Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto has a seaside villa, loyal followers, including celebrities and politicians, and a $75 million fortune • But this week he was arrested for trying to bribe a policeman and his wife attempted suicide • Shedding light on a mystery man.
Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto stands at the bedside of his wife, Devorah Rivka Pinto, in Sheba Hospital Tel Hashomer, just outside of Tel Aviv. He looks around the small room, filled with machines, sways in rapid rhythm, his hands trembling. His downward glance appears disconnected from the situation, and terrible sadness is reflected in his eyes. “What shall we do, what shall we do? We’re going through terrible suffering. But it’s all for the good. With God’s help, it’s all for the good,” he tells the people around him.
Outside the room, a commotion is growing. Dozens of Pinto’s followers are streaming to the hospital, books of Psalms in their hands. Curious patients stand in groups to see what it's all about. Only after going through five levels of security and passing by businessmen and celebrities who came to ask how the rabbi’s wife was doing, does one arrive in a small side hallway, deep in the emergency room, where a woman with her head covered lies alone. The plastic bandages on her face are evidence of the transfusion she received. Her neck is covered to conceal the fact that she attempted suicide at the beginning of the week.
Yossi Amos, Rabbi Pinto’s closest assistant for nearly 20 years, stands near the room and runs the show. He brings in friends who have come to visit and escorts them out while juggling three cellular telephones that never stop ringing. For a moment he stops outside, takes a deep breath and says, “When my father died, I didn’t cry like I cried today. The rabbi doesn’t deserve this. Neither does his wife. Truly, they don’t deserve this.”
The kabbalist
Although Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto has not yet celebrated his 40th birthday, he has gone through a lot in his life. Born in the port city of Ashdod, a student at a Haredi yeshiva, he built a worldwide empire and acquired thousands of followers all over the world. He founded a charitable enterprise and rolled tens of millions dollars around it. Along the way, he has been a constant "visitor" in the offices of the FBI where his various activities have been investigated, has fallen victim to extortion and escaped an attempt on his life when a grenade was thrown at his home. Now there is a new story – the allegation that he tried to bribe a high-ranking police officer. In the meantime, he was placed under house arrest and barred from leaving Israel for six months. His interrogation was interrupted when news came of his wife’s suicide attempt.
How did a rabbi with thousands of followers in Israel and abroad, who listened eagerly to his lessons and accepted criticism with love, reach this point? How has his name become connected, again and again, with incidents from the world of crime? H., one of his close associates, tried to explain. “He’s an amazing man, brilliant and rare. There’s a good reason for the halo around him. But it seems he’s also proof of the saying in Ethics of the Fathers: ‘The more possessions, the more worry.’ Those who have possessions will have a lot of worries in the end.”
He belongs to the world of new rabbis, those who welcome secular followers and give them an honored place in their courts. For them, taking on a religiously observant lifestyle does not mean delving deeply into the pages of the Talmud, but ethical behavior and practical advice for living a better life. Although Rabbi Pinto lives ascetically, he behaves like a tycoon. He is in the air much of the time, on weekly flights between the United States and Israel, having established 12 spiritual centers throughout the world. He devotes most of his day to study, but also uses the most advanced technology in his schools.
The prince
Rabbi Pinto’s paternal grandfather was Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira, the Baba Sali, one of the highest- ranking kabbalists in Jewish history. On his mother’s side, he is the great-grandson of Rabbi Haim Pinto, one of the most important rabbis in Moroccan Jewry. As a young man, Pinto studied in the Maalot Hatorah Yeshiva in Jerusalem with Rabbi Shmuel Auerbach, who was considered one of the most extreme leaders of the Haredi sector in matters of religion and state. At the age of 20, Pinto married Devorah Rivka, the daughter of the chief rabbi of Argentina, Rabbi Shlomo Ben-Hamo. They have a 14-year-old son and twins.
Rabbi Pinto established his status as the successor to the family dynasty when he was only 16 years old when he began giving classes on religious topics. In his twenties, he became the undisputed spiritual leader of a large community that he established in New York, called Shuva Israel, which became a pilgrimage destination for local tycoons and politicians, including NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The community has branches in various yeshivas, and Pinto constantly travels from one center to another.
Once a year, in mid-September, he travels with hundreds of followers on three jumbo jets to the city of Selestria in Bulgaria to visit the tomb of his spiritual mentor Rabbi Eliezer Papo. According to a story popular in Bulgaria, a terrible plague broke out in the city during the 19th century, and Rabbi Papo announced to everyone that the plague would end quickly and that he was about to return his soul to God. And that is apparently what happened - so the folklore goes. Other followers recount that when the rabbi and his wife had fertility problems, before their twins were born, he prayed at the tomb in Bulgaria, and salvation arrived in the form of children.
