Yaniv Ben-David, an Arab from the PA territories and Haifa whose official name until recently was Busmon Abu-Ras, found Judaism and G-d while serving a 12-year term in prison. The full miraculous story has come out in three interviews, including one with Arutz-7’s Hizky Ezra and another on Radio Kol Chai with the head of the Civil Administration, Brig.-Gen. Yoav Mordechai, known as Poli.
Yaniv’s speech is liberally sprinkled with 'May G-d’s Name be blessed' and the like, as if he had grown up all his life in a traditional Sephardic neighborhood. But in actuality, his story is very different. Without getting into details, he explains that he became involved in criminal activity of which today he is very ashamed, but that once in jail, no one in his family ever visited him. 'My crime was not related to terrorism, Heaven forbid, chas veshalom,' he says, 'but I don’t want to discuss it.'
'Some of the Jews in prison with me,' he relates, 'began talking to me, and said things like, ‘There’s something special about you, something that doesn’t seem to belong to that world that you came from... You seem to have a spark of Jewishness... Specifically, one very special guy began teaching me about Judaism, and little by little, I began to enter the world of holiness and Torah and the Chosen Nation, etc., may G-d’s Name be blessed...'"
