Baba Baruch Business
On the subject of Move over Baba Bernie Madoff, here glides the carpet surfer Elazar Abuhatzeira. There is new book by Professor Yoram Bilu that looks at the phenomena in Israel: The Saint’s Impresarios: Dreamers, Healers, and Holy Men in Israel’s Urban Periphery (Israel: Society, Culture, and History).
Naturally this is not just about Moroccans and it would be a mistake to cast this business as uniquely Israeli. Definitely one of the two oldest professions… There is a review of the book in Haaretz – A “Baba” is born. Now we know why Baba Baruch’s Beer Shevah brother, Baba Elazar Abuhatzeira needed to steal so much money from the working and hardly working Jews. The dude got an underground tunnel from his house, “not to see women” of course:
“The Baba Baruch invented the new version of the tzaddik. Bilu writes in his book that already in the 1980s and 1990s, Baruch Abuhatzeira raised his father, Rabbi Israel Abuhatzeira, known as the Baba Sali, to the level of a national holy man. Masses of people began to visit his poor home in Netivot and to fill up bottles of water, which they believed became curative and brought luck, after being blessed by the tzaddik. After the death of the Baba Sali, his son built him a gravesite with a characteristic white dome in Netivot, surrounded by a national park that has become the most important site for hilulot in Israel.
At the same time, Baba Baruch built himself a sort of palace, as well as a neighborhood called Kiryat Baba Sali. He wore traditional robes, a la Baba Sali, and began to implement a program to turn himself into a kabbalist: in other words, abstaining from women and engaging in kabbala. Despite his shady past, which included affairs with women, he succeeded in acquiring status and prestige.
Many grandsons of the Baba Sali have started flourishing hatzerot (literally, courtyards) for themselves: Rabbi Elazar Abuhatzeira built a luxurious one in Be’er Sheva, which includes a tunnel that connects his home to the synagogue, so that he won’t have to see women on the way to prayers; in the north, David Abuhatzeira, the rabbi of Nahariya, conducts a court that is similar in terms of prestige and status. Because they had the sense to go far away, rather than competing with them, the Baba Baruch has been conducting battles of prestige for years with “the X-Ray,” a stranger who settled in Netivot and eroded his power. The latter seems to have gained the upper hand. Just recently, the foundation for commemorating the Baba Sali filed a petition – one of many – against the Sdot Hanegev Regional Council, claiming that, contrary to the regulations, it allocated 34 dunams (about 8 acres) for building a yeshiva.”
Interesting so it was Baba Baruch who marketed his father. Is that “X-ray-ted” dude in Netivot a Rabbi or a Rapper?
I would be remiss not to mention that Baruch’s brother Meir who was the father of Elazar and Baba Sali himself are not responsible for the shenanigans. In fact a reader of this blog writes:
“…both Meir and his father were truly saintly men who lived lives of absolute simplicity, humility and service. I’m saying this in absolute sincerity. They both lived on the verge of poverty their entire lives with no political aspirations or involvement whatsoever. They were both a source of great pride, joy and leadership to the community of Moroccan jews during the extremely(!) difficult period of the transition from Morocco to israel, and just on that account I am very proud of them. The current generation has definitely made a mess out of things, and I have nothing to say in their defense.”
On the subject of The Chasidic Court of Bernard Madoff, here how it’s done by the professionals of the Abuhatzeira family. A hair raising tale in Haaretz - N.Y. Jews accuse Be’er Sheva Kabbalist of massive fraud. All Bernie Madoff promised was the steady 10% and he actually delivered for 40 years! But Elazar Abuhatzeira went on to do what every miracle maker and a Rabbi on the face of the earth has done before him, exchanged superstition for cold cash. And what Elazar Abuhatzeira sold was not the lousy 10% but the very life itself, is there a price one would not pay for that? One might say it’s the fault of this confused man from Brooklyn, but no, he only followed to the letter what the Rabbis told him to believe. And the esteemed Rabbis teach this with the specific purpose so that this very fraud ride continues indefinitely.
Angelo Balducci is a Gentleman of His Holiness, or an usher for the Pope (one of several). Angelo Balducci is also a senior adviser to the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, the Vatican department that oversees the Roman Catholic church’s worldwide missionary activities. He has been caught dealing with a Vatican pimp Thomas Chinedu Ehiem who was a chorister, numerous times ordering male prostitutes, some of whom where seminarians. Guardian got the dope.
This is the best quality and most complete surveillance tape montage about the Dubai assassination produced by Gulf TV.
- They rented a room opposite of the target. Can you just call to a hotel and ask for a specific room? I didn’t know that.
