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Old July 2nd, 2005 #1
lawrence dennis
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Default Major expose of Kabbalah & 'Rabbi' Berg

Inside Hollywood's Hottest Cult

Quote:
On a clear spring night in April 2004, Madonna, Guy Ritchie, Ashton Kutcher, and a gum-snapping Demi Moore stood on the dais in a banquet room at the Westin Diplomat hotel in Hollywood, Florida, facing the 2,500 Kabbalah Centre congregants who had paid as much as $4,000 each for the “Pesach Experience,” the Centre’s Passover retreat. Lesser Kabbalah lights Marla Maples and Sandra Bernhard were also in the house.

... The celebrity couples had been summoned to the dais by the Centre’s founder and spiritual leader, Philip Berg, to share their wisdom with the crowd. But according to one attendee, none of the four said anything very memorable. Moore didn’t speak at all.


Those unfamiliar with the ways of the Centre might have seen this as a strange way to celebrate Passover, a holiday that commemorates the deliverance of Jews from slavery in Egypt. Traditionally the seder ends with a toast and the words next year in Jerusalem. This one ended with a blessing from Madonna, the Catholic pop star from Michigan; the star of Dude, Where’s My Car?; and the director of Snatch. But to the congregants assembled that evening the bizarre conclusion was just business as usual. Furthermore, to them the celebrities were not the only stars onstage, or even the biggest. That distinction belongs to the Berg family: Philip Berg, his wife Karen, and their sons, Michael and Yehuda. The Bergs have come a long way since 1971, when Philip, then known as Shraga Feivel Gruberger, began preaching his version of Jewish mystical enlightenment to a small group of students in Israel. A onetime insurance salesman who left his wife and seven kids to marry Karen, his former secretary, Berg has become a man so revered that some of his followers believe he has the power to resurrect the dead. In the process he has created a multimillion-dollar brand out of a bastardization of an arcane branch of Judaism, larding it with pricey accessories and bold-faced names. His followers have been promised that Kabbalah can find their lost children, cure their illnesses, replenish their pocketbooks, and bring them true love. Berg himself is so above it all that even his wife refers to him, at least to the press, only by an honorific. He is “the Rav.”

Under the Bergs’ leadership the Kabbalah Centre has become both enormously wealthy and world famous. Its products—the red strings, the scented candles, the holy water—are on display everywhere from the counters at Sephora to the pages of Us Weekly. The Centre’s website does a lucrative business selling $280 crib sheet sets featuring protective Hebrew lettering; the diamond necklaces bearing symbols for healing, happiness, love, and prosperity are so popular they’ve sold out. No less a luminary than Britney Spears has been photographed toting a volume of the Zohar, the Kabbalists’ bible, which sells at prices up to $415 for a set. The star-studded seder in Florida shows how far the Bergs have come, from the outer boroughs of New York City to the global stage. But the Kabbalah Centre is at a turning point. When the books of ecclesiastical history are closed, those few minutes at the Westin Diplomat may end up being seen as the apex of an institution shrouded in secrecy and shielded from the public eye by the glare of celebrity. But a close look reveals an organization more committed to questionable financial deals and celebrity wrangling than to advancing an ancient Jewish mystical approach to life.

In the past several months the organization has been beset by a barrage of bad publicity. In December the Guardian of London published a 10-month investigation that revealed the dubious nature of the Rav’s qualifications as a religious leader, as well as the Centre’s avaricious ways. Then, in January 2005, a BBC documentary caught high-ranking Kabbalah Centre officer Rabbi Eliyahu Yardeni on undercover camera saying that the Jews who died in the Holocaust perished because they weren’t studying Kabbalah. The same documentary showed an employee at the Centre’s London office selling a man with cancer more than $1,500 worth of merchandise, including Aramaic books he could not read and bottled water with no proven health benefits. This Friday, ABC’s 20/20 is airing a story featuring an interview with Karen, Yehuda, and Michael Berg in which the family was asked to answer some discomfiting questions about the legitimacy of their practices. For the Bergs this increased scrutiny comes at a particularly unfortunate time. The Rav suffered a debilitating stroke last fall and has largely been out of sight ever since. Though his family has managed to keep the Kabbalah show up and running, none of his three heirs has the religious authority to fully shelter the Centre from the gathering storm.


In a bid to counter these mounting challenges, the Bergs have called in the big guns. Last winter they hired Sitrick and Company, a powerful crisis management firm that has represented such beleaguered clients as the Major League Baseball Players Association and Halle Berry. “Life coach” Shore Slocum, who has worked with Tony Robbins and Norman Schwarzkopf, was also recently brought in to help the Bergs with their communications skills. Last month notoriously intimidating Hollywood attorney Bert Fields also joined the team. One of his first actions was to send a letter to Radar warning that he was keeping a close eye on its reporting about the Kabbalah Centre and the Bergs. Finally, of course, there’s Madonna, whose ever-deepening ties to the Bergs have led her to underwrite the Centre’s activities to the tune of $18 million since 2001, according to one insider. Us Weekly reported last week that the diva was threatening to boycott ABC if the network proceeded with the 20/20 segment. (Liz Rosenberg, Madonna’s straight-shooting publicist, denied the allegation, pointing out that Madonna appeared on ABC’s The View the same week the Us report appeared.)

In the coming days Radar Online will present an in-depth investigation into the history, teachings, and practices of both the Bergs and the Centre that raises troubling new questions about Hollywood’s most fashionable cult. Radar’s findings include:

The false claims the Centre has made about its distinguished origins.

The Centre’s solicitation of freelance ghostwriters on the website Craigslist, to help the Bergs write “scholarly” books on Kabbalah, some of which the writers are encouraged to model on new-age best-sellers.

The previously unreported lawsuit that charged Philip Berg with copyright infringement and plagiarism.

The Centre’s penchant for lending money to companies owned by close friends and associates of the Bergs, including more than $2 million in loans to a company with a P.O. Box address that flips investment properties in such Los Angeles neighborhoods as Compton and Watts.

The Bergs’ luxurious lifestyle, in stark contrast to the bleak four-to-a-bedroom conditions and $35-a-month stipend they offer the full-time volunteers who cook and clean for them.

The Centre’s use of cultlike techniques to control members, including sleep deprivation, alienation from friends and family, and Kabbalah-dictated matchmaking.

The bizarre scientific claims made by the Centre’s leaders on behalf of Kabbalah Water, ranging from its ability to cleanse the lakes of Chernobyl of radiation to its power to cure cancer, AIDS, and SARS.

The Centre’s sponsorship of the Oroz Research Centre, a “23rd century” scientific institution that markets a “liquid compound for the treatment of nuclear waste” that also cures gynecological problems in cows, sheep, and other farm animals.

The Bergs’ plan to leverage celebrity congregants to expand the scope of their merchandising, and their failed attempt to lure Madonna to partner with them in a venture to repackage Kabbalah Water for the mass market.

The Bergs’ explicit strategy of steering Kabbalah away from its Jewish roots in order to appeal to a wider global market, and their plans to brand both the Centre and family members for maximum popular appeal.
__________________

How is the faithful city become an harlot! It was full of judgment: righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers. Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water. Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards.

Xian WN!

"The Jew can only be understood if it is known what he strives for: ... the destruction of the world.... [it is] the tragedy of Lucifer."

