It will take time, maybe even a decade, but this morning will be mentioned someday in a lawsuit filed against the state.
The plaintiff will be a boy or a girl, maybe brothers and sisters, or maybe they will be a group. What they all have in common will be that they grew up there, on Third Wall Street.
They will seek compensation for poor and violent childhoods, they will demand answers from welfare authorities as to why they knowingly abandoned them to parents who were subordinate to a cruel leader, while they were helpless minors.
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This indictment may include harsh descriptions, young girls who will tell how their mother took them at night to the righteous rabbi who would kiss and caress them. Young people without a shoulder or support who will remember the nights they froze on the sidewalk in front of Ayalon Prison, they will describe how they were between the ages of 3 and 14 and knocked on strangers' doors and asked for something to eat.
In a press briefing about two years ago, the commander of the Jerusalem Police Department told us about the leader of the Shuvo Banim community: "He is no less than the major criminal organizations, neither in cruelty nor in the scope of money laundering. He surpasses most criminal organizations in Israel. About 200 cases of violence, extortion, threats and intimidation have been filed in the Zion area in the last two years alone."
Rabbi Berland served time in prison for serious crimes, returned to prison for crimes of extortion, money laundering, and incitement to sabotage, and was spared the statute of limitations for his conviction for the murder of two innocent people.
Today he will return to lead hundreds of weak families, victims of a cult.
During the two years he was ostracized from his community, the welfare authorities did nothing to dismantle the cult he led. Not a single professional committee was established to examine the families and treat them as victims of a cult.
Today the state made a decision to bring back the perpetrator, the attacker, the murderer of souls, who harmed hundreds of helpless people.
A disgrace to the enforcement and welfare authorities. A sad day for the State of Israel.
• Ariella Sternbach is the Haredi Affairs reporter for News 13
