Twenty-five years ago, when I was a journalist working for a Jewish paper, I lost my job thanks to a ‘celebrity rabbi’ who was embezzling charity funds to buy a massive house, and a lot of airtime and media exposure, in order to sell his books.

(Yes, you have almost certainly heard of him.)

To cut a very long story short, that ‘celebrity rabbi’ totally went on the war path against me personally, to try to shut me up.

For months leading up to my dismissal, I was getting threatening calls, I was getting ‘interventions’ from my own local rabbi – and even, from the office of the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, to basically shut-up, and give the ‘celebrity rabbi’ all the information I’d gathered together.

It came to a crescendo when the ‘celebrity rabbi’ told the managing editor of my paper he was going to sue the publication, unless they fired me AND forced me to ‘give him back’ all the information I collected.

(I was 23 and newly-married when all this was going on.)

==

It’s important to underline here that NOT A WORD HAD BEEN PUBLISHED in the paper.

There was no published ‘story’ to sue over, it was all just part of a massive, co-ordinated ‘cover-up campaign’.

So, I did what any other journalist who hates being bullied and despises religious hypocrites would do, when the deadline for ‘turn over the info to him or get fired’ approached:

I took all my information, and I handed it into the Serious Fraud Office of the Metropolitan Police.

==

Of course, I lost my job instantly.

Of course, the psycho ‘celebrity rabbi’ went beserk and started sending me threatening letters that he was going to sue me personally.

That only stopped when:

1. My husband (who was a junior lawyer at that time) got permission to use his firm’s official stationary to start answering all the threatening letters from literally the top litigation firms in the UK; and
2. I also took the information I’d gathered to the Sunday Times newspaper, where I hoped the editors wouldn’t be as cowardly and disgusting as mine had been.

==

A (very watered-down) story appeared in the Sunday Times.

That ‘celebrity rabbi’ left the country very quickly shortly afterwards, when it became known the Charity Commission had started investigating the financial irregularities going on with his charidee.

And I had six months of PTSD, where I couldn’t really work, and I pretty much hated most of the ‘big rabbis’ at the top of the tree in the Jewish community – with two notable exceptions, who belonged to the Federation of Synagogues, and who were the only two orthodox rabbis who stood behind me when all this was blowing up.

==

Shortly before the story in the Sunday Times came out, the journalist who was writing called me to tell me this:

“I have worked on exposes of top mafia figures, but I’ve never dealt with something like this.”

What do you mean?

“The ‘celebrity rabbi’ somehow managed to pull the draft of the story I’m working on off my computer, and he’s just called me up to dictate the changes he wants me to make, before it’s published.”

==

This was 25 years ago.

The internet was barely getting started, and this was still before people had ‘internet at home’, and even most companies had just one single computer in a public space that was attached to the internet.

The journo was shocked at how ‘sophisticated’ the whole cover-up machine operating around this ‘celebrity rabbi’, and the people he was associated with, actually was.

At the time, I thought the crooked ‘celebrity rabbi’ was mostly just a ‘blip’ – a very unfortunate exception to the rule.

And now…. I don’t think that anymore.

==

This morning, I was working on more of the amazing story that I’m going to share with you in the next couple of posts, about the ‘dispute’ between R CHAIM of SANZ and the wider clan of RUZHINER EREV RAB-BEIM, when I hit some still unexploded patch of residual PTSD from my own experiences with these mafia-rabbi-fakers.

I’m not 100% sure what sparked it off, but I think it was when I realised just how much these evil people have continually covered up, about who they really are, and what they’ve really done to the Jewish people.

As I was reading stuff from 200 years ago, it all sounded so, so familiar from my own experiences 25 years ago.

And, my own experiences from around 10 years ago, when we had the misfortune of having a bunch more ‘fakers’, this time from within Breslov itself, explode in our faces.

Baruch Hashem, it was all for the best, as that is how we finally got to the Rav.