Holy-Hoax Exposed, Hollow-Cost Examined, How Low Cost? (toons)
 
Old July 2nd, 2005 #2
lawrence dennis
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Default Part 2

http://www.radaronline.com/web-only/...st-cult-ii.php


Quote:
... The Bergs fly in chartered jets and the private planes of their major donors. They recently built three neighboring minimansions in Beverly Hills, which, like their deluxe New York dwellings, were paid for by the Centre. The world headquarters of the religion the family all but built from scratch, now occupies half a block of Beverly Hills real estate, including a Kabbalah bookstore and a private day school, with more building projects underway. According to its website, the Centre has locations in nine American cities and 51 more across the world, stretching from Iran to Japan to the Côte d’Ivoire, including “satellite” locations in such unlikely bastions of new age Jewish mysticism as Bogotá, Cali, and Medellín, Colombia. In its literature the Centre claims astronomical numbers of students—3.4 million, a figure for which there is little support. More than 1 million study online or over the phone, according to answers provided by Sitrick and Company, the crisis management firm the Centre retained last winter. When addressing the federal government, the Centre tells a more credible tale: In a 2002 application for tax-exempt status, the number of active members nationwide is given as 5,000. Whatever the true number, the Bergs have shown a special genius for getting the most out of each of them. In addition to asking its members to tithe 10 percent of their income, the Centre strongly encourages students to buy a set of the Zohar—Kabbalah’s sacred and inscrutable text—for each of their homes, as well as gallons of Kabbalah Water for hydrotherapy as well as drinking. (One former member says she was urged to drink four to 10 bottles a day.) There is a host of additional expenses, from classes and books to retreats and other special events. According to former students the Centre’s teachers charge for special blessings and meditations intended to bring happiness and to ward off the evil eye....

One woman told British journalist Elena Lappin, whose 10-month investigation of the Centre was published last December in the Guardian of London, that she left her husband and children in Israel in exchange for the “honor” of cooking for the Rav. The family—which now included Yehuda, born in 1972, and Michael, born a year later—spent the next 12 years traveling between Israel and America, tending their proliferating flock. By the 1980s this included volunteers known as chevre—Hebrew for friends—who worked 12-hour days for the Bergs selling books door-to-door and keeping house for them, like members of a mom-and-pop Hare Krishna–style cult. By 1989 the Centre’s still relatively primitive business model—selling the Zohar, aggressively soliciting donations, and relying on a largely unpaid labor force—was worth at least $8.9 million, according to tax documents. Around the same time, Berg sold a 10-year copyright to his written works for more than $2.5 million—to his own organization....

Not long afterward, mainstream Jewish groups and anticult activists began to get calls from the families complaining about their children’s involvement with the Centre. “They had people who were giving them their last dollar because they had a relative with a sickness,” recalls one student from that era. “They made every promise.” The occult aspect of Kabbalah—something traditional Kabbalists reject—was more pronounced than it is today. On the last night of Sukkot everyone gathered in Queens so that the rabbi could read their destinies by looking at their shadows on a sheet in the moonlight, a predictor of one’s fortune for the coming year. One year, at another Centre, recalls someone who was present, the shadow cast by one student didn’t appear to include her hand, no matter how she was repositioned. Panic and many calls ensued. Finally, the word came back: It means give more money....

Despite his disdain for his Orthodox brethren, on at least one occasion Berg allegedly couldn’t help himself from borrowing from their work. In the mid-’90s he settled a plagiarism and copyright infringement suit filed against him in New York City by the estate of a serious Kabbalist named Levi Krakovsky, which accused “Berg and/or persons acting under his direction” of, among other things, entering the impoverished scholar’s home after his death and taking his original manuscripts....

And there is another accusation of plagiarism against Berg. According to Rabbi Immanuel Schochet of Toronto, Berg lifted most of his preface to a Centre-published book from a book by Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag. The preface, signed by Berg, was reproduced—complete with printer’s errors from Ashlag’s original—in two different publications. Asked about this, Centre spokesperson Alison Cohen again responded that the Rav’s health prevents the Centre from addressing the issue. In 1993 the Centre filed a $4.5 million defamation suit against Schochet for charging, among other things, that Karen Berg was a gentile. While the Centre has not actively pursued the case, it has had the effect of intimidating some of its critics into remaining silent....

The Centre sometimes hires ghostwriters to produce its books. The Centre has advertised for writers on the website Craigslist. In keeping with the Centre’s increasingly aggressive plan to expand, according to sources, the writers are urged to study spiritual best-sellers and mimic them using Kabbalah Centre lingo. Many of the Centre’s new books are stripped of Jewish context. Karen Berg’s debut book, last winter’s God Wears Lipstick, is full of vague parables, personal anecdotes, and commentary on the lessons that can be divined from the movie Groundhog Day. The tendency to link Kabbalah to pop culture was apparent early—as noted by the lawyer who filed the suit on behalf of Krakovsky’s estate. Berg’s commentary on the mystical properties of the Hebrew alphabet, the lawyer wrote, was done in a “science fiction” style, “using George Lucas–like allusions to the ‘Death Star Fleet’ and ‘the Dark Lord.’” Chevre at the L.A. Centre were told that the movies The Matrix and What Lies Beneath were “full of Kabbalah.” Not that the Centre is indifferent to the needs of the traditionally devout. According to an internal marketing memo obtained by Radar, the target audience for True Prosperity, by Yehuda Berg, is “Christian, Bible Belt.”...
__________________

How is the faithful city become an harlot! It was full of judgment: righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers. Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water. Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards.

Xian WN!

"The Jew can only be understood if it is known what he strives for: ... the destruction of the world.... [it is] the tragedy of Lucifer."

Holy-Hoax Exposed, Hollow-Cost Examined, How Low Cost? (toons)
 
Old July 2nd, 2005 #3
lawrence dennis
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Default Parts 3 & 4

The saga continued....

http://www.radaronline.com/web-only/the-kabbalah-chronicles/2005/06/inside-hollywoods-hottest-cult-iii.php



Quote:
For all the talk of Madonna, it was Sandra Bernhard who became the first star in the Bergs’ celebrity collection. Bernhard, who first wandered into the Los Angeles Kabbalah Centre around 10 years ago, was what you might call the Patient Zero of celebrity Kabbalah patronage. At the time, the Kabbalah Centre was already a steadily growing business, but it wasn’t yet an internationally known brand. In fact, it didn’t even have a meeting place of its own in Manhattan; when in New York, the Bergs’ followers still had to haul themselves out to Queens. And so might things have remained forever. Instead, enchanted by the power of Kabbalah, within a couple of years Bernhard had brought in her friends Roseanne Barr and Madonna, who were soon followed into the fold by Barbra Streisand, Elizabeth Taylor, Jeff Goldblum, Britney Spears, Marla Maples, Sarah Ferguson, Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall, Monica Lewinsky, Paris Hilton, and the former Posh Spice. Some, like Maples and Spears, became devoted students of the Centre’s watered-down, one-size-fits-all version of the mystical Jewish philosophy. Others, like Jagger and his ex-wife, quickly extracted themselves from its tentacles.

Of course, one star sets the gold standard in her ability to garner press and to influence—or contribute—millions. Within the Kabbalah Centre, Madonna is still what she was to the world at large in the decade prior to her first encounter with Kabbalah in 1997: a woman whose every move is followed as if the fate of humanity depended on it. In addition their relationship with the Yardenis, the singer and her husband are also close friends with Michael Berg and his wife Monica—Michael hung out and gave advice on the set of Guy Ritchie’s most recent movie, Revolver, which has had trouble finding a distributor. (Rumor has it that the screenplay was originally too Kabbalistic and had to be rewritten. A copy obtained by Radar does feature Centre-istic profundities—“Just ’cause you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there,” muses one character—strewn throughout, but it is not significantly less coherent than Ritchie’s previous work.) ...

