Elimelech Stern was gradually instructed to escalate the seriousness of his actions, in exchange for money he needed after falling into debt.By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel NewsA young Vizhnitz Hasid arrested last June for working for Iran took a while to understand that his handler was an enemy of Israel as he was gradually asked to escalate the seriousness of his actions, but did not cut off contact because he needed money, Hebrew-language media reported Friday.Elimelech Stern, 22, of Beit Shemesh, had been a yeshiva student learning to become a ritual scribe when he fell into debt of around NIS70,000 due to “improper actions,” as he told his interrogators after his arrest.He bought a smartphone, forbidden in his community, and went onto social media in order to see if he could make money with cryptocurrency.Stern was contacted on Telegram by “Anna Elena,” who initially posed as an anti-traffic accident activist from Canada and asked him to help her “save lives in Israel.”She first gave him strange but innocuous-sounding jobs such as hanging posters, activating a buried cellphone, and hiding money in over two dozen places in both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.Stern recruited two others to do some of the tasks, paying them out of the money she sent him in Bitcoin.The Iranian agent then started asking him to do more violent actions, such as break a car or store window or set fire to a car during a demonstration, saying that it didn’t matter whether it was a left-wing or right-wing protest because “the main thing is to create chaos in the country.”She promised him $500 for every smashed window and $3,000 for every car damaged.By this time, Stern understood that “Anna” was not who she said she was, but he needed cash so although he refused this instruction, he didn’t cut off contact or inform the police.He also refused but did not inform the authorities when “Anna” asked him to set fire to a forest for $7,000 or if he would shoot someone for $75,000.During one of his interrogations he also said that “I was afraid that if I turned to the police I would endanger myself.”When a joint Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and police operation caught up to him last June and officers came to his home in the middle of the night, he began outlining the whole story to his initial interrogator immediately, the officer said, because he knew why they had come.The interrogator wrote in his report that Stern had “concluded that the tasks he was asked to perform were against the State of Israel,” and even if he did not know they stemmed from Iran he “understands that this is a hostile entity with malicious intentions towards the State of Israel.”When asked if he “minded acting against the state,” Stern replied that he “felt neutral and less committed.”He added during a different interrogation that he did not really see himself as putting the country’s security at too great a risk with his actions.On July 16, the Jerusalem District Attorney’s Office filed an indictment against Stern on the single charge of contact with a foreign agent, with his lawyer saying that many other potentially more serious charges had been dropped over the course of the investigation.Two months ago, Maariv reported that that Stern filed a motion with the court to invalidate the confessions he gave during his subsequent interrogations in Shin Bet custody because his “basic rights” had been “trampled underfoot.”He said violence and threats of violence were used against him, he was deprived of sleep, and was denied access to a lawyer for eight days.The motion said that he also talked because a Shin Bet officer told him that he was not under arrest, in order to “make him ‘sing’ without fear of self-incrimination.”The post How Iran recruited a Hasidic Jew as a spy appeared first on World Israel News.