Michael Laitman and Bnei Baruch: Entry Point to the Investigation of a Cult, Abuse and Political Protection
A good place to start: this page gives the frame of the whole story before the route continues.
Michael Laitman is the single leader of Bnei Baruch. One organization, a dozen brands: Kabbalah La'Am, Arvut, Together, The Good Ones, Growing with Joy. Behind the public language of spirituality and mutual responsibility stand a closed hierarchy, night lessons, years of unpaid labor, five women with testimony about sexual violations by the leader, and a sitting Likud Knesset member under criminal suspicion.
The first warning in the Israeli press sounded back in 2009: The Seventh Eye wrote directly that journalism should turn from the television sensation around Goel Ratzon to Bnei Baruch under Laitman, “apparently the largest cult in Israel.” Fifteen years later, The Seventh Eye described the movement as the country’s largest new religious movement: tens of thousands of followers, real estate in central Israel, its own television channel, publishing operation, translation industry and a deliberate move into politics.
In July 2025, TheMarker documented a turning point: an investigation that had begun in 2022 moved into questioning under caution. Lahav 433 summoned MK Hanoch Milwidsky, a former legal adviser to Kabbalah La'Am, with approval from the attorney general and state prosecutor. The suspicions: obstruction of justice and rape. Two others were questioned with him: attorney Tzvi Gelman, who represented Bnei Baruch in defamation suits, and Eli Vinokur, vice president of Gordon Academic College. Laitman’s name appears in the women’s accounts. He was not questioned. A week later, TheMarker published a broader report: five women had given testimony about sexual violations by Laitman, and one complaint that reached Israeli police three months before publication had been quietly “lost” inside the investigations division until it was found after a direct inquiry from the editors.
Legal caution: the word “cult” in this dossier is not a judicial status. In November 2025, Bizportal reported that a 2012 letter by Aharon Appelbaum calling “Kabbalah La'Am” a cult was found defamatory; the court awarded 168,000 shekels and ordered an apology in Israel Hayom. What matters below is not the label by itself, but published documents, testimonies, court rulings, police suspicions and financial reports.
Next comes what participation in Bnei Baruch meant for concrete people.
What follows is not a pair of independent documents, but one internal chain. First the mother of a woman who gave the organization about ten years of unpaid labor and lost her health writes directly to Michael Laitman. Then the request enters work correspondence with his personal address in copy, and the family receives a position in Laitman’s name: he “does not know” her daughter at all.
How the system is built
Bnei Baruch has long since outgrown the shape of a Kabbalah circle. It is an international structure: media, translation, night lessons, disciplinary rules, maaser for the inner circle and political representation through Likud. The path from the first lesson to the regime of obligations is covered in detail in the article on entry into the system; the financial architecture is examined in the separate article on money and management, and the political exit point in the 50-million-shekel bill article.
The doctrine inside that structure was formulated by Laitman himself. Religious scholar Dr. Tomer Persico, writing for The Seventh Eye, describes it without decoration: the “key to redemption” is to understand that a person has no mind of his own and to replace independent thought with the “opinion of society” set by the leadership. At congresses, that idea became practice: “The Creator Speaks Through the Teacher” shows how sadnaot, the circle discussions, fixed agreement while doubt was treated as a spiritual defect. Another layer of the same environment is visible in the official text “Football - You Are Sex!”: there the leader’s language already erases bodily boundaries.
In practice, this means lessons at three in the morning, chronic sleep deprivation, duties toward the group, a ban on alternative spiritual materials and internal payments. Internal rule documents supplied to the editors show the same regime. It is explained in detail in “The Path Inside: How the System Is Actually Built”.
Several Laitman students died in road accidents after night lessons and congresses. Inside the movement, these deaths are recoded as a “spiritual trial.”
In the photo are Grigory Shilin and Michael Miller, students of Laitman. After such a night and such sleep, these people continue on their way to work; it is not without reason that several students have died on the roads after Laitman’s lessons.
These two photographs directly visualize the cost of participation: lack of sleep, the congress routine, and the body as a resource of the system.
These photographs set the first frame: the night regime, exhaustion, and a group that still keeps working in the morning. Two nearby articles carry that line further: the path inside explains the regime of duties, and “The Creator Speaks Through the Teacher” explains how the group reinforces submission.
In this photograph, people are protesting at the entrance to Laitman's center with signs reading: "Laitman and Milwidsky = concealment of sexual harassment and assistance in a state coup."
The cost of participation and fear of the apparatus
Ten years inside Bnei Baruch. Unpaid work for the organization. Night lessons. The chronology is simple: first health breaks, then a mother writes directly to the leader. She asks for medical and financial help in his own vocabulary of “reducing egoism” and “unity”:
"Rav, this was sent on fb I do not know who this is about
Dear Michael Laitman! My daughter has been in your organization for about 10 years. She worked a lot and for free for your organization. A misfortune has happened and today she needs help: medical and financial. Please answer me. I want to believe that your words about striving for unity and working to reduce egoism apply first of all to those who say them. Respectfully, Perochinskaya Basya Iosifovna.
P.S. I hope you will not start finding out her name, this will lead to a quarrel between us. If there is real help, of course I will name her. By the way, your night lessons take away health; systematically not sleeping is harmful, and you cannot fail to know this. https://www.facebook.com/basja.perochinskaja"
Basya Iosifovna’s letter shows what a family sees when a person is no longer useful to the organization. It never received a direct answer; through an internal manager, the family was told that Laitman did not know who her daughter was. At that point, the daughter had spent about ten years in his organization. The same technique of turning a complaint into a problem of “egoism” inside service correspondence is documented separately in the “How Should I Go On Living?” email leak.
That answer does not stand alone. The Appelbaum legal history, the lawsuits against Gur Megiddo and The Seventh Eye, and Milwidsky’s role are collected in the article on the movement’s legal defense.
Leaving the zone of responsibility
The mother’s appeal goes into internal management routing. In work correspondence where Michael Laitman’s personal address appears in the copy line, the whole reaction to ten years of someone else’s life is reduced to one administrative sentence:
“Mushi, who will answer?”
Through staff member Irina Romanova, the family receives the official position. In the first person, in Laitman’s name:
“I would answer this way: I do not force anyone to study, especially women. I do not even know what women study, where and when. I never taught women. She is probably confusing me with someone else.”
No attempt to clarify the circumstances. No minimal human gesture. A woman who gave ten years to his organization is erased from the story in one service message.
This is the familiar Bnei Baruch order of action: denial in the leader’s name, moving the problem onto the person who complains, then a legal or administrative channel. The public line with News 12, The Seventh Eye and lawsuits is covered in the article on silenced testimony and in the profile of Milwidsky’s defense machine.
When a person is no longer needed
Inside Bnei Baruch, spiritual language covers a concrete function. A person working for free is said to be “working on egoism”; silence about problems is called “walking the path of unity.” When a complaint appears that cannot be translated into the same terms, the leader answers through a manager that he does not remember such a woman.
Outside, lawyers perform the same work. The Seventh Eye summarized the series of lawsuits filed by Bnei Baruch and Hanoch Milwidsky against TheMarker journalist Gur Megiddo; the full chronology of legal pressure and Milwidsky’s role is covered in the article on the movement’s legal support.