JERUSALEM – The women tattooed his name and portrait on their bodies and gave their children his name – Savior.

They spoon-fed the bearded, one-time healer as if he were royalty, brushed his shoulder-length white locks, sent him text messages when they were ovulating and slept with him at his bidding.

They turned over wages and welfare payments to him and lived in cramped, run-down Tel Aviv apartments with the children they bore him. According to police, he fathered some of his own daughters' children.

Goel Ratzon, whose first name is Hebrew for "Savior," is now sitting in a Tel Aviv jail, suspected by police of enslaving a cultlike harem of at least 17 women, as well as 37 children. Ratzon, 60, who has lived this way for two decades, denies wrongdoing, his lawyer says.

Ratzon's alleged crimes and unconventional lifestyle have gripped Israel and become newspaper and talk show fodder.

How he managed to lure so many young women and live this way so long in full view of authorities remains a mystery.

"I'm not their messiah. I'm not their savior. I'm just good to them," he told Israeli television last year.

According to police, his lawyer and testimony from the women, Ratzon kept tabs on his "extended family" through closed-circuit TV and fined them for violating rules that included modest dress and a ban on unauthorized phone calls.

Police broke up the harem Jan. 12. Now investigating him on suspicion of enslavement, rape and incest, they have until Friday to charge him, or his detention runs out, said his lawyer.

Dvora Reichstein said that life with Ratzon was "like living in a prison" – but that she had nowhere else to go.

Another of the women, Shari Horowitz, said that Ratzon was fascinating but that the life she lived could be characterized as "enslavement."

Amy Teibel,

The Associated Press

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