“The abuse and its cover-up are symptoms of wider political dysfunction—or, more precisely, symptoms of socially disastrous political control by religious elites.”
– Journalist, Christopher Ketchum
While the cult of Chabad Lubavitch has considerable reach within the US government what is even more astonishing is the evidence that some sections of the movement may be nothing more than an organised crime syndicate acting as an ideological parasite accruing billions of dollars in the process. Leading Lubavitchers have on many occasions been convicted of money laundering, drug trafficking and connections to various Mafia. [1]
Then there is the matter of sexual abuse.
When you peruse certain extracts from the Talmud it is not an exaggeration to say that many forms of sexual abuse are not only condoned but encouraged within its pages. This may go some way in explaining why is it that so many Chabad house leaders and other Jewish Rabbis have been accused of paedophilia and sexual assault: there is a subconscious rationalisation that somehow this is sanctified.
Indeed, some District Attorney’s allow plea deals that keep them out of prison and off sex offender registries. Some rabbis act as gatekeepers to prevent awareness of the issue of abuse in Hasidic circles as soon as reports arrive at the police. Today there is still a media blackout on Jewish child abuse. Child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church get extensive media coverage, yet abuse from Hasidic / Chabad or Haredi children is wholly absent from most of the popular sources of the MSM. [2]
In Israel October of 2006, Rabbi Yoram Aberjil was accused of cult-like practices, sexual harassment of young women and threatening the lives of the survivors and those who support them. One witness who tried to escape the ultra-orthodox community with her family related a conversation she had had with the Rabbi in which he stated: “I want you to know that your children are precious to me,” he said. “I won’t let anyone pick the fruit I planted. The next conversation will be really painful. I will follow you. I have ways of making you disappear in a hit-and-run accident. I will curse your children. I’m telling you, I have powers. Your children will be orphans.” [3]
In October 12 2002 Rabbi Baruch Lanner was convicted of sexually abusing two teenage girls at a religious school where he was the principal. “Mr. Lanner was convicted on June 27 of charges that stem from incidents from 1992 to 1997, when he was principal of the Hillel Yeshiva High School in Ocean Township, Monmouth County.” [4]According to the website failedmessiah.com and their voluminous investigations of child rape and paedophilia within the Jewish religion, Lanner had been heavily protected by fellow Rabbis and his victims ignored: “Lanner stayed at NCSY. He was not reported to police. No provisions were made to protect the children in NCSY’s care… But victims went public. The Orthodox Union (OU) responded by smearing them.
After initial successes, including a rigged beit din (religious court) run by Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Modechai Willig, the OU’s attempts to smear victims failed. Lanner was arrested, tried and convicted. In the aftermath, a small number of Lanner’s enablers were forced out of the OU.” [5] By December 2008 Rabbi Lanner was honoured by both the OU and the NCSY and given a National Award for his services. The NCSY’s maxim of “inspiring the Jewish Future” takes on somewhat bizarre connatations in light of this fact.
Rabbi Aryeh Blaut AKA: Louis Steven Blaut of Seattle USA was: “… a past principal of a Jewish Day School in Seattle, WA. He was originally arrested in November 2003 for possession of child pornography. He pled guilty in July, 2004 and sentenced on Sept. 24, 2004. Rabbi Blaut spent 21 months in a federal prison in New Jersey.” According to the United States Department of Probation, “Blaut is not allowed contact with anyone under the age of eighteen on the internet or in person.” According to one blog for Jewish survivors of sexual abuse: “… there was no press coverage on this case, yet a reliable source stated that 1800 individuals in the community received a letter.” [6]
Other cases that are almost impossible to find in MSM and internet sources yet can be verified by state legislator and penitentiary records are the following from the awareness centre.org:
- Case of Rabbi Lewis Brenner (AKA: Lippa Brenner) (Brooklyn, NY) Convicted of child molestation. The original charges included 14 counts of sodomy, sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child. He agreed to plead guilty to one count of sodomy in the third degree, a Class E felony, in exchange for a sentence of five years’ probation.
- Case of Rabbi Yaakov Yitzhak Brizel (Jerusalem, Israel) Accused of child molestation.
- Case of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach There is a Call for Action on this case. Accused of several cases of child molestation, and sexual assault of young adult women.
- Case of Rabbi Perry Ian Cohen – (Montreal and Toronto Canada) Accused of sexual abuse of a seventeen year old. Fired for sexual impropriety with congregants.
- Case of Rabbi Yitzchak Cohen (Israel) Accused of sexually harassing students at Bar-Ilan University.