====

Back then, when everything was falling apart around our ears, there was one day when some serious doubts about the mashpiam we’d been following refused to be silenced any more.

These mashpiam between them, and all their cruddy ‘advice’, had managed to wreck just about every aspect of our life. On that one day, when the doubts got too great to stuff down any more, both my husband and myself were pleading with God to show us who is a real rabbi, here? What is really going on? What is the truth?

==

Within two days of that prayer, the penny finally dropped that my mashpia was not on the level he’d set himself up to occupy – and that same day, my husband came to the same conclusion about his own mashpia, who’d been teaching him in yeshiva.

Both very charismatic types.

Very good speakers.

Very apparently ‘sincere’.

And both really, really bad for us, in different ways.

==

Before them, there was another ‘Breslov Mashpia’ who was even more famous, even more charismatic, even more persuasive.

He was involved in pushing the whole Shakuf quasi-cult that took down a whole bunch of people’s marriages and wrecked their mental health….

==

The good news: ALL of these fakers, without exception, have mostly imploded since then.

None of them are really in positions of influence at this stage, thank God, except maybe in very minor ways.

And as I’ve written about so many times before, a person just gets the ‘rabbi’ that really reflects them, and their inner dimension.

And our ‘inner dimension’ was clearly so full of crud and arrogance and bad middot, that we got stuck following these people as our ‘rabbis’.

==

When it all finally came unstuck, within the first few months of us moving to Jerusalem, we had such a big crisis of faith it very nearly took us out.

Thank God, Rabbenu was hanging on to us, at that stage.

But it was the toughest year of our lives.

==

So.

I know first-hand how much damage these ‘Erev Rab-beim’ can cause to the people who are unfortunate enough to follow them.

And most of the problem with these people is that even if they start off sincerely with good intentions (which is not true for all of them, even….) – they are simply not on the kind of spiritual level required to be assuming ‘control’ over another person’s life.

==

When I started reading more about these EREV RAB-BEIM of RUZHIN (and honestly, most of the other chassiduts, too) – I started to feel quite emotional.

It’s deja vu, all over again.

These people have done so very much damage to the collective soul of Am Yisrael, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Jews, or even millions of Jews, they’ve put off the Torah, with their disgusting greed, arrogance and hypocrisy.

(I’m writing this post without referencing the whole topic of ‘Frankists’ and ‘Sabbateans’, but that clearly adds a whole other dimension to this, especially in terms of the pedophilia that is also so much covered up and ‘excused’.)

==

And it’s not just a problem with ‘chassiduss’.

Look at all the good Jews who got conned by that fake ‘psak from Bnei Brak’ three years ago….

Wherever you have power and money and respect for the Toyrah – you have a massive problem, it’s like a honey-pot that that Erev Rab-baim are drawn to and fight over.

Even if the person at the centre of it all really is a tzaddik, and a true God-fearing Jew, as the late R Chaim Kanievsky himself most certainly was.

==

This has been going on for centuries and centuries.

The fake ‘leaders’, and the family mafias they are part of, either try to shut down the ‘competition’ with slurs and slanders, and when that doesn’t work, they resort to flat-out violence that doesn’t fall short of ordering ‘hits’ on people they view as their opponents.

This is what happened to Rebbe Nachman – who really was a ‘real’ Tzaddik, and really was everything the fakers pretend to be.

It happened again to his main talmid, R Natan Sternhartz of Breslov.

It happened to the Breslovers in Teplik.

And in our days, it’s happened again with Rav Berland.

==

On Shabbat, we had shabbos guests who told us that around 18-19 years ago, they entered a Chinese Auction run by Shuvu Banim – and won!

And then, the people organising the auction didn’t give them their prize, and eventually, disappeared altogether.

I wasn’t shocked.

