How Iran recruited a hasidic yeshiva student as a spy

Vizhnitz Hasid Elimelech Stern was gradually instructed to escalate the seriousness of his actions, in exchange for money that he needed to pay back a debt.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A Vizhnitz Hasid arrested last June for working for Iran took some time to realize that his handler was an enemy of Israel, as he was gradually asked to escalate the seriousness of his actions. However, he did not cut off contact because he needed money, Hebrew-language media reported Friday.

Elimelech Stern, 22, of Beit Shemesh, was a yeshiva student learning to become a ritual scribe when he fell into debt of around NIS 70,000 ($19,800) due to “improper actions,” he told his interrogators after his arrest.

He bought a smartphone, forbidden in his community, and went on social media to see if he could make money with cryptocurrency.

Stern was contacted on the Telegram messaging app by “Anna Elena,” who initially posed as an anti-traffic accident activist from Canada and asked him to help her “save lives in Israel.”

She first gave him innocuous-sounding jobs such as hanging posters, activating a buried cellphone, and hiding money in over two dozen places in both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Stern recruited two others to carry out some of the tasks, paying them out of the money she sent him in Bitcoin.

The Iranian agent then started asking him to do more violent acts, such as damaging cars, smashing store windows, and setting fire to a car during a demonstration, saying that it didn’t matter whether it was a left-wing or right-wing protest because “the main thing is to create chaos in the country.”

She promised him $500 for every smashed window and $3,000 for every damaged car.

By this time, Stern understood that “Anna” was not who she claimed to be, so he refused these instructions but didn’t cut off contact or inform the police.

He also refused, but did not inform the authorities, when “Anna” asked him to set fire to a forest for $7,000 or shoot someone for $75,000.

During one of his interrogations. he said. “I was afraid that if I turned to the police, I would endanger myself.”

When a joint Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) and police operation caught up with him last June and officers came to his home in the middle of the night, he immediately confessed to his crime.

An interrogator wrote that Stern had “concluded that the tasks he was asked to perform were against the State of Israel,” and even if he did not know they stemmed from Iran, he “understood that this is a hostile entity with malicious intentions towards the State of Israel.”

When asked if he “minded acting against the state,” Stern replied that he “felt neutral and less committed.”

He added during a different interrogation that he did not really see himself as putting the country’s security at too great a risk through his actions.

On July 16, the Jerusalem District Attorney’s Office filed an indictment against Stern on the single charge of contact with a foreign agent, with his lawyer saying that many other potentially more serious charges had been dropped over the course of the investigation.

Two months ago, the Maariv daily reported that that Stern filed a motion with the court to invalidate the confessions he gave during his interrogations in Shin Bet custody because his “basic rights” had been “trampled underfoot.”

He said violence and threats of violence were used against him and that he was deprived of sleep and denied access to a lawyer for eight days.

The motion said that he also talked because a Shin Bet officer told him that he was not under arrest in order to “make him ‘sing’ without fear of self-incrimination.”

EspionageHasidic JewIranShin Bet