- Case of Rabbi Asher Dahan, (Beersheva), Israel Arrested after being accused of raping and sexually abusing two 17-year-old girls after he offered “to redeem them of sin and evil inclinations.”
- Case of Rabbi Anthony Dee (Blackpool England; Portsmouth, England) Former synagogue minister Reverend Anthony Dee found guilty of sexually abusing two boys and a girl in Blackpool and Portsmouth, England. This is the first set of convictions, there was a second set of convictions in 1997.
- Case of Cantor Stuart Friedman (Halifax, -Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, Los Angeles, Baltimore) Convicted and sentanced to 15 months in federal prison on one count of distributing child pornography. [7]
More recent reports include Christopher Ketcham’s expose on the Hasidic ritual bathhouses and the “Child Rape Assembly Line” published by online society and culture magazine vice.com in November 2013.
Ketchum interviewed one Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg a member of Brooklyn’s Satmar Hasidim fundamentalist branch of Orthodox Judaism. His job is to design and repair mikvahs which are Jewish bathhouses used for ritualistic purification and cleansing. Rosenberg proceeds to divulge graphic details of systematic rape by spiritual elders within these establishments with such a ring of authenticity that it is hard to dispute.
Whistleblower Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg, VICE.com © photo by Christian Storm.
Parallels to the Catholic Church are obvious as is the target for the “rites of passage” which are predominantly young boys from ages 7-14. In fact, according to Rosenberg: “… around half of young males in Brooklyn’s Hasidic community—the largest in the United States and one of the largest in the world—have been victims of sexual assault perpetrated by their elders.” Familiar to the discourse of disbelief in the face of authority, Ultra-Orthodox Jews have the same problems when they attempt to speak out about the abuse in their midst. They are ostracised and their careers are ruined. Rosenberg suffered the same consequences after he began blogging on the abuse and opened a New York City hotline for victims. As Ketchum describes, to go against what is seeded psychopathy inside what is masquerading as a societal vessel for spiritual purity and sustenance is no greater example of evil. As is the case time and time again, people will maintain the integrity of the initial message even if the structure that professed to house it has long since gone.
Rabbi Rosenberg is loathed and hated by his own community even feared as if he is a walking contagion:
“He receives death threats on a regular basis. In Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers, advertisements taken out by the self-described ‘great rabbis and rabbinical judges of the city of New York’ have denounced him as ‘a stumbling block for the House of Israel,’ ‘a public rebuker and preacher of ethics’ who ‘persists in his rebelliousness’ and whose ‘voice has been heard among many Jewish families, especially young people in their innocence… drawn to listen to his poisonous and revolting speeches.’
Cut off from practising his religion and ironically seen as a corrupter of Jewish youth regarding the true nature of Orthodox Jewish Establishment he remains an outcast. It is a classic example of ponerology where paramoralism becomes the norm leading to the lancing of those who have the temerity to give voice to their conscience.
Politics, privilege and related sweeteners which arise from both determine an unspoken acceptance of what must be. In the Catholic Church, religion and authority were used in order to in order to gain trust and thus access to the family and the children. In Chabad and Orthodox Jewish circles Ketchum’s research indicates that the goal of of the men-only Rabbinical Courts is to firstly: “… excise the mother from the child’s life,” with immediate effects which may be likened to a parental circumcision.
Just as we have seen with cases of abuse networks with procurers such as Jerry Sandusky, Jimmy Savile, Marc Dutroux and legion of others, it is the silence of denial that such a thing could be happening in the world at large and worst of all right at the heart of our most trusted institutions that allows such practices to continue.
When Rosenberg caught a Rabbi raping a seven year-old boy and intervened, he could not have known that he had dramatically changed his life. Yet, this is the result for so many whistleblowers within the Jewish community and who call out psychopathy when they see it. More often than not, it is the “pillars of the community” and those afforded the most respect and influence who are most guilty, which Rosenberg discovered to his horror. After all, is this not simply a mirroring of organised religion as a whole? A monolithic belief system which purports to represent God and His spiritual rule for living a spiritual life when in truth, it is nothing more than a mask for its opposite?
When Rosenberg took his complaint about his fellow rabbi to the rabbinate in Israel:
“… he was brought up on charges by the mishmeres hatznuis, the arch-conservative Orthodox ‘modesty squad,’ which regulates, often through threats of violence, proper moral conduct and dress in the relations between men and women. The modesty squad is a sort of Jewish Taliban. According to Rabbi Rosenberg, the rapist he caught in the act was a member of the modesty squad, which charged him with the unconscionable offense of having previously been seen walking down a street in Jerusalem with a married woman. ‘But it’s OK to molest children,’ he adds.