Rabbi Pinto speaks little about the complicated political situation in Israel. He claims that the government’s budget allocations to the Haredi sector are harmful to the promotion of the Torah in Israel, so he does not take state money for his schools. He also avoids politics. “Religion must not be part of the state,” he said in one of his public speeches. “Religion belongs in the yeshivas, the study halls and the synagogues.”
TV journalist Gadi Sukenik once accompanied Rabbi Pinto on one of his trips to Bulgaria. “I saw a man who was not yet 40 years old and already behaved like he was 80,” Sukenik recalls. “He has many characteristics whose combination is the secret of his success – charisma, intellectual intelligence and emotional intelligence. He is like a psychologist. He reads people quickly, and he has a phenomenal memory. He has quick recall of conversations and information about people – a well-known trait, particularly among politicians. He is very well-versed in current events. He prepares for meetings with people and does his homework. When we met, he was already familiar with my record as a journalist and in the army.”
Sukenik met privately with Pinto. “I probed him. I asked him directly where all his money came from. He answered, generally, that it came from donations, but didn’t say much more than that. We also talked about matters of religion and state. He said he supported army service for religious youth and that avoiding the draft for religious reasons was not appropriate. "
Sukenik remains skeptical about the rabbi. “People are looking for instant salvation and are willing to take it from anybody as long as they show some charisma. I don’t see anything good about Bolshevik-style herds, but it was important to me to see and hear the phenomenon for myself.”
One of the more sensitive issues for a rabbi like Pinto is his enormous wealth. Forbes Magazine estimates his worth at $75 million, but his associates describe him as an ascetic. “He hardly eats or drinks, sleeps little and is careful about the pleasures of this world,” they say. Where does the money come from? His followers have a single answer: donations.
Rabbi Pinto lives in Ashdod in a villa donated by his close friend, American Jewish billionaire Jay Schottenstein, the owner of American Eagle Outfitters. The villa, worth more than NIS 10 million [$2.6 million], is located on prime property on Ashdod's coastline. The well-appointed kitchen is painted in strong shades of red, chandeliers hang in the living room and kitchen, and the sitting areas are expensively decorated. “This house is not the rabbi’s house at all. It belongs to Schottenstein and is also in his name,” Pinto’s associates say. “The rabbi does not need a home like this. It serves as a synagogue, study hall and the place where the rabbi eats with his followers. None of this wealth interests him.”
Pinto bought the old library building in downtown Manhattan for $30 million and established the world center for his schools there. He turned the building into a yeshiva and included a prayer hall, auditoriums for classes on religious subjects and offices. He gives most of his classes by video and inter-yeshiva conference calls.
Among his close friends are some of the wealthiest people in Israel and around the world. He put up a mezuzah for Yitzhak Tshuva in the prestigious Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, and Ilan Ben-Dov bought Partner Communications at Pinto's suggestion. Recently, Pinto brokered an enormous transaction between Israeli tycoon Nochi Dankner and Argentine businessman Eduardo Elsztain that saved some of Dankner's flagging business. Among his adherents are Ashdod businessman Jacky Ben-Zaken, former national team soccer star Haim Revivo (of whom it was once said that he moved to Los Angeles at the rabbi’s suggestion, while others say Revivo fled Israel temporarily due to mob threats on his life), retired police chief Aryeh Amit, singer Sarit Hadad and her manager Avi Gueta, underworld figure Yossi Harari and politicians from all over the spectrum. Even basketball star and NBA champion LeBron James sometimes comes to him for advice.
Rabbi Pinto said recently in one of his lectures: “A rabbi who runs after money for himself – woe to him and woe to his soul. Such a rabbi is not a good one. That is a dangerous thing. One should hate a rabbi like that.”
Supermarket mogul Rami Levy, who was one of the donors to Rabbi Pinto’s schools, says, “I donated to him until two years ago because they came to me and asked for money for elderly people, particularly during the High Holiday period. I know that my money went to good places because I paid the suppliers directly. I got to know the rabbi. He is a great man, wise and brilliant. He is a man of kind deeds.”
The man who got into trouble
With money comes trouble, and for Pinto, the trouble has multiplied in tandem with his growing wealth. In 2011 he submitted a complaint in the U.S. against his former assistant, Ofer Biton, and publicist Ronn Torossian, claiming they had extorted money from him for a long time, threatening that they would disclose medical information about members of his family unless he gave them large sums of money. The rabbi says he capitulated and even gave the two men $380,000, but when the extortion attempts continued, he contacted the police.
