Kabbalah Center's Shenanigans Examined by the Press
The Kabbalah Chronicles from radarmagazine.com

Inside Hollywood's Hottest Cult I

Part One (6/16/05)

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

Red String Theory A four-month Radar investigation reveals how a renegade rabbi and his striver wife ended up atop a multi-million-dollar empire built on bracelets, bottled water, and Madonna.

by Mim Udovitch

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.

Madonna, looking, in the words of one observer, “fierce,” wore a holiday dress and a jaunty newsboy cap. Moore, a more recent recruit, was decidedly casual in pants. In keeping with the Centre’s traditions, Ritchie and Kutcher, like the rest of the men in the room, were dressed head-to-toe in white. On this particular evening Kutcher had even personalized his outfit with a white skullcap featuring a black Nike swoosh.

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.

In the course of reporting this story Radar spoke to scholars of Judaica and Kabbalah, cult experts, and government officials. In addition Radar interviewed current and former students, employees, and business partners of the Centre, almost all of whom asked for confidentiality, citing fear of reprisal.

Inside Hollywood's Hottest Cult II

Part Two (6/17/05)

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

In the Beginning Radar’s investigation of the Kabbalah Centre continues, focusing on founder Philip Berg, insurance salesman-turned- guru, and his second wife, who conceived the idea of dumbing down Jewish mysticism and selling it to the masses.

by Mim Udovitch

For an outer-borough New York City couple of uncertain background and qualifications, Kabbalah Centre founders Philip and Karen Berg have done quite well for themselves. An elderly man in a white overdress and a woman in an ill-fitting wig, they secretively rule over a tax-exempt organization the true value of which can only be imagined. Tax documents filed between 2000 and 2003 show assets of approximately $60 million for five of the nonprofit entities controlled by the Bergs. (The Centre did not answer questions about its current assets; furthermore, it has sources of revenue it apparently doesn’t want to publicly acknowledge. Darin Ezra, national brand manager for Kabbalah Energy Drink, told a number of media outlets that his product has no connection to the Centre—which owns the company that was, at the time, distributing it. Kabbalah Energy Drink was launched in February; Ezra told Radar he expects $20 million in sales during the first year.)

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.

Asked about the high-priced merchandise and pressure for donations, Philip and Karen Berg’s son Michael responded that many activities are free and that the Centre has a “generous” scholarship fund.

“We do not use aggressive or manipulative methods to raise money…. Those who give to the Centre do so freely,” he added, in a document entitled “Kabbalah Centre responses to ‘controversial questions’ from Radar magazine.” In February and March of this year the Centre provided 72 “generous” scholarships averaging $124.06 per applicant. Courses at the Centre cost as much as $270. Sitrick and Company justified the use of the word generous on the grounds that financial assistance is available to all who ask for it. And no doubt many need it: One former member told Radar that when she worked at the bookstore in the Los Angeles Centre, teachers encouraged students who could not afford the literature to pay with post-dated checks. Another student was asked to give $5,500 out of her savings of $6,000. She did. “I wanted so badly to belong,” she says.

The man behind this entrepreneurial enterprise is known within the Centre simply as “the Rav.” Born to an Orthodox Jewish family, Philip Berg began his life in Depression-era Brooklyn as Shraga Feivel Gruberger. After completing a traditional yeshiva education, he was ordained as a rabbi in 1951. Two years later he started working as an insurance salesman at New York Life. Along the way he married his first wife, Rivkah, with whom he fathered eight children, one of whom died in early childhood (a second has since passed away). Other than these broad-stroke facts, details of Berg’s early life are sparse. Suspicious of the press, the Centre refuses to confirm Berg’s exact age or Karen’s maiden name. Rivkah and her children are expunged from Kabbalah’s official history, in which Berg’s personal life begins with his historic partnership with Karen.

Karen is credited by all—including herself—with being the driving force behind the Kabbalah Centre empire and its explosive growth. In fact it was Rivkah who provided Berg the critical introduction to Kabbalah. In 1962, during a trip to Israel, he met Rabbi Yehuda Brandwein, whom he calls his master. A respected Kabbalist and dean of the prestigious Yeshiva Kol Yehuda, Brandwein also happened to be Rivkah’s uncle. In his autobiography, Education of a Kabbalist, Philip Berg describes Rabbi Brandwein as “a distant relative.” Asked about the relationship, Alison Cohen, the Centre’s publicist, responded by e-mail that “because of his health concerns, the Rav is not able to respond to this question.”