Ketchum then explains the reasons behind such actions and what underpins the central premise of this blog by stating: “The abuse and its cover-up are symptoms of wider political dysfunction—or, more precisely, symptoms of socially disastrous political control by religious elites.” Yet, psychological deviance traverses all societal domains using politics as a tool rather than the corruption of politics as the starting point. These are religious symptoms uniquely manifesting within a fertile field of psychopathy, the results of which feed into a further degradation of Orthodox Jewish religious authority – with Chabad Lubavitch at the zenith of corruption. It is no coincidence that this cult is at the centre of American political power brought up on the same endemic abuse.
Judaism’s roots as a monotheistic religion carved out by war, conquest and totalitarianism is simply attuning to its original extremes once again. Therefore, it is inevitable that such pathology will infect more moderate expression of Jewish identity as we have already seen. The same patterns of victim hood and blind faith will continue to imbue authority with Freudian hue of misplaced trust. And since nothing is done without the consent of the Rabbinical Authority the mental instability and social dysfunction will continue to rise just as Ketchum recounts:
Families saddled with an increasing number of children soon enter into a cycle of poverty. There is simultaneously an extreme separation of the sexes, which is unprecedented in the history of the Hasidim. There is limited general education, to the point that most men in the community are educated only to the third grade, and receive absolutely no sexual education. No secular newspapers are allowed, and internet access is forbidden. “The men in the community are undereducated by design,” Ben said. “You have a community that has been infantilized. They have been trained not to think. It’s a sort of totalitarian control.” [Emphasis mine]
The Jewish writers of chabad-mafia.com have drawn our attention to the criminal activities and complexities regarding Chabad Lubavitch and the infiltration into Hasidic clans. Quite apart from the lucre needed to fund the burgeoning Chabad Houses all over the globe, it does beg the question how it’s possible that Chabad Lubavitch can fund an average school intake of 400 students at roughly $10,000-$15,000 per year with thousands of schools the length and breadth of the United States and the world, most of which is offered for free? Where do they find millions of dollars needed for so vast an enterprise? Chabad-mafia.com offer up some possibilities:
“… most of these Chabad houses are located in remote places where there are no Jews, such as rural parts of South East Asia and South America. According to Chabad, the purpose of these Chabad houses is to provide kosher food and free housing to Jewish travelers if they go to those places. But once again, where do they get all the money for all these Chabad houses? And why would anyone want to build a free Kosher restaurant that also provides free housing to the occasional Jewish traveler, in a remote place where there are no Jews?
Chabad houses have been strategically located in areas where there is a high volume of illegal drugs activity. Take for example the city of Tijuana in Mexico, a city where there are no Jews. The Chabad house in Tijuana is the oldest Chabad house in Mexico, and Tijuana is the most important city for drug traffickers moving their drugs from Mexico to the USA. Chabad houses also provide money laundering services to drug dealers and other criminals. [8]
With over 3,600 Chabad-Lubavitch centres in over 70 countries and all continents of the world, it is no coincidence that international Chabad Houses are also strategically located on all of the major drug trafficking routes. One of the policies of the Chabad is to send Rabbis across the world to set up Chabad houses. This movement, known as “Shilchus”, has given Chabad a global support network. There is a long history of Chabad Houses not only being used as safe houses and logistics centres for Israeli intelligence but as storefronts for criminal activity. Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reported that “Chabad Houses are fronts for Israeli military intelligence and Mafia activities in… Asian cities.” [9] Judging by the copious crimes by Chabad rabbis over the last decade it seems this is just the overflow from an inner core of corruption.
In Bolivia, 2009, authorities conducted a raid on a Chabad House headed Rabbi Aharon Freiman and his wife who were “… convinced they had been sent to Rurrenabaque, by the deceased Lubavitcher Rebbe.” Amid rumours of drug trafficking and an assassination attempt against the country’s president, Bolivian police closed the House for several weeks. [10]
It seems the Chabad House in the Village of Kfar also had quite a reputation. In 2007 it was the centre of major tax fraud allegations against top level Chabad officials. Arrested at Ben-Gurion Airport upon returning from a fundraising tour in the United States, the “… airport intelligence unit received information that an association linked to young Chabad members was being used to cover up tax evasion.” The main target of an eight-year investigation “…used fictitious bank accounts for money laundering purposes” whereby “funds raised by the association in the past few years for education, aid and charity activities were transferred to ‘straw accounts’ in Israel and abroad and were withdrawn for private purposes, including payments to the association members.” [11]
In Israel, July 2010, Israeli District Police arrested “… three Jewish men suspected of smuggling over $1 million worth of cocaine. One of the suspects, a resident of Kfar Chabad, is suspected of orchestrating the deal.” [12] Four months later, an Israeli Chabad emissary was arrested at Madrid airport after being found to have hidden 4kg of cocaine in one of his suitcases. “Eliyahu Hecht, 57, a father of six who works for the global charity organization Kollel Chabad, was returning to Israel from Costa Rica, where he was fund-raising for a soup kitchen operated by Kollel Chabad in Safed.” [13] He was later vindicated of all charges, though suspicion remains.
