Silencing Testimonies: Why the Investigation Against Bnei Baruch Bypassed Michael Laitman for Years
Silencing Testimonies: Why the Investigation Against Bnei Baruch Bypassed Michael Laitman for Years
Bnei Baruch Investigation · Entry point · Part 4 of 4
The foreign complainant whom TheMarker identified as “C” was a former Kabbalah Laam participant who had left the movement several years earlier. She contacted Israeli police by email with a complaint about sexual assaults by Michael Laitman. She received an official written confirmation from a police officer: the complaint had been transferred to the investigations department. The case did not move. Police remembered the complaint existed only after a query from the newspaper. In the investigations department, they could not find the complaint itself; they had to be shown their own confirmation letter.
This is not a single case of a lost document. It is a pattern.
In its August 8, 2025 publication, TheMarker frames this episode as part of a wider chain: “A,” “B,” and “C” lived outside Israel; “R” did not sign a prepared affidavit after contact with people from the movement; and Ilanit Yezersky initially refused to take part in the investigation after being told her family would be expelled from the group’s structures. In this form, the problem looks less like one police department’s failure and more like the repeated fading of testimonies at different stages.
Complaints That Did Not Move on Their Own
Victim “A” publicly described sexual abuse by Milwidsky and by Laitman. In procedural terms, the track connected to the Knesset member showed visible movement: he was questioned. The allegations against the movement’s leader did not lead to comparable action.
This gap - an investigation of Milwidsky without comparable procedural movement on Laitman - was separately emphasized in TheMarker's July 27, 2025 reporting and in TheMarker's August 8, 2025 article. For this article, that is the key frame: the issue is not only the content of individual complaints, but which complaints receive movement and which remain at the edge of the investigation.
In the Aaron Appelbaum case, former participants gave written testimony about sexual exploitation, pressure, and attempts to prevent information from being made public. Some witnesses initially agreed to speak, then disappeared from the process. In The Seventh Eye’s court account from January 23, 2023, journalist Gur Megiddo spoke about complainant “K”: he said he had seen evidence of threats, including messages with the addresses of her family members. This was not corridor rumor, but a claim made in the Bat Yam Magistrate’s Court, in a proceeding where the association was trying to challenge publications about the movement.
Witness “R,” who had been preparing to sign an affidavit about violations she had seen in the inner circle, wrote to attorney Carmel Pomerantz on the eve of signing: “Hi, Carmel, Bnei Baruch contacted us again. This time they say they want to meet and offer something. Hanoch (Milwidsky), Parovoz, and Mushi will be at the meeting. What do you think - is this a trap?” The affidavit was not signed.
In September 2022, in the Bat Yam Magistrate’s Court (Judge Azaria Alkalay), clinical social worker and therapist Ilanit Yezersky (A.Y.), once a member of the inner circle in Petah Tikva, testified under oath. She stated that in a private meeting she directly asked Laitman about intimate relationships, telling him about the complaints: “At first he denied it, but then admitted it… I told him: ‘Get treatment, you have a problem.’ He laughed and said: ‘I am already old.’” When Yezersky tried to serve as a witness for investigations, she was expelled from the movement together with her family, with an aggressive social boycott applied to her 12-year-old daughter: “It is not easy to leave a cult… Do you understand what a cult is? Everything is inside.”
Institutional cover. The suppression of information did not happen only through hidden threats; it was rooted in the organization’s own structure. At the same 2022 hearing, Tahel Shadmon, Bnei Baruch’s human-resources director and the official responsible for preventing sexual harassment in the movement, testified. When attorney Yuval Yoaz directly asked what she had done to examine the grave accusations against Laitman, as an office-holder, Shadmon was forced to admit under cross-examination: “I did nothing.”
Expert confirmations. In January 2023, Rachel Lichtenstein, director general of the Israeli Center for Cult Victims, also publicly confirmed the pattern in court. She testified about the many-hour account given by victim “K” in 2016, describing how Laitman used his spiritual authority to coerce her into a relationship. Lichtenstein added: “The harm to women is caused not only by Laitman himself… His behavior trickles down to other men in the community.”
Olesya, Galman’s Office, and the Protective Contour
This mechanism is most clearly visible in Olesya’s story. According to her account, after her story became dangerous to the movement’s leadership, she found herself in an episode where the pressure no longer looked like the abstract silence of an environment. It took a concrete form: a meeting at a lawyer’s office, an attempt to change or soften testimony, translation and accompaniment by people from the inner circle.