- There was a recorded attempt to hack “reprogram” the entrance lock from the outside. Assume it was a standard card reader.
- The murdered man officially died from blood pressure in his brain to appear as natural death. Can you induce a stroke?
- The murdered man room was locked with a dead bolt and a key chain from the inside. How would you do that?
If this was Mossad it must be considered a spectacular failure for the entire team to get highlighted like that. But this is also the sign of times when everything is recorded at all times. Mossad used the identities of seven Israeli citizens. How would like to wake up and discover that you are on the Interpol wanted list? This seems reckless and irresponsible.
I don’t know a single person, from the heretics to the messianists and all the in-betweens, who think that the Judaic State is functional today. People with different degrees of attachments or detachments, the geeks absorbed in the Talmudic abstractions, the utopian dreamers living in the projected past, the rebels and the swindlers, no one can stare at the present without averting his or her eyes.
How would one define a contemporary post-Judaism or post-Orthodoxy? The two most significant ideologies of the last centuries – Marxism and Freudism represent a post-Judaic eruption, except they don’t brand themselves as Judaism anymore. Similarly Christianity and Islam are the plagiarized branches of Judaism, even after they severed their ties with the trunk. The Jewish history itself is replete with what I call the source code hacks, indeed Chassidism itself was a post-orthodox eruption, so was Kabbalah, etc. Is the evolution possible today?
Speaking about the future is futile; you never know when a “black swan” will glide in unexpectedly. We are constructed to see the world in a rear view mirror. Sometimes we can master the heroism to glimpse the present, but never the future.
Contemporaneously I observe two main groups of people in various stages of the Judaic rejection. First are the tiny minority who managed to escape relatively unscathed. You can literally count them on one hand. The second group is the vast majority. I call it nominally the Chulent Brigade, these are the people who reject or more likely were rejected by the religious communities. They feel that the secular world doesn’t understand them, the religious world doesn’t accept them, so they live in the in-between, the intergalactic void. A friend compared them to the Eastern European dissidents – “the commies are evil but the West doesn’t get us”.
Psychologically people who were subjected to the various flavors of orthodox indoctrination can be compared to the victims of a sexual abuse. The survivors of the abuse are forever torn between the hate towards the abusers and the longing, even love. This very confusion is the lethal and unrelenting legacy of a sexual abuse, and blasphemously speaking, the confusion of is the staple of a ideological or religious indoctrination. I just don’t meet many people who can break from this.
In America this predicament is only worse. There is the unprecedented chasm with the secular society. And then there is the cruelty of the mass produced indoctrination. What was traditionally, by and large, a private religious instruction, turned into the factory-like school system, where an ego and dissent are crushed by the debilitating group-think. The proud graduates are measured, rewarded and awarded a Stockholm syndrome degree. Is a post-abuse, a post-Stockholm syndrome possible for a post-human? Not even God can ask that much from a mere mortal.
Illustrations by Hugh MacLeod
Often people who proclaim the departure from the Judaic creed display the internalized values and the logic that personifies the most blatant Judaic cultural imbalances, even when the renegades are compared to the openly observant. Witness XGHs riff on Rabbi Reuven Feinstein. There is a text and it must be dissected, regardless of the historical context, motivations or the character of the author, in other words the most pointless geekery and metal gymnastics. So how did Reuven Feinstein appear on the EJF web site? Do you think after Shabbos he booted up his laptop, read all the blogs, and then carefully wrote the responsa? One of the two things happened:
- Someone called him on the phone and described to him in general, or likely misleading, terms the release and asked Rabbi Reuven Feinstein if it would be OK to use the endorsement (this is how Rabbi Elya Wachtfogel got ensnared).
- Or someone wrote the release and brought it to Reuven Feinstein to approve, perhaps even together with a fat fee.
Now do you think for a moment that after Leib Tropper resigned from the EJF, “the board members” rushed to the bank to unauthorize Tropper from using the EJF funds? So while the blogosphere raged in indignation, Leib Tropper might have spent the precious time delivering money bags to people needed to protect his racket. Luke Ford have been doing a nice job on this tailor made for him story (sex, gerus, jews), he posts:
“Anne emails: You need to look into the role of Menachem Lubinsky in this affair. He is the PR frontman for EJF and Tropper, and he has always stepped in when Tropper has alienated people, which as an aggressive and intemperate pig he has tended to do fairly regularly. Lubinsky is the composer of last Monday’s EJF press release and he wrote all the so called statements by the various protagonists (Wachtfogel has since distanced himself from EJF and denied that he made any statement or accepted the role in EJF). Lubinsky has been working the phones all week trying to get rats to board the sinking ship that EJF has become. And of course the reason EJF can’t fall is because it is the key to obtaining Tom Kaplan’s money.
