Healer hails TV personality Yaron London as official messiah

If you ask Oren Zarif, a self-styled super-healer, the messiah has been here for some time. Meanwhile, the messiah continues to deal with the petty things in life, keeps up with the news and doesn't miss the days when he broadcast together with Motti Kirschenbaum on Channel 10.

In his dream, Zarif sees the messiah, better known as TV personality Yaron London, riding through the streets of cities on a white donkey and blowing a large shofar, heralding the redemption. Zarif takes his dreams seriously. That is why he has contacted an advertising agency to begin a campaign to crown London as the official messiah. Of all time.

Zarif says the publicity campaign will begin next week and will herald the advent of "our master and teacher the King Messiah Yaron London, may he live a long life." Meanwhile he advises London to add the name Ben-David to his surname. After all, there are rules even for messiahs.

While Zarif, 33, married and the father of two, was sitting last week in his office in the Pardes Katz neighborhood of Bnei Brak and talking with shining eyes, the messiah was flickering from the television screen while sitting in the Channel 10 studios on the 16th floor of Migdal Havered in Givatayim. "I worship him, not only because he's the messiah," says Zarif. "The campaign will cost NIS 5 million, and I'm paying for it out of pocket."

"Nu, seriously, don't you guys have anything to do?" wonders London in reaction. "He's a fool, and he makes money from people's foolishness. I'm not at all amused by all of this. Why are you even interviewing him?"

London himself interviewed Zarif about four months ago, to find out about another bizarre news item, about Zarif allegedly demanding that his dozens of employees add the name "Zarif" to their surnames "because the name has strong energies."

During the interview Zarif admitted: "For years I said that I would be interviewed by everyone except you. You're too tough for me."

London smiled and said: "Because I don't buy your nonsense and because you're a crook. And you can sue me for that."

Two days later London complained to the police that an anonymous person had threatened his life over the phone. The caller, he said, had introduced himself as someone associated with a crime family that had invested a lot of money in Zarif and didn't want the business to fall apart.

Zarif denies any connection to crime families and says he turned down offers to sue London "because I love him." He says he is not insulted that the messiah, the son of David, called him a crook. "I never get insulted."

Instead of a lawsuit Zarif proposed to pay London millions to serve as the director of all his business enterprises, because he believed London was gifted with supernatural powers that only a few people can understand: "Regretfully, I have not yet succeeded in getting him. I made supreme efforts. I myself initiated his and Kirschenbaum's salary crisis so he would be persuaded and come. I forcibly infiltrated my thought into the head of the director of Channel 10, and he cut 35 percent from the salaries of each of them. At the moment he is playing the hard-to-get woman, but in the end I'll break him," Zarif says.

Zarif says he ordered a 1.5 meter-long, black shofar from an expert in Jerusalem, at a cost of about $4,000 and hired the services of a rabbi to teach the veteran journalist how to blow the animal horn. "I'm working hard on his awareness frequency, and I'm trying to convince him to participate in the campaign photos. I see him with a beard, a hat and a shofar," says Zarif.

Zarif has a clinic very much focused on his own personality cult: pictures, video clips praising him, articles in unimportant local newspapers and letters from clients. He admits he loves himself very much, and when he walks down the street, he "feels like a demigod, feels the most perfect." He takes NIS 250 for half a minute of transferring energies. He also sells creams (with his name), "which are fortified with an immediate dosage of energy," and perfume (with his name) that "does wonders on dates."

He rejects any suggestion that he is a fraud who robs his clients: "Nobody can claim that I misled him, and that I promised something and didn't keep my promise," says Zarif.

Zarif doesn't make the big money in the clinic, he says, but from consulting services for senior officials and VIPs. "They don't make a move without me. Late at night they sneak into my house and ask to hear what I have to say."

About a month and a half ago it was reported that Zarif demanded NIS 70 million from businessman Yitzhak Tshuva for the discovery of natural gas at the Tamar-1 drilling site opposite the Haifa coast. He claimed he had infiltrated Tshuva's subconscious and helped him to locate the gas, and therefore it was proper that the business mogul share the profits with him, which he plans to donate to children with cancer. Tshuva's spokesman said the two don't know each other.

"In media terms he's a great artist," says media consultant Moti Sherf. "You can make fun of him, but he gets what he wants - exposure that's worth millions. They write about him, in bizarre and amusing contexts, it's true, but it works. The press understands there's manipulation and a gimmick here, but he gives it what it's looking for."

Zarif laughs: "Do I need Yaron London in order to get publicity? I publish every month for a million dollars in newspapers and brochures." He says the producers of "Big Brother" begged him for help, "but it would have scared everyone. Sometimes my advisers appear in the form of ghosts."

Perhaps they advised him to anoint London. "Let him take it upon himself already and everything will be good," he says. "The vision of the dry bones will come true. We won't have a Knesset with 120 people and 280 opinions. [Our enemies] won't arise against us to exterminate us."

And then he breathes and says: "But look, it's possible that later on I'll have a clearer revelation, and it will turn out that the messiah is not him."

"Write that the messiah has nothing to say," laughs London in response. "Anyway, I think that this job has been taken for a long time by the Lubavitcher rebbe. To be the messiah, I need the consent of Rabbi Dov Wolpe, and I don't deal with Chabadniks."