Biton is also the subject of an FBI probe claiming that he had funneled illegal campaign contributions to U.S. Rep. Michael Grimm.
Last weekend, the story about Biton's alleged extortion relating to secret medical information broke - evidently lead to his wife’s suicide attempt while her husband was being questioned by police. The Pintos were arrested and questioned under caution on suspicion of having offered a $200,000 bribe to a senior Israeli police intelligence officer, as well as suspicions of money laundering. Police suspect that Pinto offered Brig. Gen. Ephraim Bracha, a high-ranking officer in the Investigation and Intelligence Department the money in exchange for classified information about an investigation connected with his institutions.
Police say they have hard evidence against Rabbi Pinto, including recordings that prove Pinto paid bribes to Bracha. Last Thursday, after midnight, the rabbi and his wife were released to house arrest and forbidden to leave Israel for six months. They also had to deposit half a million shekels of their own money as bail and obtain NIS 2 million in bail from a third-party as well. The police had excellent reasons for setting the Pintos’ bail so high: police representatives at the remand hearing claimed that “Rabbi Pinto, the yeshiva and the charitable organization all have money in abundance, and increasing the amount of bail and the conditions are not sufficient to allay the real fear that they will evade interrogation, judicial proceedings or serving a prison sentence. These statements come from past experience and solid information that we have in our possession.”
The investigation about which Pinto allegedly wanted information on is being conducted against the Hazon Yeshaya charitable organization, of which he is a member. The affair came to light six months ago, and no criminal evidence against Rabbi Pinto was found. Police suspect that Hazon Yeshaya officials defrauded donors by using the money they received from them – money that was supposed to help elderly people and Holocaust survivors – to buy tons of chicken and sell it to the Haredi public, allegedly keeping the profits for themselves.
Brig. Gen. Bracha quickly reported the money he had received to his superior, Maj. Gen. Yoav Segalovich, the director of the Investigation and Intelligence Department. Maj. Gen. Segalovich instructed Bracha to conduct an undercover investigation against Pinto, at the end of which the rabbi and his wife were arrested.
Rabbi Pinto admitted to his close associates that he had given Bracha tens of thousands of dollars via their wives, but the purpose of the money was to fund medical treatment for a member of Bracha’s family. “The families are friends. The rabbi and the major-general have been friends for 14 years,” Rabbi Pinto’s associates say. “The rabbi has been helping them for many years. He is sure of his innocence, and has asked that the investigation be conducted as soon as possible.”
Another associate added, “The rabbi has withstood tougher investigations, by the FBI. He will not fall because of something like this. Do you think he has to bribe people for information? Dozens of high-ranking police officers, both currently in office and retired, come to him. He is a law-abiding man.”
Rami Levy agrees. “The rabbi himself doesn’t deal with money. The people around him do. I know that he’s a very honest man. Even when I donated to him, he wasn’t interested in that at all. What interests him is Torah study and doing good deeds.”
Pinto has retained the services of attorney Eli Zohar and media adviser Amir Dan, who also represent former prime minister Ehud Olmert in his legal cases. Some of the rabbi’s associates describe the current incident as “problematic.”
A man of charisma
Every time an incident like this takes place, the argument about the “new rabbis” and the big money swirling around them resurfaces. When Avi Blum, a high-profile Haredi commentator, dared speak out about the alleged extortion that Rabbi Pinto complained about, he said what everybody knew about it but no one dared speak aloud: “Nobody tries to extort money from Rabbi Steinman [a leader of the Ashkenazi Haredi world]. Nobody tries to extort money from Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. Nobody is saying that Rabbi Pinto has any part in it. It’s clear he’s as pure as snow. But why was he involved in an extortion case? Because he’s connected to big money. He’s connected to tycoons,” Blum says.
Dr. Haim Schein of Sha’arei Mishpat College, a law school in Israel's central region, says, “No true kabbalist ever came out of a five-room apartment. There is a combination of interests of wealthy people who want to clear their consciences, and rabbis who need money because of their lust for power. That’s how this kind of shady relationship is formed. Some of the people who are called kabbalists are not real kabbalists. The connection between the Kabbalah and big money can’t work. All the great kabbalists of the past were shoemakers, builders, street cleaners. One was an artist. They were far away from material things, particularly money. Many rabbis today are very charismatic people. They have followers, but they do not have the divine spirit within them. None of them is a great expert in finance.”
israelhayom
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