Who is currently signing EJF checks? If it is still Tropper then the whole resignation is phony – a cosmetic damage limitation exercise, cooked up by Lubinsky while a strategy is prepared – however ridiculous this may seem to you – for Tropper to rejoin the kiruv world, a humbled and repentant figure.”
Which brings us back to Rabbi Reuven Feinstein, it’s not his lack of the moral ground that is appalling, nor the glaring contradictions in the badly written release, not even his family relation to the Tendler kin in Monsey. The words are empty without the financial transparency. Till Reuven Feinstein and the rest of the politburo disclose the favors accrued in the process of pimping the Eternal Jewish Family, the HTML based pashkevilim will not do.
On the subject of 10 Similarities between a Chabad House and a Las Vegas Casino. This is the plague of the late Bugsy Siegel, the Rebbe and the founder of Las Vegas. The plague is in the Bialystoker Synagogue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Note the auspicious day of his passing. You can see that Beirush was shot just two months after his father Max left the world. But the good news is that the Cunin family in Las Vegas can save of the yarhzeit candles and literally kill two birds with one stone.
I plan several posts from the Russian collection of photos by Margaret Bourke-White. These are all from 1931 in addition to the 1931 Magnitogorsk photos and 1941 Stalin photos.
Worker tightening a bolt on a generator shell. Dnieper River Dam.
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If you remember in the beginning of the first tape Leib Tropper mentions “Alpert from Far Rockaway”. He was actually in the middle of arranging the August 19th wedding of his son Pesach to the Alpert family. There was the list of Rabbis who attended the wedding, published on his now defunct blog, but the list is still in the “cash”:
“We who work with Rabbi Tropper’s blog share in his simcha tonight. Maran Hagaon Harav Chaim P. Sheinberg was Mesader Kiddushin at the Alpert -Tropper Chasuna. In attendance:
- Rosh Yeshivas Ponoviz, Hagaon Harav Berel Povarsky
- Rosh Yeshivas Kaminetz, Hagaon Rav Yitzchok Scheiner
- Hagaon Rav Dovid Feinstein
- Hagaon Rav Reuven Feinstein
- Hagaon Rav Shmuel Eliezer Stern
- Hagaon Rav Moshe Shapiro
- Hagaon Rav E.B. Wachtfogel
- Hagaon Harav Moshe D. Wilhelm, Rosh Yeshivas Boston
- Hagaon Harav Shimon Alster, Rosh Yeshivas Cliffwood
- Hagaon Rav Aaron Schechter
- Hagaon Harav Eliyahu Mann
- Harav Asher Bergman (grandson of Rav Shach)
- Hagaon Harav M. Altusky
Letters of Brocho were received from Hagaonim:
- Rav Shaul Alter
- Rav Chaim Kanyevsky
- Harav M.Y. Lefkowitz
- Harav Shmuel Auerbach
- Maran Harav Eliyashuv
- Maran Harav A.L. Steinman
Special Guests: Tom & Dafna Kaplan, Mr. & Mrs. M. Honlein, Mr. & Mrs. M. Lubinsky and Mr. & Mrs. Deniss Rapps.”
It’s hard to go wrong with so much “genius” around… Fortunately it’s just a Tropper, not another Holocaust.
I continue to curate the Russian collection of photos by Margaret Bourke-White. These photos are all from 1931 in Magnitogorsk, the mining and industrial town on the border with Kazakhstan.
Russian woman grimly holding a slab of meat as other women staunchly stand
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This is the self described bio that was on Leib Tropper’s web site before the site was taken down yesterday:
“Rabbi Leib Tropper, Rosh Yeshiva of Kol Yaakov Torah Center, was born on the Lower East Side to Rav Yehuda Tropper, a popular mechanech at Yeshivas Rabbeinu Yaakov Yosef Elementary School, and Rivka o”h, the daughter of the Valbolneker Iluy, HaGaon HaRav Leib Forer zt”l. After graduating from Yeshivas Rabbeinu Yaakov Yosef at the age of 12 ½, Rabbi Tropper first attended the Yeshiva of Philadelphia and then learned at the Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland. Before reaching his 15th birthday, Rabbi Tropper traveled to Eretz Yisroel to learn in Yeshivas Torah Ore, founded by Maran Harav Chaim Pinchus Scheinberg shlit”a. Rabbi Tropper spent more than five years at Yeshivas Torah Ore, where he developed a close relationship as a talmid, receiving most of his hadracha from the Rosh Yeshiva shlita.
