, and that Milwidsky himself attacked and raped her. She gave testimony to the police.ב׳
Signed a declaration documenting how she was allegedly forced to enter an intimate relationship with Laitman through the use of his position as a spiritual leader. She concealed the declaration and the interview she gave about it because of threats she allegedly received against the lives of her family members abroad. Police tried to investigate, but B did not cooperate.ג׳
Filed a complaint about a system of intimate relationships with Laitman and other senior members of Kabbalah La'Am, using their spiritual authority. She contacted the police to give testimony, but the police never contacted her to take her testimony.ד׳
Testified that senior members of the group exploited new joiners by using their position as people who allegedly possessed spiritual abilities, and also about cases in which she saw Laitman stroking the buttocks of a woman in the group in public. She withdrew her intention to submit a declaration about this after meeting with Milwidsky and others. Police did not investigate.ה׳
A clinical social worker who testified that her patients told her about intimate relationships with Laitman while he was their spiritual teacher. For some time, she refrained from disclosing what she had learned against the backdrop of threats to exclude her family, including her young daughter, from Kabbalah La'Am frameworks. Police did not investigate.
Complaints That Did Not Move on Their Own
Witness “R” was intercepted on the eve of signing. An affidavit drafted with attorney Carmel Pomeranz documented the men of the “inner circle,” whom visiting women take to hold higher spiritual rank, and three separate instances when she witnessed Laitman stroking a cult member’s buttocks in public. The day before signing, she wrote her lawyer: Bnei Baruch had called again, offering a meeting with Hanoch, Parovoz, and Mushi. “Do you think this is a trap?” Contact ended. The affidavit was never signed. Pomeranz’s complaint about witness tampering went nowhere.
Another complainant was forced to withdraw her affidavit by threats to her family. At a court hearing on January 23, 2023, journalist Gur Megiddo stated he had seen evidence: she had been sent addresses of her relatives (The Seventh Eye). Because she never underwent cross-examination, the law bars reliance on her affidavit. The mechanism functioned as calculated.
This is how it worked years before “R.” David Sakiyan, a former Laitman follower, told The Seventh Eye that in 2016 Milwidsky prevented his then-wife from filing an affidavit charging Laitman with sexual assault. And by that same affidavit of Sakiyan’s, filed in one of Bnei Baruch’s lawsuits, the next round of pressure came not as a threat but as generosity: his family in crisis was invited to come to the cult’s house in Petah Tikva every midday and take “as much food as she wants for the family,” and a lawyer Milwidsky knew was brought into his criminal case free of charge. “It was clear to both of us that he was buying our silence so we would not come out against Bnei Baruch and would not testify against them,” Sakiyan wrote, and in the same place he was precise: “He did not say it outright, but it was clear this was not out of kindness.” The same mechanism, turned inside out: a witness can be silenced without being frightened.
Ilanit Yezersky is a clinical social worker who left “Kabbalah La’Am” in Petah Tikva several years ago. The cult was everything for her all at once: neighbors, clients, her income, and her entire family’s life (TheMarker, Bizportal). Several women confided to her that they were sleeping with Laitman as part of an effort to reach higher spiritual levels. She demanded a meeting with the spiritual leader. According to her account, Laitman admitted his transgressions and promised to reform.
Pictured is Ilanit Yezersky, a clinical social worker to whom Laitman admitted that he has sexual relations but does not harm his female students.
She repeated that same conversation under oath in September 2022 before Judge Azaria Alkalay at the Bat Yam Magistrate’s Court. The Seventh Eye quotes it verbatim: when she told Laitman to his face that she knew about his relationships with women who were not his wife, he first denied it, then admitted: “I haven’t harmed anyone.” Hearing about his own wife and children, he agreed: “Yes, you’re right, I did cause harm. What do you suggest I do?” And when advised to get treatment, he laughed: “I’m already old.” One admission, delivered twice: to journalists and to the court.
There was no one inside the cult to complain to. At that same hearing, Bnei Baruch’s human resources director Tahel Shadmon, formally responsible for preventing sexual harassment, answered under cross-examination by attorney Yuval Yoaz when asked what she had done about the grave accusations against Laitman: “I did nothing.” The family route of that complaint is detailed separately.
Outside the cult, the complaint was received but never advanced past the center. In January 2023 Rachel Lichtenstein, director of the Israeli Center for Victims of Cults, testified that in 2016 a woman came to them whom the spiritual leader had drawn into a sexual relationship; she felt compelled to consent because of his authority and her fear. The center’s clinical director spent hours verifying the account. Laitman’s treatment of women, in Lichtenstein’s assessment, is emulated by other men in the cult. Police never followed up on that referral.