At that period of time, 20 years ago, right up until 2011-2, Shuvu Banim had been effectively ‘taken over’ from the inside by a bunch of pseudo-Breslov ‘psychos’ from Meah Shearim, who belong to exactly these families of interesting people I write so much about here.

==

Long story short, they realised the Rav was a total ‘cash cow’, and decided they were going to get into the action, and to milk it for all it was worth.

They weaselled their way into close contact with members of the Rav’s family – and then started encouraging them to make rules like ‘you can only see the Rav if you pay $1000 first’.

Meanwhile, these people had their own guys ‘accompanying’ (read: policing) the Rav at all time, they kept him virtually a prisoner in his own home for 10 years, they beat-up the Rav’s followers who tried to get close to him without paying them the money they were demanding…. And they left a terrible, horrible, swathe of destruction and hard feelings within and around ‘Shuvu Banim’.

==

Their reign finally came to an end when the Rav ended up in the hospital with serious heart issues one week after another after another, from all the stress.

At that point, the Rav decided to escape from Jerusalem, and two former commandos who had made teshuva and were now part of Shuvu Banim helped him to do that.

(You can read basic details of this story in One in a Generation I and II).

==

That’s when the Meah Shearim psychos told the Rav that if he didn’t come back to being their ‘cash cow’, they would start slandering him across the whole media.

The Rav didn’t come back to them.

And the slanders began.

This brings us up to 2012-2013, when the Rav then went into exile in Morocco, and then South Africa, Holland, South Africa again – and then finally, he returned to Israel in 2017.

Where he was framed for crimes he never committed in a billion years.

==

Fast-forward to 2019, shortly after he got out of prison, and again, people started to flock to the Rav, and towards ‘real Breslov’.

The Erev Rab-baim literally can’t stand the idea that there should be charidee funds being given – and none of it is going to them.

And that’s also true of our failed State, btw, that has also been built upon so much outright fraud, corruption and greed, revolving around charidee money devoted to ‘supporting Eretz Yisrael’.

Just one set of Erev Rab-beim have beards and chassidic courts, while the other set have degrees and important jobs in the civil service and government.

But they are exactly the same people, literally exactly the same family of crooks.

So when the Rav – a real Tzaddik! – appeared on the scene and started threatening their power base, in so many different ways, they all started co-operating closely to shut him down.

==

Sigh.

There is nothing new under the sun.

The Erev Rab-beim, in all their guises, all their costumes, with all their different ‘branding’ – they’ve been pulling exactly the same stunts over and over again, for millenia, to keep control of the Jewish community, keep the money flowing to them – and to keep the Jews away from the true Tzaddikim of their generation, and away from having a real relationship with God, and their own souls.

And that is still happening today.

==

When the Rav was in prison back in 2017, he explained to one of his grandsons that Shuvu Banim had to go through all this difficult ‘purging’, to get rid of the dross that had attached itself to the Rav.

Today, with all the ongoing persecution of the Rav and his institutions, and all the public scrutiny that never ends, Shuvu is pretty much the last place where a pedo or charidee scammer would want to hang out.

As I’m unwinding more and more of our ‘real Jewish history’, I’m finally starting to understand a little bit more about why everything that’s happened over the last few years has had to happen.

There are such big tikkunim going on with all this.

Such big things being ‘fixed’, on such a deep level.

==

Tov, with this ‘introduction’ out of the way, we will start to unpick yet more of this sordid tale in the next couple of posts.

I felt and feel so sad, that the Erev Rab-baim have been so good at their jobs, especially the last few hundred years.

How many Jewish souls they’ve destroyed….

How many chances for ‘geula’ they’ve ruined….

How many people they’ve killed, both spiritually and physically….

But then I remember how me and my husband got to the Rav, the ‘Tzaddik HaDor’, who was so hidden from us for so long:

We begged Hashem from the bottom of our hearts to show us the truth, and to show us who the ‘real Tzaddik of the generation’ actually was.

And maybe, there is just no other way of doing this.

==