Soon after they met, according to the Centre’s official lore, Berg became Brandwein’s special disciple and subsequently his anointed spiritual heir. For seven years Berg shuttled between the U.S. and Israel, working as a fundraiser for the yeshiva and, he says, spending every spare moment at Brandwein’s side. “I did not leave my teacher…even for a second; we were together 24 hours a day,” he writes in one account of this period, adding that in 1967, by channeling the forces of Kabbalah, he and Brandwein controlled the events that led to Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War.

Berg says he replaced his mentor as dean of Yeshiva Kol Yehuda after Brandwein died in 1969. But Brandwein’s son Avraham, the yeshiva’s current dean, has angrily disputed the claim.

To bolster its case the Kabbalah Centre sent Radar an anthology of Brandwein’s letters to Berg. According to the Centre the letters, written in Hebrew, prove that Brandwein declared Berg his legitimate heir and blessed his plan to teach Kabbalah to all who wanted to learn it. But a close examination suggests that relations between the two men were less intimate than the Centre suggests. A translation of the letter in which Brandwein supposedly passes Berg the torch is ambiguous at best; the position he blesses Berg for accepting is most likely an administrative post in America. Moreover, far from endorsing the popular dissemination of Kabbalah, Brandwein clearly states in one letter the traditional view that only Jews can receive its wisdom.
Certainly Brandwein’s death in 1969 was a turning point. It was then that Philip and Karen Berg joined forces. In an account Karen Berg wrote for Radar, this occurred four days after Brandwein’s death. The two had not seen each other since Karen had worked as Berg’s secretary eight years earlier. After a mutual colleague mentioned her name, Berg inexplicably called Karen. Karen’s recollection of their conversation reads like a Hasidic Harlequin romance. She writes that she felt “strangely flustered” at the sound of his voice. “What are you doing these days?” she asked, “a little breathlessly.” Berg replied that he had returned to the U.S. after devoting years to the study of Kabbalah. Intrigued, Karen offered to work for him for free if he agreed to teach her Kabbalah. They got together that very night to work out the details. “We knew instantly,” she writes, “that we were meant for each other.”

Since women are traditionally prohibited from the study of Kabbalah, Karen’s request put Berg in a bind. This minor stumbling block was conveniently removed when Brandwein suddenly appeared to Karen in a dream. His mentor’s ectoplasmic intercession convinced Berg an exception could be made in Karen’s case. In 1971 Berg married his former secretary; they set out for Israel determined to promote their new, all-inclusive vision of Kabbalah.

In her responses to Radar, Karen takes credit for what she calls Kabbalah’s next revolutionary step. The mystical study of Jewish laws and practices traditionally is reserved for scholars, following an extensive Talmudic education. But Karen felt that she had to bring what she saw as the miracle of Kabbalah to the masses. “At the time I met the Rav,” she says, “Kabbalah was still a hushed topic, relegated to secretive rooms occupied by dour-looking men in black hats and long beards…. The obvious question to ask was, Why?… Why not spread this world-saving wisdom?” Spread it, that is to say, to Jew and non-Jew alike.

In Israel the couple attracted a small but fervent following. Then, in 1973, for reasons that remain unclear, the Bergs returned to Queens. People came to them seeking a closer relationship with God; some ended up abandoning all their non-Kabbalah relationships. 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.

At the start of their crusade the Bergs had lived in near poverty, in keeping with the true mystic’s indifference to money. But as the years went by and cash began rolling in, their followers noted a dramatic change in the couple, a shift from humble servants of God to His chosen messengers. Karen indulged her taste for expensive clothing, and the Bergs lived an increasingly extravagant lifestyle. “Their lectures meant nothing to them at all,” one member told the BBC. “They behaved as demigods. Everything was done for money.” By the time Yehuda and Michael were ready to take their places as royal heirs in the kingdom of Kabbalah, it seemed natural for Yehuda to leave his clothes lying on the floor in the knowledge that one of the chevre would pick them up.

In the mid-’80s the Bergs returned to New York full-time and established their headquarters in Queens. 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.