Chabad Lubavitcher International centres are located on all the major trafficking routes – city by city.| Source: Princeton University/CIA source-Book
During the late 1980s in the United States, it was business as usual with the breaking up of a major international money laundering operation linked to drugs trafficking in Panama and Colombia. Rabbi Sholom Ber Levitin, a regional director of the Lubavitch Hasidic community in Seattle, several other Chabad House residents and Israeli nationals were arrested. The Assistant U.S. Attorney Ron Friedman who was prosecuting the defendants said:
“… they had been involved for at least 11/2 years in shipments of hundreds of thousands of dollars from New Jersey to Seattle …” with $350,000 to $400,000 a week … sent in cash to Seattle and converted to cashier’s checks that were hidden in magazines before being shipped by air freight to Panama and Colombia. […] federal prosecutors in New Jersey said as much as $25 million in cashier’s checks and money orders may have been sent to the two countries, as well as to banks in London, West Germany and Israel.” [14]
The authorities discovered that most of the cheques were finding their way to: “Banco Cafetero in Panama City or to Enrique Korc, the alleged kingpin of the operation in Cali, Colombia.”
What is noticeable in this and many other similar reports is the reaction from Hassidic leaders and the Jewish communities as a whole: Disbelief. Yet, this is the policy of messianic Chabad Lubavitch mandated by Rabbi Scheerson himself. The humanitarianism acts as a perfect cover. The religious intent may be genuine but the means used to fulfil prophecy appears to be without limit; yet another example of “the ends justify the means.” What makes it so easy is wilful blindness and inability to believe.
Some of the reactions to Chabad corruption:
“ ‘When I heard this, I couldn’t believe it,’ said Rabbi Anson Laytner, director of the Jewish Federation’s Community Relations Council. “ ‘This is totally out of keeping from the man that I know,’ he said. ‘To my mind he is a scholar and a very spiritual person, a community activist in terms of helping people in need.’ Levitin, the father of nine children, founded the Chabad House in the early 1970s. It is known as a place where Jewish people can seek emergency housing, food or money and receive outreach services. Several hundred Hasidic Jews live in Seattle, most in the area of Chabad House.’ ” [15]
That is not to say that there are not indeed great drug “outreach” centres that provide valuable outposts for care and support. Yet, there also remains strong evidence that many locations are anything but. Such is the nature of religious ponerisation: the genuine exist side by side with the pathological, the former proving a useful in denying the existence of the latter.
Rabbi Ronald Greenwald was a major example of political power meets Jewish mafia. Known to do business with mafia figures and the criminal underworld it was a coup d’état for such a man when offered a position in Richard Nixon’s administration allowing him to protect his mafia friends business interests and line his own pockets:
“Greenwald was a major player in CREEP, the re-election campaign for Richard Nixon in 1972. Greenwald was used heavily by Nixon and other Republicans to gain the Jewish vote, which he doubled for Nixon during that election… in the state of New York. Soon, the rabbi was given a post as an “advisor” to Nixon on “Jewish poverty programs,” a post which certainly made some snicker at the time, though it was clear that Nixon owed Greenwald, and the rabbi made quick use of his new found powers. He used his power to protect the mafia’s bilking of Medicaid programs and other crimes that were never investigated by the authorities. His post as head of the “Jewish poverty” initiative permitted him to shield those involved with such financial scams, as well as call off any and all FBI investigations of his friends. Part of the rise of Jewish mafia groups was the protection afforded it by Greenwald’s political connections. [16]
As we have seen, longstanding ties between Russian-Zionist oligarchs have also been well documented. Russian Jews were never disengaged from Jewish philanthropy. Throughout the 1990s, the oligarchs who made money quickly and in great quantities invested in resuscitating Jewish communal life, from establishing the Russian Jewish Congress, to building synagogue and community centres and sponsoring Chabad Lubavitch missions throughout the former Soviet Union. Indeed, it seems that the cult’s reach has overtaken mainstream Judaism and: “…continues to boom in Russia, dominating the Jewish scene in every Russian city.” [17]
David Shneer professor of History at Denver University recounts what he heard while attending a World Union for Progressive Judaism conference in Moscow: “I heard stories about Reform rabbis being driven out of their synagogues by Chabadniks, about how Chabad uses its cozy relationship with the federal government to take over Jewish institutions around the country. To the Union of Progressive Judaism, Chabad sounded like Al Capone’s mafia of 1920s Chicago.” Shneer is dismissive of this, putting it down to the fact that: “Chabad was already building an underground infrastructure for Jewish life in the Soviet Union” in the 1980s and believes it was more a product of the Chabad faithful’s work ethic and dedication than any nefarious designs for political power.
