A letter in Laitman’s name: how the Bnei Baruch kindergarten scandal reached the police

This image is related to a closed police case involving a kindergarten of Laitman’s organization, where a complaint of sexual abuse of children was dismissed at an early stage, and a key role in neutralizing the complaint points to police officer Ami Liberman, who is a student of Laitman.

The Global Garden story does not begin with a complaint, but with a letter. On 31 March 2013 a text went out to parents in Michael Laitman’s name: children left unsupervised, rough treatment, threats, isolation, unsafe conditions, and possible sexual abuse between children in the kindergarten.

All of it survives in preserved correspondence with names: the softening happened at once and in the open, in the same mailing list, in front of the parents. The letter was written at the request of Michael Laitman’s daughters, Yael and Rachel. Four days later those same authors retracted the three gravest allegations, and on 22 April Binyamin Kogan took the matter to the Petah Tikva police. The frame had been set by those who opened it.

What parents described inside the “Global Garden”

The first letter to parents contained a separate section on episodes tied to possible sexual abuse between children. The newsroom knows what that meant: one child led others into the toilet, locked the door and penetrated them with his fingers. There was more than one victim.

The authors named themselves. On 4 April Yael and Rachel Laitman, Michael Laitman’s daughters, wrote to the same list: they had asked the Rav to write the letter in his name, and they needed the urgency and the shock. On 31 March that same day Oren Leibovich told parents he did not confirm what was written: all of it had been told to him and to Shira by women of the Laitman family. The newsroom knows something the correspondence does not show: Yael Laitman removed her son from the kindergarten, and it was seen.

The correspondence shows something else: parents were afraid for their children, and for their place in the group. The threat of expulsion from the “spiritual family” and isolation turned a simple parental question, “what happened to my child?”, into a test of loyalty.

How the crisis was translated into the language of a “spiritual test”

The letters and replies lean on the language of spiritual work: “the right intention,” “rise above the situation,” “do not destroy unity.” Where concrete facts demanded checking, that language pushed toward faith and submission: fear, harm, humiliation, and possible sexual abuse were named a “test,” and responsibility dissolved. Instead of asking who allowed the risk, the question became whether parents were reacting spiritually enough.

On 1 April, a day after the letter about possible sexual abuse between children went out, Laitman writes four lines to the list: “I think I did what I had to do,” “there is no more need for me,” “I do not belong to the future of the kindergarten,” “I also ask that you stop calling it ‘Global’.” About authorship he says nothing, neither confirming nor denying. Three days later his daughters would write that the Rav knew their opinion that his grandson’s kindergarten was not being run properly, but he was not aware of the details. Laitman’s hypocrisy here is not judgment but arithmetic: they ask him to write a letter in his name listing specific failings, yet he himself, by their account, knew none of them.

That same 4 April the same authors retract the three gravest allegations. They withdraw the classification “maase sdom” outright: a single incident between two small children, which, according to the kindergarten management, had been reported to parents, after which a psychologist was brought in. The shaking case, by the same letter, was handled and documented. The mother who had described staff abuse reported after the mailing: not a slap but wild behaviour and shouting. Binyamin Kogan replied that day: suspicions of criminal acts had been presented as personal testimony supposedly based on video, and were not checked before the mailing. It was not “a single incident,” and the newsroom knows it. Inside the cult it was explained differently: children that age do not understand what they are doing, it is a game. That is a lie. A four-year-old does not invent such a scenario. He repeats what he lived through, and the adults in the kindergarten called it a game. The accusation of 31 March and the retraction of 4 April sit in the same file, and we publish it in full. Separately on this, the Bnei Baruch directorate letter.

How the complaint reached the police and what is known of its fate

On 22 April 2013 Binyamin Kogan filed a complaint with the Petah Tikva police. The record fixes the complainant, the date, and the location: a kindergarten at 17 Amal Street. This is the one step in the whole affair that no longer depended on the cult’s internal correspondence. The story rests on three documents, independent of one another: parent correspondence from March and April 2013, police confirmation of 22 April, and the Ynet report of 4 March 2016, where Kogan himself speaks of his own removal three years later. The same pattern repeats at each step: alarming report, then softening, then silence.

The newsroom learned from Ami Liberman himself: he helped close the case because he had connections inside the police. Liberman is a student of Laitman and a police officer: the link between the cult and the police runs through one man. This is the admission of the man who did it, not a third-party retelling.

The document records the filing of the complaint. The closure comes from Liberman: the case was closed, and he helped close it.

What this episode shows about the cult as a whole

A letter about abuse in a kindergarten goes out in the name of a spiritual leader at his daughters’ request. Four days later the same authors retract the gravest allegations. The dispute narrows to loyalty. And when one parent takes the question outside, he is taken outside with it.

The price was personal. The newsroom knows: after the police complaint the Kogan family was pushed out of the cult, entered on an internal blacklist, moved to isolation, and the child felt the sanctions. Four measures, one result: a person is struck out of the environment entirely, family and child included. Binyamin Kogan went to an investigator, and the whole family paid. The removal he describes in his affidavit and the removal after the complaint are the same event. The published record says otherwise, and we show it: according to the Ynet report of 4 March 2016, Kogan himself names a personal crisis and psychological pressure inside Bnei Baruch as the cause of his removal, and social sanctions, he says, were imposed on him more than once by various committees. Two versions of one event: the published one, and the one the newsroom knows. They diverge on the cause and meet on the mechanism: committees, social sanctions and removal are a standing instrument, applied to whoever has stopped being convenient. This is not a malfunction of the cult but its working state.