Not surprisingly, the Centre’s embrace of secularism outraged Orthodox Jews. Philip Berg returned their animosity. In a 1992 interview with the Canadian Jewish News he told a reporter who asked why he’d changed his name from Gruberger that the question was “ugly, resentful, and Jewish.” Around the same time he also advised a student who had decided to become Orthodox to avoid fully observant Jews. “Stay away from the frum”—the Yiddish word for Orthodox—“they will chew you up for breakfast and spit you out for dinner,” Berg warned.

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. Berg insisted he had written the passages in question himself. Elliot Wolfson, an eminent professor of Hebrew studies and Kabbalah expert at New York University, who testified in support of the plagiarism charge, remembers Berg as “incredibly arrogant.”

“I recall that the judge actually interrupted the proceedings at some point when Berg was trying to translate a passage from the Zohar,” Wolfson says. “It was slow, laborious, and unclear. It was coming out in sentences that made no sense.” A few days after the judge’s admonition, Berg settled the case for an undisclosed sum.

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 Bergs haven’t relied just on rabbis for help. 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.” (Alison Cohen says that if such a memo exists “it would have been put together without the knowledge or authorization of the Bergs or the Kabbalah Centre.”)

From the very beginning the Bergs’ new-agey message had a pronounced mercantile streak, but as they collected more and more of the rich and famous, they got more and more creative. In 1999 the Centre began selling Kabbalah Water, the molecular structure of which, the Centre claims, is changed by the Rav’s blessing, which endows it with curative and other beneficial properties that make it a bargain at $2.65 per one-liter bottle. Visitors to the Kabbalah Centre can now choose from an ever growing list of expensive products deemed essential for true enlightenment, from a $415 authorized edition of the Zohar to the ubiquitous $26 red string bracelets the Centre recommends for warding off evil. (The Centre claims the bracelets are blessed in a special ceremony in Israel at Rachel’s Tomb, on the West Bank, under extremely dangerous conditions. But the Guardian reported that rabbis who have a permanent presence at the Tomb had never observed any ritual remotely like the ones described by the Centre.)

Once the Bergs arrived in L.A., it didn’t take long for the Hollywood glitterati—always eager to fall into bed with the latest spiritual gurus—to take notice. For their part, the Bergs were more than happy to gratify the desire. Before the taking of L.A., Karen Berg went to Toronto for a facelift and complete cosmetic dental overhaul, according to a source. After years of wandering in the new-age desert, Kabbalah had finally reached the promised land.

Inside Hollywood's Hottest Cult III

Part Three (6/20/05)

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

Madonna’s Magical Mystical Tour Demi! Ashton! Marla! Roseanne! When it comes to attracting celebrities, the Bergs have given Scientology a run for its money. But their lucky star is an aging pop icon who has funded the Centre to the tune of $18 million… and counting.

by Mim Udovitch

The Kabbalah Centre and its network of businesses, both nonprofit and commercial, are closely controlled by an intimate coterie that includes founders Philip and Karen Berg, their sons Yehuda and Michael, and a handful of consiglieri of unimpeachable loyalty. The leading light of the latter group, the most effective in the care and feeding of the Centre’s growing roster of celebrity members—and its biggest donors—is Madonna’s personal Kabbalah teacher, Eitan Yardeni. When she appeared on Dateline NBC in 2003, Yardeni was by her side spouting the Bergs’ credo that Kabbalah helps everyone to the limit of his or her potential to embrace its wisdom. Yardeni told Matt Lauer, with a straight face, that Madonna just happened to be among the one percent who really “gets it.”

Yardeni’s wife Sarah runs Madonna’s pet charitable project, Spirituality for Kids, a Kabbalah Centre subsidiary. Eitan, who has been with the Centre since he was a teenager (“He’s a rabbi now?” one member from the old days says. “Oh my God, he was a lackey for the Bergs. He was a shlepper.”), doesn’t confine his pastoral oversight to the actresses, agents, and realtors-to-the-stars to whom he ministers in the privacy of their homes. One former student from the Los Angeles Centre remembers Yardeni’s telling her to “let us know anyone who spends more than $100. Make a list and give it to the girl who coordinates the volunteers, so we can focus on them.”

The Centre denies giving celebrities preferential treatment. But someone observing Centre gatherings in L.A. and elsewhere around the world might find that hard to believe. Another student, who worked as a volunteer at the L.A. Centre, remembers being charged with helping Marla Maples find her place in the prayer book during services. On shabbat, after the traditional sabbath meal, a circle of men, all of them dressed in white, forms around a table, their arms linked. A group of women then forms a circle around the men, and they all sing and sway in tribute to the people seated at the table. The people at table, when they’re all in town at the same time, include Madonna, Guy Ritchie, Ashton Kutcher, and Demi Moore—and their hosts, Philip and Karen Berg. Sometimes Madonna, in a transport of spiritual ecstasy, will close her eyes and bang her fists on the table in time with the music.