The fifth witness was reached through her child. A clinical social worker knew what was happening from her own patients and remained silent: her family faced expulsion from “Kabbalah La’Am.” The family had entered the cult when their daughter was seven. By the time of the boycott she was twelve; she lost all her friends at once and begged her parents to return. This is what a destructive cult charges for a woman’s silence: an organized boycott of her child.
Olesya, Gelman’s Office, and Legal Support
One court version was substituted in advance. In statements signed before a lawyer, Olesya names those involved and describes how, according to her account, the lie for court was prepared. That primary testimony is examined in a separate article.
Why “Consent” Does Not Work Here as a Concept
The Israeli Penal Code treats this as a distinct criminal offense: sexual relations between a minister of religion and a person receiving counsel or instruction from him. A minister of religion under the law is someone who “presents himself as possessing special spiritual properties.” For twenty years Laitman has presented himself this way: with answers to every question, from geopolitics to intimate life. Women came to him for spiritual guidance, and the same years of dependency and unpaid work for the cult precede Mona’s testimony, Katya Sukhova’s account, and Olesya’s story.
Victim “A” described it in one sentence in a Channel 12 interview: “He built individual relationships with each woman to achieve spiritual enlightenment.”
A Structure with Political Cover
Police and press did not move against the cult until after an election: Milwidsky, then legal adviser to “Kabbalah La’Am,” took 26th place on the Likud list, a slot won with fewer than five thousand votes, on the votes of a cult enrolled in the party in advance and in an organized wave. Testimonies of sexual abuse moved nothing. A Knesset seat moved everything.
In summer 2025, police questioned under caution in the same case the cult’s legal adviser and educator, attorney Zvi Gelman and Dr. Eli Vinokur, on suspicion of witness tampering (Haaretz, Ynet; per the affidavit of Binyamin Rafaeli, Vinokur translated the explanations for her into Russian, per The Seventh Eye); neither is suspected of sexual crimes (News1, The Times of Israel). The roles and the course of the interrogations are analyzed in the procedural-node article. Laitman was not summoned this time either.
August 11, 2022. Omri Maniv. Testimony of “A”
On August 11, 2022, the day Milwidsky won the primary, journalist Omri Maniv published a four-post thread on X. He attributes the backing of almost the entire Likud leadership to one thing: an army of thousands of registered party members from the cult. Then comes the announcement of an interview with a former member. According to her, Laitman sexually exploited her, and according to her, she received money from the cult for false court testimony that nothing happened; Milwidsky was the one who instructed her to lie.
The fourth post in the same thread is a denial. Laitman and Milwidsky categorically reject these claims and note that the same woman signed, on two different dates, affidavits confirming their version. Accusation and denial came from the same author minutes apart. The thread is reproduced in full here. The cult’s defense rests entirely on that signature, the one the woman says she gave for money and on instruction.
Four years earlier, Rina Ben-Ami recorded on a hidden camera how Kabbalah La’Am’s legal adviser declares that complainant “B”'s testimony was bought “even for 100 thousand euros,” offering no evidence; the recording is analyzed in Milwidsky’s profile. It is one tool pointed both ways: when a woman says she was paid for silence, the cult responds that someone else paid for her words.
A month later the cult filed suit, not against “A,” not against Omri Maniv, not against News 12, but for 2.87 million shekels against Binyamin Rafaeli, a bodyguard who confirmed her account on air. The filing calls the testimonies of abuse an “extortion attempt,” and in a cynical inversion the cult recast their circulation as “sexual harassment” of its own female students. The pressure now came in the form of a claim form. It attached no evidence (The Seventh Eye).
Testimony from “A” gave the investigation momentum. In summer 2024 a LAHAV 433 delegation travelled to Moscow and took her statement. In summer 2025 police questioned Milwidsky, Gelman, and Vinokur.
Laitman was never questioned.
Five testimonies have been sitting since the middle of the previous decade. Police told TheMarker that the 2018 investigation was completed and the case closed by prosecutors, and that a “review” is now under way regarding the new information. They have not initiated contact with any of the five women, and for a second year they have not said a word about Michael Laitman, Milwidsky’s teacher.
This investigation continues. If you have information about these events, or if you were yourself a participant or witness, contact us.