This seems woefully naive in respect of their longstanding association with crime, their messianic beliefs and racist values. It does explain why so much of the Jewish community is unaware of the danger that such extremism poses to their religion. It represents the same ignorance and naivety that exists in contemporary society about the nature of power brokers in general. No one is exempt from the effects of psychopathy “chosen” or not.
Away from media fears of anti-Semitism, the Russian, Ukrainian Mafia and the Jewish mafia are fairly synonymous. Scores of anti-Zionists in Russia have been murdered by car bombs or other devices, and none of the cases have been solved. The massive oil and mineral wealth in the country is just too big a bonanza and acts as a major ideological funding resource for Zionists and Israel. To keep the monopoly on Russia’s resources and the exploitation tributaries into other countries open the Russian Mafia has eclipsed other crime groups by becoming the most ruthless and cold blooded. There is no code of honour regarding other Mafia clans or families. They will kill men, women and children without hesitation while embarking on any methods suitable to remain ahead of the field. In other words, the Russian-Jewish Mafia is the closest you can get to the embodiment of the collective psychopath in crime.
With no conscience or codes, no limits need apply.
See also: Orthodox Advocates Push for Sex Abuse Reform in New York | In the Name of the Father Part I
For a similar example of mafia-like corruption within an ostensibly pious and religious movement see: The Mennonite Drug Connection by The Fifth Estate. Again, the purer the movement’s claims the greater the vulnerability ponerological infection.
Notes
[3] ‘Not-so-saintly Rabbi in Netivot’By Tamar Rotem , Haaretz, October 12 2006.
[4] ‘Rabbi Convicted of Sexual Abuse Is Freed on Bail Pending Appeal’ By Ronald Smothers, The New York Times, October 12, 2002.
[5] ‘OU-NCSY Honors Child Sexual Abuser Rabbi Baruch Lanner’s Chief Enabler – Committee Members Include Cream Of Modern Orthodox Leadership’ failedmessiah.com, December 2008.
[6] ‘Jewish Survivors of Sexual Abuse Speak Out’ theawarenesscenter.org.
[7] Ibid.
[8] http://www.chabad-mafia.com
[9] ‘Chabad House: Terror, Ecstasy, Heroine, Prostitution, Espionage & Money Laundry’ by Wayne Madsen, November 28 2008. The waynemadsenreport.com “In March 1989, U.S. law enfocement rounded up a criminal network in Seattle, Los Angeles, New Jersey, Colombia, and Israel that involved a Chabad House that was involved in money laundering and currency violations.”
[10] ‘Bolivian policemen close local Chabad house’ By Matthew Wagner, The Jerusalem Post, April 23, 2009.
[11] ‘Senior Chabad official suspected of evading millions in taxes’”Man arrested at Ben-Gurion Airport upon returning from fundraising tour in US. Simultaneously, dozens of detectives raid Kfar Chabad, detain several people for questioning.” By Eli Senyor, Israel News November 14, 2007.
[12] ‘Tel Aviv – Three Arrested in Drug Bust Smuggling $1M Worth of Cocaine’ http://www.vosizneias.comvia Haaretz, July 8 2010.
[13] ‘Israeli Chabad emissary nabbed in Madrid with 4kg of cocaine’ Friends of the arrested man say he was fooled into smuggling the cocaine as he was returning to Israel after a fund-raising trip to Costa Rica. By Eli Ashkenazi, Haaretz, Dec.07, 2010. | ‘Jailed Fundraiser is Vindicated’ http://www.collive.com/Jan 27, 2012.
[14] ‘Seattle Rabbi is Arrested 13 Acussed of an International Plot to Launder Money’ By Steve Miletich, Seattle PI, March 19, 1988. Section: News, Page: A1. http://www.seattlepi.com/archives/1988/8801080982.asp.
[15] Ibid.
[16] ‘The Judeo-Russian Mafia: From the Gulag to Brooklyn to World Dominion’, by Y M. Raphael Johnson, PH.D. Barnes Review, May 27, 2006,[17] ‘Why Chabad Excels in Russia, And Why Reform Judaism Doesn’t’ by David Shneer, April 16, 2007, jewcy.com.