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.)

Those close to Mrs. Ritchie are at a loss to explain or even describe the extent of her willing dependence on the Bergs. The family was not at her 2000 wedding, but starting in 2001 people who knew her began to see a change. “She basically stopped having her normal friendships with people who didn’t study,” according to one. Sources say the Ritchies have been encouraged to give their son Rocco a little brother or sister for the sake of their marriage. At the afterparty following the first show of Madonna’s Reinvention tour, one witness recalls, “Christina Aguilera and all these other people were walking around and, you know, partying, and there’s Madonna, sitting with these elderly Jews worshiping her while she’s worshiping them.” In the 2003 interview with Lauer, the singer attributed the failure of her and Ritchie’s film Swept Away to there having been “a lot of evil eye” on her family—Kabbalahspeak for envy. She also told Lauer that any reservations her previously agnostic husband had had about Kabbalah had been overcome by its scientific aspects. (The website for the Oroz Research Centre (oroz.org), registered to Kabbalah Centre International, boasts that its “23rd century” products do everything from enabling “better drug penetration” to eliminating radioactive waste, and has to be seen to be believed.)

At services, Madonna is protected from the potential envy of other Kabbalists by a screen behind which she sits in a special chair next to Karen Berg. All these blessings come at a price. As an internal Centre marketing memo states, “the source of money is God.” And it’s clear that for the Bergs God frequently takes a detour through Madonna. So far, according to an insider, she has in the last four years given the Centre approximately $18 million.

Until 2001 the singer’s private charitable foundation, Ray of Light, made numerous small donations to a range of charities, from the Helen Keller Services for the Blind to St. Michael Catholic Church in Pontiac, Michigan. Then something changed. Perhaps it was the trauma of 9/11: In 2001, for the first time Ray of Light made a single donation larger than $26,000. One, for $600,000, was to the New York Police and Fire Widows & Children’s Benefit Fund. Another, for $500,000, was to Kabbalah Centre International. In 2002, Ray of Light gave $2,101,657 to 14 worthy institutions—$1,994,157 of it to the Kabbalah Centre. Similarly, in 2003, of the $1,269,529 the foundation dispersed to 13 charities, $1,171,230 went to the Kabbalah Centre.

Another way Madonna has helped the Centre increase its legitimacy and appeal is through the Spirituality for Kids Foundation, her pet project. SFK emphasizes its outreach program: free self-improvement classes for what the tax documents refer to as the “millions of children…being raised in high-crime, poverty-stricken communities.” In fact, SFK also pays for the Centre’s private elementary school and a variety of other services. (Like Philip Berg—who was born Shraga Feivel Gruberger—Spirituality for Kids began life with a more ethnic name: the Kabbalah Children’s Academy.) All the proceeds of Madonna’s children’s books, with their Kabbalah-centric narratives—go to SFK as well. (Sales and merchandising of English Roses, the first of them, sent an estimated $5 million into Centre coffers. The fifth in the series, the appropriately named Lotsa de Casha, was published this month.)

The Centre, through its crisis management PR firm, Sitrick and Company, first told Radar that since SFK’s inception approximately 10,000 children had participated in one of the SFK outreach programs. After Radar pointed out that SFK’s 2003 tax filings had reported only about 150 participants in Los Angeles in that year, terms and figures got fuzzier. Carnivals and other special events attracted as many as 500 children at a time, the Centre said; in another e-mail the Centre said that it had only started keeping records recently. Whatever the case, outreach kids are provided with free transportation and a nutritious meal as well as lessons in life skills. In 2003 (the last year for which figures are available), SFK spent $813,092 on program services: $440,332 of it on salaries and wages, and a scandalously low $1,985 on its scholarship fund.

According to reports, the millions Madonna has given the Centre include a $5 million donation to build the London Centre and a house for Eitan Yardeni.

