Bnei Baruch
universalist Kabbalah association
Bnei Baruch (also known as Kabbalah Laam, Hebrew: קבלה לעם) is a universalist kabbalah association founded by Michael Laitman in the early 1990s. It is estimated to have around 50,000 students in Israel, and some 150,000 around the world.
History
Bnei Baruch is a group teaching Kabbalah in the tradition of the Yehudah Ashlag (Hasidic rabbi). Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag emigrated from Poland to the Yishuv in what was then Palestine in 1921. He wrote a commentary on the Zohar called the Sulam (Ladder). He became very popular in Israel, and was consulted on Kabbalah by the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel, David Ben Gurion. Relying on his claim that the statement “Love thy friend as thyself”, Yehuda Ashlag proposed a theory of "altruistic communism," a form of socialism based on principles of altruism and different from Soviet-style, materialistic communism. '
Yehuda Ashlag died in 1954. After his death, his disciples divided: some followed one of his associates, Yehuda Tzvi Brandwein (1904-1969), who had become Ashlag's brother-in-law through his second marriage. Brandwein's group is, directly or indirectly, at the origins of some contemporary Kabbalah movements, including the Kabbalah Centre of Philip Berg.
The public source identifies “Bnei Baruch” as universalist Kabbalah association. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bnei, Baruch and universalist.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4088504. VIAF identifies the subject as 105146331911618691779. The Library of Congress control number is nr2006004033. 2 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1921, 1954, 1904 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bnei Baruch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.