Once one of the most outspoken and independent-minded women in the world, Madonna now goes on television mouthing the Bergs’ simplistic creed, part of which is that you have to be outspoken and independent-minded to grasp it. According to one student, the Bergs have told their most precious acolyte that she is the reincarnation of the biblical Queen Esther, who saved the Jews from the evil vizier Haman. And if the Bergs can work this kind of transformation, how surprising is it that they can turn water into gold?
http://www.radaronline.com/web-only/...st-cult-iv.php



Quote:
... In short, whether the focus is celebrity, philanthropy, merchandising, or the tithing and donations involved in the practice of Kabbalah itself, the one constant is sizable amounts of money. This goes to the heart of the Centre’s mantra of “giving and sharing”—the golden rule of Kabbalah, Berg-style. Both present and former students told Radar that this only ever means one thing. In the words of one, “Every teacher explicitly said, the only true charity that counts is to give to them—all your spare time and even your work time. People were encouraged not to go to work, because you have to share, you have to give.” Like most of the former students with whom Radar spoke, this woman considers herself to have been brainwashed during her time with the Centre. Cult experts Steven Alan Hassan and Rick Ross have both counseled former Centre students and received numerous calls from worried family members and friends of people who have gotten involved with the Centre. The techniques the students allege the Centre uses—isolating members from external support networks, pinpointing and exploiting their fears and desires, giving them a community that promises to fulfill all their needs—are so elementary that it’s hard to believe they would work on significant numbers of people. But they have, they do, and doubtless they will continue to, in ways both small and large. Another former student, who worked as chevre at the Los Angeles Centre, living with four other volunteers in a one-bedroom apartment for a stipend of $35 a month, considered herself lucky to get private time with Yehuda Berg. Her teachers used to tell her that the body doesn’t really need more than four or five hours of sleep a night—in fact, more than that is bad for you. In this student’s belief, if she had given the Centre the $30,000 in her savings account she would not have ended up in the ranks of the chevre. If they couldn’t get her money, well then, her labor would do....
__________________

How is the faithful city become an harlot! It was full of judgment: righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers. Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water. Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards.

Xian WN!

"The Jew can only be understood if it is known what he strives for: ... the destruction of the world.... [it is] the tragedy of Lucifer."

Holy-Hoax Exposed, Hollow-Cost Examined, How Low Cost? (toons)
 
Old July 2nd, 2005 #4
Whirlwind
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Default

A fool and his money are soon parted- by a jew.
__________________
KILL YOUR TV! Or at least stop taking it more seriously than a goldfish.
 
Old October 17th, 2011 #5
Mike Parker
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Default

Mysticism and money

Couple's success spreading kabbalah yields to discord, tax probe

Philip and Karen Berg, founders of the L.A.-based Kabbalah Centre, set out to make secret Jewish mysticism available to the public. But former followers are now critics, and the IRS is investigating.

By Harriet Ryan and Kim Christensen, Los Angeles Times
October 16, 2011
First of two parts

Philip Berg’s new wife was young, beautiful and worldly, everything that he, a middle-aged orthodox rabbi, wasn’t. Karen Berg could be pushy too. She brought a television into their home over his objections. She tossed out his traditional black fur hat, and pressured him to teach ancient Jewish mysticism -- known as kabbalah -- to the public.

“Men and women together?” Philip said.

“Yeah, sure, men and women,” she replied.

The heightened profile of the L.A.-based Kaballah Centre came with a continued emphasis on soliciting donations, sometimes in ways some found offensive. Then the IRS stepped in.

Philip understood how radical her proposition was. For centuries, elite rabbinical scholars -- all of them men -- had guarded like rare gems the spiritual secrets believed to be encoded in the Torah. Karen was an outsider to this culture. Entrepreneurial and unimpressed by religious authority, she saw no reason why such valuable teachings shouldn’t be offered on the open market.

“Let’s give it to the people,” she insisted.

Philip was torn between tradition and his soul mate. He chose Karen.

That conversation four decades ago, recounted by Karen in videos and in a book she wrote, set the course for their lives. Once so poor that they shopped at thrift stores, slept in cramped rooms above a Queens synagogue and studied scripture on a pingpong table, the Bergs gradually turned their spiritual vision into the Kabbalah Centre, a worldwide organization with headquarters in Los Angeles, branches in dozens of countries and assets estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The center’s teachings about God, happiness and the meaning of life drew a passionate following that included big names in film, fashion and music. Devotees treated the couple as if they were gods. Some considered it an honor to eat Philip’s table scraps. They addressed Karen in the third person and showered the couple with gifts, including couture handbags and spa vacations. The Bergs stayed in luxury hotels, traveled by private jet and took gambling trips to Las Vegas, according to former members of their inner circle.

The Kabbalah Centre prospered, but eventually its success proved divisive, and harmony gave way to public discord. The Bergs’ lifestyle was questioned, their finances scrutinized. Friends became enemies, supporters fell silent. In recent months, IRS agents investigating the center’s finances pored over records and questioned the Bergs’ followers.

Philip had always sensed that Karen’s idea of kabbalah for the people would stir vehement opposition. “We’re probably going to get killed,” he warned her during that conversation 40 years ago. “We’re probably going to get stoned.”

A devout religious upbringing


Philip Berg, flanked by sons Michael, left, and Yehuda, blows the traditional ram’s horn at Rosh Hashana, or Jewish New Year, rites for kabbalah students.

Philip Berg was born Shraga Feivel Gruberger in Brooklyn, two months before the stock market crash of 1929. His family was devoutly religious. Their neighborhood, Williamsburg, filled with Hasidic Jews fleeing Europe. A thorough Torah education was a given and Philip began his at age 3. He attended ultra-Orthodox yeshivas and was ordained a rabbi in 1951.

As a young man, he turned away from full-time religious studies. He later wrote that he had become “profoundly disillusioned by my religion as it had been taught to me,” but he also needed to support his wife, Rivkah, and their young family. The couple would eventually have eight children. He Americanized his name and became a salesman for New York Life Insurance Co., a position family friend Billy Phillips said afforded him a chauffeured Cadillac and good cigars. In the early ‘60s, Philip went to Israel, where he was introduced to kabbalah by his wife’s uncle, a renowned scholar named Yehuda Brandwein. Kabbalah entranced Philip. Unlike yeshiva, often dominated by debates about the minutiae of Jewish law, kabbalah focused on life’s existential questions: Why am I here? How can I be happy?

Brandwein, who ran a Jerusalem yeshiva, was Philip’s spiritual guide to the mystical world that would become his lifelong devotion.

The Hebrew word for “received,” kabbalah holds that the first five books of the Bible contain hidden lessons. Kabbalists believe God revealed this wisdom to Moses along with the Ten Commandments. That knowledge, they believe, was passed down orally until the 13th century, when it was published in a series of books known as the Zohar.

Some Jewish scholars regarded with suspicion kabbalah’s preoccupation with astrology, reincarnation and a world of unseen forces. Others, including Philip, saw it as Judaism at its purest.

Returning to Brooklyn, he opened his insurance office at night to orthodox Jews for the study of the Zohar. In 1965, with the help of another student and an elderly, impoverished scholar, Levi Krakovsky, Philip set up the National Institute for Research in Kabbalah, a forerunner of the Kabbalah Centre.

In a tiny apartment so crammed with books that he could have only one visitor at a time, Krakovsky translated the Zohar and other texts into English. He yearned to spread the teachings, but like other scholars before him, he was confounded by an inherent contradiction in kabbalah: It taught that the Messiah would appear only when the world embraced its wisdom. Yet only Jewish men, 40 or older and with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Torah and Jewish customs, were permitted to study it.

Krakovksy lugged his handwritten manuscripts around Brooklyn in a suitcase, searching for an audience. He died in 1966, never having found a publisher. Years later, his heirs claimed that Philip had stolen some of his manuscripts. They sued, accusing Philip of publishing the translations under his own name to make money and “to falsely enhance [his] stature ... as a great Kabbalah teacher.”

Philip denied the allegations.

