Supposedly, the money comes…
… from outside Israel. Generous haredi philanthropists in London, Antwerp, Brooklyn and Montreal pay to keep haredi Jerusalem pure.
What exactly do they pay for? This:
…Former members describe a "military-like organization".
"I was pretty much into it", says Chess, who was active in the organization for four years. "We would meet in a regular meeting place and get our assignments. Every Thursday we would be on alert.
"I bought a club, so that I would have an easier time breaking bones. Some used irons. The job only get carried out after hard evidence was gathered. We would collect the evidence, and there was a hotline as well."
Whose bones did you break?
"You would have children misbehaving. An example would be this married woman who was sleeping around and cheating on her husband, so we closed in on her and beat her. This one time I came up to a woman and broke two of her bones. For two bones we would get $1,600 and divide it amongst ourselves. There was this one case where the guy was big and had big bones; we got $3,300 because he was a harder case."
A former member from the Geula neighborhood said, "I joined two years ago and I left. We would film people going to gay clubs in Tel Aviv with either a cell phone or a digital camera. The squad always looked for the ones running off to Tel Aviv because they thought that they were safe there, but they didn't know that we were onto them. Always."
"There was one guy in the neighborhood, we had information that he had porn films in his possession and that he would sell the films to other people. We immediately locked onto him. We followed him to where he was having dinner one Thursday. We broke two of his bones.
"We would go into orthodox chat rooms and forums. Those places are like Sodom and Gomorrah. There was a lot of sex chat. I pretended to play along and I met a married woman who was looking for men. Our goal was to get to the persons in charge of the forum through her. We started beating her, but she denied that she had anything to do with running the site, we believed her and the chat room is still operational."
Where does the money come from?
"A lot of our guys would fly abroad and get donations for our cause and come back a lot of dollars."…
[Hat Tip: Ben Max.]