This is exactly where attorney Tzvi Galman and Eli Vinokur entered the criminal field. On July 27, 2025, The Seventh Eye reported that two additional suspects had been questioned under warning: attorney Tzvi Gelman, who for more than a decade led Bnei Baruch’s campaign of lawsuits, and Dr. Eli Vinokur, a Kabbalah Laam veteran and vice president of Gordon Academic College in Haifa. According to Rafaeli’s affidavit, Gelman was present at A.'s briefing, and Vinokur translated the explanations into Russian for her; Gelman said he acted professionally and gave documents to the police, while Vinokur did not respond to requests from The Seventh Eye and Shakuf. Substantively, the question is not limited to one meeting episode. It is about a broader scheme: who helped, and how, to turn testimony dangerous to the movement into a document suitable for defending the structure in court.
This is precisely what the earlier complaints lacked. Before, one could speak of inaction, fear, leaks, and closed cases. In Olesya’s story, an almost operational picture appears: a victim, a lawyer, people from the inner circle, an affidavit, the investigation’s procedural interest, and a parallel claim that the whole procedure was impeccable. This is how silence becomes a system, not merely a chain of unlucky coincidences.
Why “Consent” Does Not Work Here as a Concept
Across different testimonies, the same pattern repeats: men from the “inner circle” carried special spiritual status, and sexual intimacy with them was presented not as a personal initiative, but as part of the spiritual path. Refusal was treated as a breach of hierarchy.
This mechanism is well documented in Mona’s testimony, Katya Sukhova’s testimony, and Olesya’s story: first came years of dependence and unpaid labor, then transfer into the inner circle, where intermediaries explained that the leader “has the right.” The person is inside a rigid spiritual and social dependency. Refusal means losing everything: the spiritual path, the social environment, the sense of meaning.
Victim “A” formulated this mechanism in a Channel 12 interview in one sentence: “He built individual relationships with each woman in order to achieve spiritual enlightenment.” There is no coercion in the legal sense in that formulation. That is exactly the problem for the investigation.
A Structure with Political Cover
Kabbalah Laam is not a local group. It is an international infrastructure with constant media production, a translation system, and strict financial requirements. Publications about the centralized mobilization of movement members for Likud recorded that this is not just a spiritual center, but a structure with external political ties.
Institutional inaction in this context is not an administrative anomaly. Complaints are filed against a structure that has media resources, internal discipline, and representatives in parliament.
It is also important that Vinokur’s figure takes this story beyond the inner religious circle. When a person with academic and managerial status appears in publications about possible pressure on a victim, it means the movement’s protective contour is not closed inside one community. It intersects with universities, public posts, and external institutions of trust.
August 11, 2022. Omri Maniv. Testimony of “A”
On August 11, 2022, Channel 12 journalist Omri Maniv publicly recorded that, according to victim “A” and Rafaeli, Milwidsky instructed a witness to give false testimony in court, while the organization he had legally accompanied had enlisted thousands of party members for political influence. A month later, on September 5, 2022, Bnei Baruch responded not with a lawsuit against A., Maniv, or News 12, but with a 2.87 million shekel lawsuit against Rafaeli, Laitman’s former bodyguard, who confirmed her version on air.
The testimony of victim “A,” passed to Maniv, gave the investigation new momentum. In the summer of 2024, a delegation of LAHAV 433 investigators went to Moscow and took her statement; in the summer of 2025, Milwidsky, attorney Tzvi Galman, and Eli Vinokur were questioned - people linked to pressure on witnesses and to the legal management of the movement’s crises.
Laitman was not questioned.
Several victims, including publicly, named him directly. The official police position: old materials were reviewed and closed, and new information is being checked separately. Milwidsky, Galman, Vinokur - summoned. Laitman - not. TheMarker frames this gap as the key question: why the person named in several testimonies was not called into Israeli police interrogation rooms.
The gap between different speeds inside the same case is especially visible here. Where the investigation reaches a Knesset member, a lawyer, and people from the crisis contour, there is movement. Where the question runs into the movement’s own leader, the picture again breaks apart into old closed materials and new checks without comparable procedural effect. Olesya’s story and the questioning line around Galman and Vinokur matter not as a periphery, but as the point where the mechanism is visible: how a complaint enters, or does not enter, the legal contour.
At least three people publicly named Laitman: Katya, Mona, and Olesya. Together with witnesses whose testimony appeared in criminal proceedings or journalistic investigations - “R,” Ilanit Yezersky, and others - the documented cases number at least five.
In the official police response given to TheMarker, the police said: the 2018 investigation had been completed, the materials had been transferred to prosecutors, and prosecutors had decided to close the case. A “check” is being conducted on the new information. Police did not initiate contact with any of the five women.
This investigation continues. If you have information relevant to these events, or if you were yourself a participant or witness, you can contact us. The full map of the investigation materials is on the entry page.
Continue reading: Eli Vinokur: Academic Career and Suspicions - how a person from the inner circle ended up at the intersection of legal strategy and victim testimony.
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