The case went to trial in Manhattan federal court, but just as the jury was to begin deliberations, the center reached a confidential settlement with Krakovsky’s family.

Whether or not he stole Krakovsky’s work, Philip inherited his desire to expand kabbalah’s reach. That ambition might have remained unrealized had he not hired a gum-smacking 16-year-old named Kathy Mulnick as a receptionist.

Oft-told tale of couple’s meeting


Philip and Karen Berg are seen here at a 2009 event in Israel sponsored by their Los Angeles-based Kabbalah Centre, which the IRS is investigating.

The Bergs’ romance is the Kabbalah Centre’s creation story, and the family has told and retold it in books, videos, religious services and media interviews. Verifying it has proved difficult. Many of those involved, including Philip’s first wife, are dead. The Bergs declined to talk to The Times.

Raised by a single mother in postwar Brooklyn, Kathy Mulnick was a self-described wild child who could take care of herself. She attended 13 different schools, and would later tell friends she couldn’t read until she was 9. Later in life, after she changed her name to Karen, she regaled friends with stories of the toughness bred by her chaotic youth.

Her family was Jewish, Karen has said. But they were assimilated and ignorant of even the most sacred parts of the religion. In a 2009 interview with the Jerusalem Post, she recalled a family tradition of enjoying a big meal on Yom Kippur, the day of fasting and atonement. Her job at Philip’s insurance office exposed her to the world of religious Jews who observed the Sabbath and kept kosher.

She has written that as a high school student, she had nothing in common with her boss, a 31-year-old with a wife and children. “In fact, I disliked the man,” she wrote in “God Wears Lipstick,” a 2005 book subtitled “Kabbalah for Women. ”

After six months, she quit.

At 17, she married a man from her neighborhood. They had two daughters, built a contracting business and eventually divorced. After they separated, she decided to call an old friend in Philip’s office. At the end of the conversation, she asked the woman to say hello to Philip for her. It had been eight years since she had seen him.

“Not 10 minutes later, my phone rang,” she wrote.

It was Philip. They chatted and their conversation turned to his devotion to kabbalah. Karen was intrigued because of her interest in New Age philosophy and asked if he would give her private lessons. By her account, Philip, who wouldn’t even shake hands with a woman who wasn’t his wife, nonchalantly replied, “Okay, why not?”

“We made a date for dinner that night to discuss the details,” she wrote later. “I have to tell you at that meeting, it was all over. We knew instantly that we were meant for each other.”

Philip’s marriage to his first wife fell apart, and he and Karen were married in 1971. Their early relationship was a tug of war between her worldliness and his piety. Philip threw out his new wife’s library of New Age books and blocked the door when she tried to bring a television into their home. He gave in when she threatened to leave him, Karen wrote.

Then there was the hat.

“One day I took that big black fur hat off his head and threw it right out the window. I said to him, ‘Let’s understand something. I joined your world so you’ve got to come to mine. I can't live with this kind of strictness,’” she wrote.

Philip gave up the insurance business and the couple moved to Israel shortly after they were married. They lived in a tiny apartment in Jerusalem with their sons, Yehuda born in 1972 and Michael in 1973, and drove a beat-up Fiat, recalled Jeremy Langford, an early disciple who lived with the Bergs in Israel for two years.

Karen began to study kabbalah seriously. They argued over what to do with

Philip’s spiritual knowledge. She suggested teaching kabbalah to anyone who wanted to learn about it, including women and those without yeshiva training. Philip acquiesced, and in so doing elevated Karen to a status well above a rabbi’s wife. In the eyes of followers, Karen became Philip’s peer: He had the education, she had the nerve.

In the eyes of followers, Karen became Philip’s peer: He had the education, she had the nerve.“What Karen Berg has done is what no man in history has done,” said Phillips, the family friend. “Never have the words ‘kabbalah’ and ‘Zohar’ been known outside the small circle of kabbalists.”

The Bergs advertised introductory classes; the cost was about “the price of a falafel,” one former member recalled. The New Age seekers, retirees and others drawn to the courses in Tel Aviv were from secular homes and knew little about their Jewish heritage.

“We loved that we found mysticism in our own backyard, in Judaism. The teacher spoke of things that very much resonated with us.... There was no pressure to be observant,” said one longtime member who became disillusioned and left the center after two decades. The former member, who continues to practice kabbalah’s philosophy of helping others, asked not to be named because relatives are still involved.

Philip held himself out as the spiritual successor to Brandwein and used the name of a kabbalah yeshiva founded in Jerusalem in 1922. But Brandwein’s heirs, who were running the yeshiva at the time, publicly disavowed any connection to Berg.

Philip had fewer than two dozen regular students in 1977 when Langford enrolled. Langford said he was captivated by the rabbi’s teachings: “Everything we did felt so important. The future of spirituality was dependent on us.”

The Bergs spoke constantly of expanding and in published materials sometimes exaggerated the size of the organization, he said. “There was a joke that anywhere he had sneezed he would say there was a branch there,” Langford said.

In the classroom, Philip, known as the rav, or rabbi, was beloved for his clear explanations of lofty concepts such as shame and mercy. At home, his conversations with Karen often concerned less spiritual topics.

“She was always talking about money and the need to have it,” Langford said. Karen wanted a big house and her husband agreed, saying it could attract new students, he said.

“He could see in her no evil. He could see in her no wrong,” recalled Langford, who was the first student promoted to teacher. He is now a glass artist in Israel and said he still studies kabbalah.

In the early 1980s, the Bergs returned to the U.S.

“He came to me and said that if he wants to make it big time, it can’t be done in Israel,” Langford said.

A family affair


Flanked by their sons, Yehuda, left, and Michael on the right, Philip and Karen Berg participate at a 2009 kabbalah event.

The Bergs settled in Richmond Hill, a middle-class Queens neighborhood. Karen finally had the big house she wanted, but its stately exterior belied a modest existence. They had moved back from Israel without enough money for a car, according to former student Dorothy Clark. She and another former student recalled that Karen dressed their sons in secondhand clothing.

The house doubled as the American headquarters of what would soon be known as the Kabbalah Centre. The basement served as a dining hall and the living room as a synagogue. Classes were held around a pingpong table, one of the Bergs’ few pieces of furniture, recalled Michel Obadia, a Manhattan hair salon owner who studied at the center.

As in Israel, the students were mostly alienated Jews who liked Philip’s combination of approachability and orthodox background. He would teach that the oft-told stories of Adam, Abraham and other Torah figures contained hidden wisdom about how the universe worked. Over two hours, Obadia recalled, Philip would discuss what the Zohar taught about a particular esoteric topic -- how to find the middle ground between judgment and grace, for example.

Obadia said students would speak up about how the abstract principle applied to their own lives.

“He had the language, the formulas, for you to pierce through and all of a sudden start to understand things,” said Obadia, who left the center more than 20 years ago but can still recite many of Philip’s teachings.

He said that at the close of class, many students would strap on phylacteries -- small boxes that contain Torah passages -- and pray together.

Their congregation was growing, but the Bergs were determined to reach even more people.Their congregation was growing, but the Bergs were determined to reach even more people. They turned to publishing. In Israel, they had discovered that students wanted their own kabbalah texts and would pay for them. This was a revelation to Philip, who was used to impoverished yeshiva scholars hunkered over communal books, as he later recalled in testimony in a civil lawsuit.

The books sold in Israel were dense and difficult, and written in Hebrew. Berg turned to Clark’s husband for help in making the teachings more accessible. Kenneth Clark was a Chicago Tribune reporter covering entertainment in New York. The two men got together every Wednesday night at the Bergs’ dining room table.

“His idea was to get this into common language that anybody could understand,” Kenneth Clark recalled in court testimony years later.

