The “Sanhedria-Nachlaot Affair”: a case first exposed in 2010, in which at least 160 children from Haredi neighborhoods in Jerusalem fell victim to repeated abduction, torture, and rape at the hands of an organized ritual abuse network.
Community leaders turned it into an actual blood libel and tried to pin the blame on Christians and the church, claiming they were trying to forcibly convert Jewish children. A local elderly Haredi woman, a former Christian who had converted to Judaism, was accused of facilitating the alleged Christian plot. On the order of a rabbi, men raided her home, beat her badly, and smashed the contents of her house. Alleged tunnels leading from her home to East Jerusalem churches were never found, of course.
The Israeli police, with the encouragement of a senior Haredi police officer, also diverted the investigation toward the Christian angle. Eventually, following in the footsteps of the community’s religious authorities, the police dismissed the whole thing as “mass hysteria” and arrested one of the therapists treating the children, claiming that she and other therapists had planted ideas in the children’s heads as part of a conspiracy to raise funds for therapists and victim-support organizations. The police didn’t even try to watch countless hours of testimony given by the children themselves.
Since the Sanhedria-Nachlaot Affair, similar testimonies have spread and multiplied across ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Local community leaders and authorities, if not directly complicit, do everything they can to silence the victims. The police do nothing. The few children and their parents who dare to speak up are portrayed as malicious liars, mentally ill, or victims of the so-called “mass hysteria”.
Meanwhile, hundreds of children, maybe thousands, maybe more, are still being harmed in the most unimaginable ways by pedophilia and ritual abuse networks throughout Israel’s Orthodox Jewish communities.
This piece by Channel 13’s HaMakor originally aired in November 2023.