After leaving Torah Ore, Rabbi Tropper accepted a position at the world renowned Ohr Sameach institutions, then still in its embryonic stages. During that period, Rabbi Tropper accumulated four semichos, the first being from Hagaon Harav Sroyohu Deblitzky shlita, a talmid muvhak of the Chazon Ish zt”l. Subsequently, he received ordination from then Sephardic Chief Rabbi, Rav Ovadia Yosef shlita. However, his most precious semichos were those received from the Mara D’asra of Yerushalayim, Harav Betzalel Zolty and Maran Harav Elazar Menachem Man Shach zt”l, the Ponevezher Rosh Yeshiva.
After five years in Yerushalayim teaching baalei teshuva, Rabbi Tropper returned to the United States to become the educational director of Ohr Sameach, New York located in Yonkers and Monsey. After several years he was encouraged to start a new yeshiva for baalei teshuva who wish to become B’nei Torah and be mainstreamed into a conventional yeshiva environment. Kol Yaakov’s doors opened in Elul of ’81 and was named in honor of Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky zt”l, who inspired its founding. In existence for almost 25 years, Kol Yaakov has reached students from across the globe. Rabbi Tropper attributes the yeshiva’s success to the approach in Hashkafa and Chinuch he learned from his Rosh Yeshiva, Maran Harav Scheinberg shlita.
In 1990, Rabbi Tropper began a new outreach program called Horizons, focusing on educating and inspiring the unaffiliated to experience a Torah lifestyle. As its director, Rabbi Tropper has traveled across the world to places such as Berlin, London, Paris among others and visited remote cities throughout the U.S. lecturing and teaching. Additionally, he has also authored three seforim, the first of which was published at the age of 21 which incorporated many of the psakim of Harav Eliyashuv, shlita and received approbations from numerous Gedolim including Harav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, zt’l and Harav Henkin, zt’l. Another of his Halachic sfarim is based on the p’sokim of his Rebbe, Maran Harav Scheinberg, shlit”a and the third based on halachic decisions of Rav Tuvia Goldstein zt’l.
Rabbi Tropper studied Halacha under the direction of Gedolei Horoah such as, Harav Sheinberg, Harav Tuvia Goldstein and had the special opportunity to learn with Harav Henkin, zt’l.”
How about the insistence that Leib Tropper and the multiple recent scandals are the perversions of the Jewish religious legacy? Someone said: “I want my Judaism back”. And what Judaism would that be, as it exists in the imagination and books or as it lived in real life? This is like saying that the glossy presentations to the BTs and the goyim at the fancy retreats (from reality) is the truth but the way Tropper conducted himself with the whores, the oligarchs and the gdolim is a lie. This is like saying that communism that was practiced in the good old CCCP was the perversion, but the communism that exists in Rabeynu Carl Marx’s books is the reality.
Leib Tropper articulates the Judaic culture rather perfectly; he takes it to the ultimate conclusion. Chassidim are not the ceramic dancing tchotchkes, nor are they Buber bobe mayses, the Chasidic conquest was fueled by the collusion between the Rebbes and the rising merchant class. The currency of money and communal stature are interchangeable and trade-able. And this in nutshell was Tropper’s game, the game as old as this world.
If you strip Tropper from the lurid predilections, the mechanics are no different from that of all the “outreach professionals”. What they all do is sell the Jewish nostalgia back to rich Jews who are one or two generations removed from the abominable reality of the Jewish communal life, long enough to forget the bad and but not too long to still remember some good. What the benefactors can’t readily understand is that people who fall in the sphere of influence of the “leaders” are treated like pawns or props, they are deprived of humanity or even abused. The victim and the pawn on the tapes can’t realize that she is dealing with the law abiding citizen, it’s in his interest to delay the actual conversion indefinitely, so she can continue to be used for the “treatments”, in full compliance with the holy Torah. Notice how the man says on the second tape: “I can love anybody”. This is the code word for the exactly the opposite and just few sentences later; he inevitably evokes the rape.
The comparison of Leib Tropper to Tiger Woods is plain wrong. Tiger in his texts is still looking for the elusive meaningful connection. He didn’t pimp his women and he actually made his money through the hard work and the incredible talent. But you can comrade Leib Tropper to Bernie Madoff (although Bernie was a legit star trader at some point). Bernie sold the perceptions and the myth, his Ponzi Scheme was basically the same as Tropper’s. Stir imagination, trap the investors, the false reports, buy influence and hope to have a genuine business one day. Leib Tropper is Bernie Madoff plus the pimping (see The Chasidic Court of Bernard Madoff).