Philip would explain a portion of kabbalah to Clark, who had been raised a Southern Baptist and knew no Hebrew. Clark would look for ways to make the ancient teachings relevant. When Philip described kabbalah’s conception of the age-old conflict between good and evil, Clark suggested comparing it to the "Star Wars" movies.

Books he wrote with Clark and other ghostwriters allowed Philip to reach beyond Queens and Israel, and the Bergs soon had branches in cities with large Jewish communities, including Miami, Toronto and Paris.

They also established a religious order called the chevre , “friends” in Hebrew. The chevre , primarily young Israelis, took vows of poverty and lived dormitory-style in a house near the Bergs’ Queens home and later in cities around the world. By day, they knocked on doors in Jewish business districts, carrying Zohars and delivering a pitch about the center to raise funds. At night, they roamed Jewish neighborhoods.

“We would say, ‘We are teaching Jewish spirituality.’ Most people would say, ‘I'm not interested.’ Some would say, ‘What's it about?’” recalled Shaul Youdkevitch, a high-ranking teacher who had a falling-out with Karen in 2008 after three decades as a chevre .

The chevre tried to persuade people to make a donation or buy a Zohar for $360, according to Youdkevitch and other former members of the order. Many of the people they solicited did not read Hebrew, but the chevre assured them that wasn’t a problem: Just passing a hand over the Zohar’s letters can give spiritual insight, and its physical presence provides protection from harm. (The talismanic powers of the Zohar remain a central tenet of Kabbalah Centre teachings.)

In the mid-‘80s, the center began emphasizing donations as a way to ensure members’ well-being, spiritual and otherwise. Consistent with Jewish tradition, followers were urged to give generously beyond the expected tithe of 10% to 20% of their income.

Teachers departed from tradition in telling donors their money should go only to the center: Spreading kabbalah was more vital than the work of homeless shelters and other charities. The center taught that tithing protected donors against financial setbacks, and that additional donations would stave off divine punishment in the form of illness, family strife and other problems.

Karen kept close tabs on fundraising, Youdkevitch and other former members said.

“She was sitting on every chevre in the world: ‘Where are you? How much money are you bringing in?’” he recalled her inquiring. “She would say you have to be outside all day.”

Philip focused on spiritual matters. He prayed six to eight hours a day and continued to write books with Clark. In 1988, Philip published “Power of Aleph Beth.” The first sentence mentioned “Star Wars” director George Lucas and the cover featured a sci-fi design with Hebrew characters floating under a dark planet.

The book used modern worries such as nuclear war and drug abuse to give kabbalah teachings a contemporary feel.

There was also a nod to a world-famous pop star.

“We are living in a material world and I’m a material girl,” began the second chapter. Nearly a decade before Madonna attended her first kabbalah class, she served as what Clark called “a made-to-order metaphor for what kabbalah does not teach.”

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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...7637.htmlstory
 
Old October 19th, 2011 #6
Mike Parker
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Celebrities gave Kabbalah Centre cachet, and spurred its growth

The heightened profile of the L.A.-based Kabbalah Centre popularizing previously secret Jewish mysticism came with a continued emphasis on soliciting donations, sometimes in ways some found offensive. Then the IRS stepped in.


Madonna, in photo at left, holding a book at an event in Tel Aviv, enrolled at the Los Angeles center in 1996 at Sandra Bernhard's suggestion. Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, right, were married by a Kabbalah Centre teacher.

By Harriet Ryan and Kim Christensen, Los Angeles Times
October 18, 2011
Second of two parts

When Philip Berg decided in the early 1970s to teach kabbalah to the masses, he predicted that orthodox rabbis would stone him and his wife, Karen. For a long time, that seemed a pompous overstatement. Few people had even heard of the kabbalah school they ran out of their living room in Jerusalem and later in Queens.

But Philip knew that revealing the secrets of the Torah to any Jew who wanted to learn them -- spiritual teachings once open only to elite rabbinical scholars -- would be controversial. It also proved wildly popular.

MYSTICISM AND MONEY

Philip and Karen Berg, founders of the Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles, aimed to make secret Jewish mysticism available to the public. He had the education, she had the nerve.

Two decades later, the Kabbalah Centre had become an empire with branches in major cities, a publishing arm and scores of passionate young volunteers. Then in March 1990, the center caught the attention of a council of rabbis in Toronto. They didn't stone the Bergs, but they publicly disputed the validity of Philip's teachings of ancient Jewish mysticism and took exception to the center's aggressive fundraising.

"We have become aware of a group of young men promulgating the sale of so-called kabbalistic literature and of their establishment of classes in this topic," the rabbis wrote to the city's orthodox community. "We categorically state that the group known as the Centre for Kabbalah Research is not approved nor endorsed by the undersigned rabbis."

The letter was circulated among Jewish groups around the world. In Jewish enclaves where the center had long gone door-to-door soliciting donations, there was sudden hostility. People ordered members off their front porches and sometimes out of their neighborhoods. The repercussions reached the Bergs' two sons, who were students at an orthodox yeshiva in New York. Their teachers told them to abandon their father, according to a former member who at the time was close to the family.

The rabbis' denunciation might have been fatal to a more traditional Jewish organization. But the Kabbalah Centre taught that the closer a person drew to the light -- God -- the more the forces of darkness would target him. Followers saw the criticism as proof that the Bergs were on the right spiritual path. They hailed them as prophets.

Members of the chevre, the center's religious order, discussed the intense level of spiritual development one would need just to be Karen's assistant and lined up to eat Philip's leftovers as a way to show their devotion, former members said. The center's synagogues around the world had special chairs for the Bergs' exclusive use, even though they might visit only once a year.

It became standard practice to address the Bergs in the third person. "Does Karen want water?" followers would ask her. "How is the rav today?" they would inquire of Philip.

A large painting at the Toronto branch showed Philip in what struck one visitor as a classic Christian pose: Jesus leaning against a rock.

"It was the very same picture, except it was the rav's face," recalled Dorothy Clark, whose husband, Kenneth, helped Philip write books that sought to popularize kabbalah.

An inner circle of very wealthy donors -- the "close people" as they were known at the center -- gave hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars in tax-deductible tithes and donations. Big donors were rewarded with seats at the Bergs' table at Sabbath meal, invitations to intimate prayer services and personal conversations. Those who grumbled were chastised by officials or other students.

"When you brought up something about the family, they would tell you it clearly shows you have an opening in your consciousness for Satan," said a former longtime member who grew disillusioned and left the center but did not want to be named because relatives are still members. "Clearly you are not doing enough to get the light."

Adored inside their organization, the Bergs continued to be vilified outside. Rabbis in Israel, Philadelphia and Queens condemned them publicly. At a religious conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, an orthodox rabbi gave a speech criticizing the center's practices and Philip's "scandalous" personal life, an allusion to the breakup of his first marriage. The center responded with a defamation suit, which it later dropped.

L.A. headquarters


Sandra Bernhard, left, introduced Madonna and Roseanne Barr, center, to the Kabbalah Centre. The list of celebrities attracted to the center later included big names such as Elizabeth Taylor, Gwyneth Paltrow, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

The Bergs were spending more time in Los Angeles, running the center from a converted 100-year-old Spanish-style church on Robertson Boulevard. The location, which became the center's world headquarters in 1998, was near the heart of the city's orthodox community, but more significant was its proximity to Westside neighborhoods the entertainment industry calls home.

The first celebrity drawn to the Kabbalah Centre was Sandra Bernhard, who began studying in 1995. Bernhard was a raunchy stand-up comic who'd posed nude for Playboy. She dove into kabbalah classes with a charismatic Israeli teacher, Eitan Yardeni. She was effusive in the media about kabbalah, which she said had eliminated "at least 80% of the chaos in my life." In her Hollywood circle, she was a one-woman marketing campaign for Yardeni and the center.

