Kabbalah Centre claims their bottled water cures Cancer, AIDS, and SARS

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

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.”



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.)



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

[peekaloo]

1. something about a "religious leader" wearing a Kangol lid

makes me :rofl:

:shrug:

religious profiteers

[GreenArrow]

2. give me good old Lourdes water, any day

Maddona offends me.

[smirkymonkey]

3. What a scam!

Of course Madonna is in the 1% who "gets it." She donated over $5 million dollars.

This is a business, not a religion. (Although I do believe there are sincere Kabbalah followers, the Bergs themselves are con artists.)