(Through her publicist, Liz Rosenberg, Madonna has denied giving money to Kabbalah Centre International for any specific purpose.) At each stop of the Reinvention tour, Kabbalah merchandise was sold alongside concert T-shirts. And the business ties may go even deeper. There were plans to use the tour as a launching pad for the marketing of Kabbalah Water, repackaged for the mass-market consumer, alongside Aquafina and Dasani (“Kabbalah: Fused Water for Body and Soul”) on supermarket shelves. One proposed marketing mock-up, the “Madonna” model, even includes a jingle (“Get that feeling/Of Kabbalah healing…”). The singer, along with Rocawear’s Alex Bize, were to be equity partners in this project, which dead-ended before the tour, much to Philip Berg’s frustration. “If the damn FDA would just let me put that the water cures cancer on the label, I wouldn’t need marketing,” he told one source. (Berg told another student Radar interviewed that Kabbalah Water had cured AIDS. A third was present at a shabbat lecture in New York during which a scientist from the Miami Centre told the congregation that drinking it had cured the case of SARS she had contracted during her recent travels in Asia.)

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?

Inside Hollywood's Hottest Cult IV

Part Four (6/21/05)

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

There’s No Profit Like Non-Profit How did a family of middle class mystics end up with matching mansions in Beverly Hills? Our final installment examines how the Kabbalah Centre is pouring millions into a network of businesses controlled by the Bergs and their minions.

by Mim Udovitch

The public image of the Kabbalah Centre is a mishmash of celebrities, $26 red string bracelets, and bottled water imbued with curative powers. But there is another side to the organization the public never sees. In the last part of our series about the Kabbalah Centre and the family that runs it, Radar looks at the commercial operations of this nonprofit, tax-exempt religious institution.

As reported in yesterday’s installment of “The Kabbalah Chronicles,” in 2003 Spirituality for Kids, the Centre’s children’s program, devoted a paltry $1,985 to its scholarship fund. However, over the last eight months SFK—for which Madonna is the international chairperson—has loaned about $1.5 million in private mortgages to Barak Enterprises Inc., a for-profit company with a P.O. Box address that flips Los Angeles properties in such unpromising neighborhoods as Watts, Compton, and Inglewood. Like a number of companies with which the Centre does business, Barak is run by devoted followers of Philip and Karen Berg, the Centre’s leaders and founders, in this case Ilana Koresh and her husband Yoav Atzman. The couple have an excellent eye for real estate, realizing profits of up to 80 percent on properties sold mere weeks after they were purchased. It is part of SFK’s mission, prominently emphasized in its literature, to help families in the kind of at-risk neighborhoods where Barak often turns a fast buck.

Barak is not the only company doing business with the Centre belonging to friends or students of the Bergs. In 2002 the Kabbalists announced “an exclusive deal” to make a line of Kabbalah clothing with Sharagano, a semi-chic label favored by, among others, Alana Stewart and Susan Lucci. Sharagano (per its website the name is Aramaic for ray of light) is owned, according to the Centre, by a man named David Shamouelian, to whom the Bergs are connected through his relationship with Karen Berg’s daughter from her first marriage, Suri Shamouelian. Asked about its dealings with Sharagano, the Centre replied, through the corporate crisis-management firm Sitrick and Company, that it had given Sharagano a small loan, which had since been repaid. Furthermore, the Centre’s own for-profit subsidiary, Kabbalah Enterprises Inc. (KEI), sometimes does business with itself. For example, KEI once sold property to a limited-liability company called KAF Investments, which is co-owned by KEI with Kabbalah Centre member Rafael Feig, whose construction company, Bravo, is currently doing some major work for the Centre.

The Centre defends the loans to Barak on the grounds that it earned interest on these loans. In an e-mail, Kabbalah Centre publicist Alison Cohen wrote that the Centre was “proud” to be involved with Barak, which, per this e-mail, invests in properties in depressed areas in order to improve the stock of available affordable housing. But Barak isn’t always in the business of improving its real estate. In at least one case Barak sold the property to Ilana Koresh, who sold it to Barak, an MO that clearly does not make housing either more available or more affordable. “Those kinds of transactions are closely examined by the IRS, because of the potential for diversion of moneys to individuals,” says Marc Owens, a partner at the D.C. law firm Caplin & Drysdale who served as the director of the exempt organizations division of the IRS between 1990 and 2000.