"Sandra told me that I would love him, and that he was for real, and righteous," Roseanne Barr wrote in her memoir "Roseannearchy." Both comedians are Jewish, but other people Bernhard recruited were not.

In the Bergs' decades of challenging tradition, the center had remained fundamentally Jewish. The conflict with the orthodox establishment had always turned on whether kabbalah study was permissible for certain Jews -- women and men without yeshiva training. Gentiles were never even a consideration, and were a rare and generally unwelcome presence, according to former members. Gentiles at Sabbath services were expected to stay in the back and not participate.

"We had to be careful to avoid contamination," said former student Michel Obadia, recalling the concern over a "non-Jewish eye" witnessing the blessing of wine.

That changed with the arrival of Bernhard's diverse circle. Gentiles flocked to an introductory course she arranged in Manhattan.

"Non-Jews are welcome at this class," the New York Times declared in 1996 in one of several news stories that saw a hot, new trend in the scene of a yarmulke-wearing teacher from the center instructing a crowd of actors, models and designers.

It was difficult for some former disciples to square the ecumenical approach with the Kabbalah Centre they had known.

Jeremy Langford, an early follower who left the center in 1984 over concerns about its authenticity, said reports about gentile celebrities attending classes confirmed his belief that the Bergs were teaching "pop, light, quasi New Age, ersatz kabbalah."

Nothing garnered bigger headlines for the center than the arrival of Madonna. She enrolled at the L.A. center in 1996 at Bernhard's suggestion.

It didn’t really matter that I was, you know, raised Catholic or I wasn’t Jewish,” Madonna said in 1999. "It didn't really matter that I was, you know, raised Catholic or I wasn't Jewish and I felt very comfortable and I liked being anonymous in a classroom environment," she told television personality Larry King in 1999.

To the surprise of her detractors, Madonna stuck with her studies. She attended Sabbath services, had one-on-one study sessions with Yardeni, enrolled her daughter in the center's Sunday school and chose a Hebrew name, Esther.

The Kabbalah Centre suddenly had cachet among the rich and famous, and through them entree to a wider audience. Yardeni was at ease with big names and egos, and the Bergs tapped him as their Hollywood emissary. He had once worked as a door-to-door chevre and had a humility and directness that the powerful and well-connected found refreshing, and he was willing to accommodate busy schedules with private lessons.

"I thought Eitan was very, very bright and a very good spiritual teacher," said talent manager and producer Sandy Gallin, who first heard Yardeni speak at Barr's home. He said one-on-one tutoring with Yardeni taught him "to take the high road and to understand there is a greater power than you."

The list of celebrities attracted to the center grew to include Elizabeth Taylor, Gwyneth Paltrow, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

Yardeni held exclusive sessions at Westside mansions. Producer Christine Peters hosted one that drew entertainment figures that included her then-boyfriend, Viacom Executive Chairman Sumner Redstone.

"He was so wonderful," said Cindra Ladd, wife of former 20th Century Fox President Alan Ladd Jr., recalling classes she attended at a Pacific Palisades home. She said Yardeni would begin by reading from the Zohar and the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, in Hebrew and English. He would relate stories about Moses and other biblical figures to daily life. Topics included how to achieve lasting fulfillment, how to transform oneself "in the light of God" and how to refrain from gossip.

"That was the hardest one for everyone," Ladd joked.

Yardeni's teachings about finding meaning beyond the material had a special appeal to those in her circle, said Ladd, who was raised a Mormon.

"A lot of times people in this town who are very successful are left with a feeling of 'Is this all there is?'" she said.

Tax exemption

The heightened profile of kabbalah meant enormous growth, but precisely how much is difficult to say. The parent organization, Kabbalah Centre International, was granted tax-exempt status as a church in 1999 and stopped filing returns.

The center's assets grew from $20 million in 1998, the year after Madonna went public with her ties to kabbalah, to more than $260 million by 2009, according to the resume of a former chief financial officer and tax returns the center and affiliated organizations filed before becoming exempt.

The center's revenue sources include fees for classes and sales of merchandise such as candles, red-string bracelets that the center says will ward off evil, and bottled water long touted as having healing powers.

Soliciting donations remained a focus of the Bergs and other ranking leaders. Major donors to the center or its affiliated nonprofits include Madonna, whose foundation has reported giving more than $10 million, and fashion designer Donna Karan, whose foundation has reported giving at least $2 million.

A prominent filmmaker said that after a few lessons with Yardeni, he received an unannounced visit from another official. You are a rich man and you should be giving millions, the filmmaker recalled being told. He said he ordered the man off his property. The filmmaker asked not to be named for fear of offending industry colleagues still involved with the center.

There also was pressure on less well-off students. George Cabral, a welder in Melbourne, Australia, who participated in a class on Skype, said that when he cut his $100 weekly tithe in half to pay bills, his teacher was furious. The man told him to write "I'm in debt to the cosmos" on a piece of paper each day. Instead, he quit.

Some requests came directly from the Bergs, as in the case of a wealthy Calabasas family who turned to the center after their matriarch was found to have cancer.

Samuel Raoof, a former Kabbalah Centre student, said his parents were invited to join the Bergs at their table after Sabbath services in 2000 or 2001. Raoof, chief executive of a skin-care company, said his parents returned to their own table and told him what happened: Philip had urged them to commission a Torah for the center to "help cure" his mother's cancer.

Philip did not mention money, Raoof said his parents told him. But later, the couple's teacher visited the father at his office, repeated the claim about the Torah's curative powers and requested a $100,000 donation to have a scribe write the scrolls, Raoof said.

Raoof said his father, a physician, was infuriated and refused the request. Raoof said the teacher, who had grown close to his mother, then went to a clinic where she was receiving chemotherapy and persuaded her to give about half the amount.

Raoof said his father eventually paid the rest, hoping the Torah dedication ceremony might provide his wife some final joy with family and friends. Month after month, the family was told the Torah wasn't ready, according to Raoof.

After his mother died in 2004, Raoof said, the family was told by letter that its donations had gone to the center's general fund, not for a Torah.

The center eventually agreed to create a Torah, Raoof said. The family ultimately rejected the offer and asked for their money back, which the center refused, he said.

Raoof showed The Times copies of four canceled checks from late 2003 and early 2004, drawn on his parents' account and made out to the Kabbalah Centre, totaling $107,000. The word "Torah" appears in the memo field on three of the checks.

The elder Raoof declined to discuss the matter but confirmed his son's account.

Change of lifestyle

How much of the center's money made its way to the Bergs is unknown.

Their lifestyle changed markedly after the celebrity influx, however. Billy Phillips, a longtime family friend, said the Bergs had previously lived like paupers with no privacy in simple accommodations at the Robertson Boulevard center, which followers considered beneath their status.

"People had been begging to give them houses," Phillips said.

In the mid-2000s, the Kabbalah Centre bought three houses side by side in Beverly Hills for the couple and their two sons. The homes on South Almont Drive are relatively modest by Beverly Hills standards, with appraised values of up to $1.8 million each.

"They are far from being mansions," said Naftali Gruberger, a Brooklyn cabinetmaker and one of Philip's sons from his first marriage. "My house … is bigger than that."

Birthday parties for Philip were elaborate affairs, including one in 2003 at a Hollywood Hills mansion where Michael Buble and Madonna serenaded the guest of honor.

Donors lined up to cover the cost of the parties and other luxuries, demonstrations of loyalty that assured a place in the inner circle, former members said. Gifts included private plane rides, jewelry and trips to Europe and Mexico, they said. Supporters defend such gifts as expressions of gratitude.

"If there's a really rich student, very wealthy, and he wants to cover someone's car lease and that's the way he gives, are you going to insult him and not take the gift?" Phillips said.

Arthur "Archie" Falkenstein, a Toronto volunteer who worked closely with the Bergs, said, "Everything they have is donated or bought for them.

"Show me one spiritual leader in the world who had not been given gifts," he said.

Some former associates say the Bergs made gambling trips to Las Vegas, where the center has a branch, and that the couple sometimes stayed at Caesars Palace and other casino-hotels on the Strip. They were frequent enough players to receive complimentary meals, rooms and limousine rides from the airport, according to three people who said they had gambled in Las Vegas with the Bergs.

One of the three recalled an occasion when Karen played craps at Caesars with a stack of $100 chips while Philip watched "like a bystander."

A second former member described casino trips when both Bergs played blackjack at the $100 table. The man said IRS agents investigating the center's finances had recently questioned him about the Bergs' gambling and that he had given them the same account he gave The Times.

The Bergs were staying at the Bellagio in September 2004 when Philip suffered a stroke, said people who were in Las Vegas with them. It was a devastating blow for followers who had been taught that the truly spiritual could conquer illness. The community rallied with round-the-clock Zohar readings outside his hospital room.

Philip, who began using a wheelchair and had difficulty communicating, could no longer lead the center.

Succession debate

The issue of a successor was debated at a 2007 meeting of the chevre in Boca Raton, Fla. The obvious candidates were the Bergs' sons: Yehuda, an outgoing jokester who favored baseball caps over yarmulkes and interrupted spiritual lessons to announce the Lakers score, or his younger brother, Michael, an introverted scholar who had a close friendship with Madonna.

The sons, both in their 30s, were well liked, but some followers did not see them as mature enough to lead. Karen was urged not to step aside, said two people who attended the meeting. She and her sons are co-directors of the center, but Karen, 68, is chief executive of the parent organization, Kabbalah Centre International, and is identified as "spiritual leader."

As the center continued to court Hollywood -- Yardeni officiated at the wedding of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore in 2005, Yehuda Berg threw a paparazzi-mobbed book party at Kitson's flagship store on Robertson -- it seemed to de-emphasize Judaism more than ever.

"You don't have to stop being Catholic to study kabbalah. You can be both," a member from Miami said in a marketing video that claimed the center's teachings were "known to Jesus" and applicable to "those of no faith."

Some longtime members became upset about what they perceived as Madonna's outsize influence. After the singer adopted a son from Malawi, she and Michael Berg co-founded a children's charity with offices at the center. The cause seemed worthy, but difficult for some to reconcile with the center's teaching that donations should be confined to efforts that spread the Zohar.

Her fame was so immense that there was no way that God or kabbalah or the rav or Karen Berg or heaven and Earth could remain the same in the face of it,” Roseanna Barr said of Madonna."Everything changed once Madonna began to study," said Barr, the comedian. "Madonna had great intentions, and has done a lot of good things in the world, but her fame was so immense that there was no way that God or kabbalah or the rav or Karen Berg or heaven and Earth could remain the same in the face of it."

After Philip's stroke, a number of major donors and celebrities, including Barr and Bernhard, left the center. Norton Cher, a New York apparel manufacturer who said he donated about $400,000 over a decade, said he and his wife disliked what they saw as Karen's all-business approach.

"It just got too commercial," he said. "The people there just wanted more and more and more. We kind of decided we don't need a broker: When we want to talk to God, we'll do it ourselves."

The disaffection spread. The empire the Bergs had built over four decades suddenly seemed vulnerable.

Shaul Youdkevitch and his wife, Osnat, high-ranking chevre who had been with the center since the 1980s, departed in 2008. "The magic was gone; the love turned to confusion, cynicism and bitterness," Youdkevitch wrote in a blog post addressed to "dear friends" at the center.

He said that after complaining that Karen had too much power, "we were presented with an ultimatum -- to have us agree that Karen Berg possessed Ru'ah HaKodesh -- Holy Spirit (total obedience to every decision of hers) or that we could no longer work within the Kabbalah Centre."

"Biblical law has never allowed any human being to be above the law and above constructive criticism," Youdkevitch wrote.

The dispute became ugly. A lawyer for the couple sent a seven-page letter to Karen detailing the money they had brought to the center and demanding $7 million for their three decades of unpaid work. The center had 72 hours to respond, the lawyer wrote, or the Youdkevitches would ask authorities to investigate its finances.

The center called the couple's bluff and sued them, alleging that a kabbalah group the Youdkevitches had started nearby was unfairly competing with the center and using its trademarks and trade secrets. After months of legal wrangling, the center dropped the suit.

Many longtime "close people" who had provided donations and companionship were gone. Increasingly, Karen leaned on Moshe "Muki" Oppenheimer, an Israeli management consultant. Oppenheimer's forceful presence, at a time when Philip was less visible, became a topic of conversation.

Rumors of an affair between the two became public in June 2010 when the New York Post's Page Six gossip column published a denial from a Kabbalah Centre spokesman. The paper called the allegations "a false story" and quoted a center insider who blamed a disgruntled ex-member for trying to create "a scandal that could destroy the Kabbalah organization."

The gossip was beaten back, but a greater threat to the organization was about to emerge.

Allegation of fraud

In August 2010, Nicholas Vakkur complained that he was fired as chief financial officer after less than three months because he had uncovered income tax fraud at the center.

"This is very serious business," Vakkur wrote in an email that circulated among center officials. "I have little choice but to cooperate with the IRS and bring down the entire Kabbalah Centre."

Months later, the criminal division of the IRS launched its investigation, focused in part on whether the Bergs enriched themselves with members' donations. Prosecutors subpoenaed financial records from the center and two affiliated charities with links to Madonna.

Among those the IRS agents interviewed were former employees and ex-members. Those questioned in recent months said investigators possessed an impressive knowledge of the Bergs' world, right down to the name of a casino host who arranged free hotel rooms for the couple in Las Vegas.

Celebrity followers have gone silent. Less famous adherents continue to defend the Bergs.

"They have spent their whole lives spreading kabbalah and trying to help people," said Falkenstein, the Toronto volunteer.

Phillips, the longtime friend who participates in a weekly scripture study that the 82-year-old Philip attends, said it is inconceivable that the family has done anything wrong.

"When it comes to honesty, integrity," he said, the Bergs are "infallible -- or they are not kabbalists and there is no Torah."

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Times staff writer Richard Verrier contributed to this report.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...track=lat-pick
 
Old April 12th, 2012 #7
Mike Parker
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Widow with dementia gave $600,000 to Kabbalah Centre charity

She also borrowed millions to build a home in Beverly Hills. Her financial advisor, a key figure in the oversight of Kabbalah Centre finances, has been instrumental in those expenditures, public records and interviews show.

April 09, 2012|By Harriet Ryan, Los Angeles Times


Despite $1.2 million advanced for construction by Davis' trust, the Beverly Hills home sits half-finished because of what the contractor said were his client's "cash-flow" problems.

Susan Strong Davis, an 87-year-old widow, spends the day inside her Palos Verdes Estates home, tended round-the-clock by nurse's aides. For company, relatives say, she has her dog, the television and, on increasingly rare occasions, memories of the glamorous socialite's life she once lived.

"She definitely has some sort of dementia," said Viki Brushwood, a niece who visited from Texas in December. "I don't know if it's Alzheimer's or what. She is somebody who is not making decisions anymore."

But decisions involving large amounts of money are being made in Davis' name. In recent years, she has borrowed millions to build a four-bedroom house in Beverly Hills featuring three fireplaces and a pool, according to property records, court filings and interviews. She has also given at least $600,000 to a charity to which relatives say she has no ties and which is run by the controversial Kabbalah Centre, the Westside spiritual organization now under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service.