These convoluted dealings are not confined to real estate. As previously reported in this series, Darin Ezra, a spokesperson for Kabbalah Energy Drink, repeatedly denied his product’s ties to the Centre when speaking to the press. Ezra told Radar that Kabbalah Enterprises Inc., the drink’s distributor, was formed about six months ago and that the company had no connection to the Centre. In fact, KEI is a for-profit subsidiary of the Centre and was incorporated in 2000. Its articles of incorporation list as its president Philip Berg. (Ezra also told Radar that Kabbalah Energy Drink was not the Centre’s type of product because it wasn’t “completely healthy” and that his investors’ identities were confidential.) In response to Radar’s questions about this, Centre spokesperson Alison Cohen said that what Ezra was trying to convey was that the energy drink was distributed by the Centre’s for-profit subsidiary, rather than by the Centre itself. Cohen makes a fine distinction. An asset of KEI is an asset of the Centre.

Whether Kabbalah Energy Drink still is an asset of KEI is unclear. The name “Light Force Water Source Inc.” now appears at the bottom of the Kabbalah Energy Drink website, although the site itself remains registered to the Centre. The Centre initially said it did not have any affiliation with Light Force, but Cohen then said that although the name didn’t ring any bells at first, it was a company that a Centre student, Marc Taubman, was going to use to market Kabbalah Energy Drink. Light Force, whose CEO is Marc Taubman, identifies itself on public documents as a beverage distributor, not a marketing company. As to the unfamiliarity of its name, the Centre has trademarked the phrase Light Force Water. According to an online person-locator database, one of Marc Taubman’s previous personal addresses is another property owned by the Centre.

The popularity of its potable assets with its donors has also been beneficial to the Centre’s philanthropic activities. After posting a widely publicized appeal at the beginning of January for funds to finance the distribution of Kabbalah Water and Zohars to victims of the December tsunami, the Centre raised $960,244.76 by the end of March, according to an April e-mail to donors. The same e-mail claims that the Centre had spent and/or was formally committed to spending “exactly $384,562.45.” The bulk of that amount was to go for 700,000 one-liter bottles of Kabbalah Water, on which the Centre placed a value of $219,996. However, according to International Medical Corps, the global relief agency cited in the memo to donors as the Centre’s main partner in distributing the water, the need for bottled water decreased following the immediate aftermath of the tsunami. As of mid-May, 2,317 cases of water, valued by the Centre at $77,256.10, had been shipped, and no certain plans were in place to ship more. (SFK also has a tsunami relief effort, a plan to send backpacks full of toys, crayons, books, and other goodies to tsunami orphans. After a quick start when SFK got 10,000 teddy bears from JetBlue in January, this effort has run into, according to the Centre, “logistic complications.” The donor e-mail states that the backpacks were to have been distributed by the end of April. As of mid-June, not a single teddy bear had reached Indonesia.)

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.

There are many ways to study Kabbalah without going through the Kabbalah Centre. What the Centre offers is the wisdom of the Rav, and his family is determined to make sure it reaches everyone. An imaging and branding memo given to Radar defines each of the Bergs according to demographic appeal. For example, the Kangol-cap wearing Yehuda is “the everyman.” His audience is “all of working-class America…. It is a similar audience to the Oprah audience, the Billy Graham audience…. The people who read People magazine—everyday people.” In the internal marketing notes for one of his books, Yehuda’s position is summarized as “I am not the guy in the slick suit, I am like you, I am a regular person.” Michael, in contrast, is “a scholar and intellect.” His audience reads the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. It consists of “people who are not interested [in] ‘Kabbalah lite.’ ” Karen is appealing to “people who read Marianne Williamson.” Philip Berg is simply “THE KABBALIST.” Through Alison Cohen the Centre denies that these documents were ever authorized by or known to the Bergs. Yet these are precisely the qualities the Bergs have used to build their empire and the expanding network of commercial and spiritual enterprises that have brought them so much influence and wealth.
Michael Berg emphatically states that all revenues from the Bergs’ books, tapes, and other items go directly to the Centre and not to the members of his family. There is no reason to doubt this. The question in situations like this, as Owens remarks, “is not whose name is on the bank account, it’s who enjoys the fruits of the enterprise.”

At least some of the fruits of the Kabbalah Centre’s enterprises, whether in the form of spiritual or material rewards, have accrued to Philip Berg and his family. In his transformation from Shraga Feivel Gruberger to Philip Berg to the Rav, Berg is a true American story of self-invention and making good. And what he’s selling is all-American as well: a mystic elixir every bit as powerful as snake oil, guaranteed.
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