Public records and interviews show Davis' longtime financial advisor, John E. Larkin, has been instrumental in these expenditures. A veteran entertainment industry money manager, Larkin has been a devout student of the Kabbalah Centre's brand of Jewish mysticism for nearly a decade and is a key figure in the oversight of its substantial financial assets. He was handling his elderly client's personal finances when she made the donation. And Davis' Beverly Hills home is being built on a lot Larkin previously owned and sold to her at a substantial personal profit.

Larkin, 64, did not return messages seeking comment. Although the IRS' criminal division has been investigating the center and its controlling family, the Bergs, for tax evasion for more than a year, Larkin has not been identified as a subject of that probe and has not been accused of any crime in handling Davis' money.

Davis has no children, and her siblings are dead. Those relatives still in touch with her — three nieces — said they visit at most once a year. Neither they nor seven other family members contacted were aware of her donations to the Kabbalah Centre or of the home under construction in Beverly Hills.

Bunny Sumner, an 89-year-old niece who lives in Carlsbad, said that when she visited Davis two years ago she was "well into" dementia.

"She wasn't a bit well," Sumner recalled. "We just talked about old times."

The daughter of Frank R. Strong, a pioneering real estate mogul who made a fortune subdividing Southern California scrubland, Davis grew up in a turreted mansion in La Cañada Flintridge. Her family's dinner parties and vacations were detailed on the society pages. She became a professional ice skater, touring in the chorus line of Sonja Henie's ice revue. She married three times, including a 1951 union with British actor Richard Stapley that put her on the Hollywood party circuit. Her last husband, Frank Davis, died in a car crash in the 1980s.

"She was a free spirit before it was a free spirit time. [A] very Katharine Hepburn-ish type but only better looking," said nephew Thomas H. Dutton of Lodi.

Davis' lifestyle was underwritten in part by a trust fund set up upon her mother's 1962 death and supervised by a Los Angeles probate court. By 1981, the original trustees had died or become too ill to serve. At Davis' request, the court appointed Larkin one of two co-trustees. How he and the heiress had become acquainted is unclear.

Larkin operated a financial advising business in Sherman Oaks, and he had built up a clientele of TV executives, athletes and actors that eventually included the likes of Ricardo Montalban and Candice Bergen.

The court approved Davis' choice of Larkin and a second trustee, George W. Dickinson, a real estate developer who had known Davis for decades. The men took control of the trust, a portfolio of stocks, oil rights and other assets valued in a court filing last year at just under $11 million.

Over the next two decades, Davis signed off on their pay and put Larkin in charge of her personal finances as well, according to court filings. Within a two-year period a decade ago, their compensation doubled to $100,000 a year, probate records show. Since 2002, the trust has paid Larkin and Dickinson a combined $900,000.

Larkin's intense involvement in the Kabbalah Centre began in the early 2000s, a period in which Madonna's devotion piqued the interest of many in Hollywood. Raised Roman Catholic, Larkin became close to founders Philip and Karen Berg. He converted to Judaism and took a top center official, Orly "Esther" Sibilia, as his fourth wife in a 2006 ceremony performed by the Bergs' son Yehuda. The couple bought a $2-million home on the Beverly Hills block where the Bergs and their sons live in side-by-side homes.

The family put Larkin in charge of an auditing committee that oversees center finances, and according to a suit pending against him and the center by a former member, he also managed personal investments for Philip Berg and his celebrity followers.

In 2006, a center charity, Spirituality for Kids, attached a list of the previous year's major contributors to a publicly filed tax return. Madonna, who has served as the organization's board chair, gave generously as did local billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick. The biggest donor of all, however, was Susan Davis, whose tax-exempt contribution was listed at $600,000. The address listed for her was Larkin's office.

Relatives said that when they visited Davis in the mid-2000s she was lucid. They said she never mentioned kabbalah or Spirituality for Kids. Her family was nominally Protestant, but she had never demonstrated an interest in religion, relatives said.

"I never heard of her going to church," said Karen Molinare, a niece who lives in San Diego. "She's been known to go to a wedding and not show up at the ceremony, just the reception."

It is not clear what instructions Davis might have given Larkin about the donation. While Larkin was an almost daily presence at the Kabbalah Centre, former employees and members said they never saw her at center classes, religious services or other events.

Whether Davis made other donations is not known. Spirituality for Kids did not disclose its contributors before or after that year, and the center has never made public its donors. Through a spokesman, the center declined to answer questions about Larkin, Davis or her donations.

Spirituality for Kids' finances are a subject of the federal probe. The nonprofit shuttered its domestic programs last year, citing budget problems.

In 2009, a period in which Davis' relatives say her memory was failing, Larkin sold her the vacant lot he owned near the Kabbalah Centre's Robertson Boulevard headquarters for $1.4 million. Although it was one of the worst real estate markets in memory, the sale price for the land on South LaPeer Drive was $300,000 more than Larkin had paid for it in 2004, according to assessment records.

To facilitate the sale and construction of a home on the site, Davis has borrowed $2.65 million from the trust, according to property records and court filings. The trustees had informed the probate court of potential conflicts of interest in the past, including Larkin's handling of Davis' personal affairs. But their annual reports to the judge did not disclose Larkin's role in the home sale.

"The judge has nothing to say about it. It's not trust business," said Alan L. Rosen, a Westlake Village attorney who filed the trustee accountings.

Experts consulted by The Times disagreed, saying the real estate deal appeared to be a conflict of interest that called for a judge's review. Under the state probate code, a transaction "by which the trustee obtains an advantage from the beneficiary is presumed to be a violation of the trustee's fiduciary duty."

Arnold Gold, a retired L.A. County Superior Court judge, said a judge could determine whether such a transaction was legal only if trustees brought it to the court's attention.

"It's a conflict of interest. In my opinion, he should have disclosed the entire aspect of the loan, not only that she was borrowing it for a house but that he was the seller," Gold said.

The trustees' filings state that the loans to Davis were "to help with costs on her new home." Davis has lived for three decades in her large Palos Verdes Estates home overlooking the ocean, surrounded by a flower garden and decorated with mementos from her ice skating career. The Beverly Hills house sits on an alley next to a defunct car dealership. It is a block from Larkin's own home and in an area convenient for Kabbalah Centre followers who want to be within walking distance of their synagogue because of the Sabbath prohibition on driving.

In a brief phone interview, Larkin's co-trustee, Dickinson, who is 85, said he hadn't had contact with Davis in "a couple of years."

"Most of the paperwork is handled by Mr. Larkin," Dickinson said. He said he was unaware of Larkin's role in the transaction but didn't see it as his concern.

"I'm a trustee, not a guardian. She can give it all to the dog and cat hospital if she wants," he said before hanging up.

Rosen, the trustees' lawyer, said, "If Ms. Davis has a problem, I suppose she could complain about it." Asked whether dementia might prevent such a complaint, he said he had no information about her health and hadn't seen her in "many, many years."

"I know nothing about the woman," he said.

Despite $1.2 million advanced for construction by Davis' trust, the Beverly Hills home sits half-finished because of what the contractor said were his client's "cash-flow" problems. Ron Kolodziej of Niagara Construction said he had never met Davis and dealt exclusively with Larkin. He said four months ago, Larkin told him that the owner wasn't going to move into the home and that it would be sold instead. To make it more attractive in the heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, he said, Larkin directed him to install a kosher kitchen.

One recent morning, a home health aide who answered the door at Davis' Palos Verdes Estates residence said Davis was in bed and unable to talk to a reporter. Asked whether Davis might be available by phone, the aide shook her head.

"She is not allowed to use the phone," the aide said. "She has a trustee that takes care of that sort of thing."

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http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr...arkin-20120409
 
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