REHOVOT, Israel (AP) – At the age of 20, Harel Hershtik planned and carried out a murder by shooting his victim in the head and burying the body in a crime that a quarter of a century later is still remembered for its horrific details.
Today, he is the brains behind an Israeli health technology startup ready to make millions of dollars with the support of prominent public figures and investors with deep pockets.
Neither his conviction for premeditated murder, his long prison sentence, nor the nocturnal house arrest imposed by the parole board prevented him from being released. His partners advertise it as a successful case of rehabilitation and a second chance.
But once his company goes public, Herschik’s past is under new scrutiny, raising questions about whether someone who has taken a person’s life deserves to rehabilitate his or her own to such an extent. It also tells a striking story of a life derailed and incredibly back on track through a combination of intellect, aspiration and cunning.
“When I was young, I would say I was stupid and arrogant,” said Hershchik, now 46, sitting in his office next to a futuristic-looking computer with color coolers he built himself. “You can be a genius, but still be very stupid and not contradict each other.”
Today, Herschik is vice president of strategy and technology at Scentech Medical, a company he founded in 2018 while behind bars and which claims its product can detect certain diseases through a breath test.
In a three-hour interview with the Associated Press, his first for an international news agency, he repeatedly expressed remorse for his crime.
At 14 Hershtik met Jacob Sela, a charismatic snake catcher with a group of young fans who gravitated towards his warm personality and naughty profession. Hershtik, who said he was physically and emotionally abused because of his weight by peers in the kibbutz where he was raised, loves snakes and met Sela during a zootherapy program.
Hershtik learned from the Village about the world of snake handling, and the two organized snake exhibits together and partnered to cross reptiles. But despite their initial relationship, the relationship has evolved from mentoring to “mutual hatred and hatred,” according to court documents.
Sela was known for having many girlfriends at once, including Hershtik’s mother. Hershchik told the AP that he felt uneasy about the way Sela treated some of these women and had “trouble seeing him talk to women in a humiliating way, especially someone I cared about and loved.” .
This Bat-Lea was among the fans of the Village. She met him in a kibbutz in the late 1980s and was pregnant with his child six months later. She called him a brilliant and warm-hearted but troubled man who was traumatized by his upbringing by Holocaust survivors. She said Sela has always been loving, but may be unreliable.
“When you were with him, you were the only person who existed on the face of the earth, and he was completely focused on you. And when you weren’t there, you didn’t exist, “she said.
In early 1996, Sela discovered that Hershtik had stolen 49,000 shekels (about $ 15,000 at the time) from him, and the two agreed that instead of hiring the police, Hershtik would repay him twice that amount. Court documents say Hershchik devised a plan to take Sela to banks across the country, tricking him into thinking he was collecting money to get his money back.
While driving, Hershtik pretended to vomit, and Sela stopped the car. After he stopped, Hershtik’s accomplice fired three shots at Sela, using Hershtik’s mother’s pistol. He then handed Hershchik the pistol, according to documents, and Hershchik shot Sela in the head at close range.
The couple pushed Sela’s body into the trunk and buried it in a grove in the Golan Heights, according to documents. Weeks later, tourists saw a hand protrude from the ground and Sela’s body was found.
The sensational crime has taken over the nation. Sela’s disappearance, murder, and trial — and Shakespeare’s details of the deception, lust, and tragedy that resulted from it — have repeatedly been featured in the front pages of newspapers.
In court documents, prosecutors say Hershtik planned and lied in an attempt to distance himself from the murder. Even his own mother, also convicted of the incident, called him a “pathological liar,” according to court documents. Prosecutors said he repeatedly lied about his whereabouts on the day Sela disappeared, and said Sela fled the country after a hit and run accident.
“I tell you unequivocally that we did not use force to solve problems. “I am a person who uses pens, pencils and computers to solve problems,” he told an interviewer at the time, according to court documents, while police worked to solve the case.
Herschik said today that he was forced to lie in order to protect others involved in the scheme, which included a friend who was eventually found to be mentally unstable, as well as his mother. His mother has been convicted of several crimes, including trying to thwart a police complaint from Sela’s mother about his disappearance.
After Herschik’s accomplice confessed to police, Herschik was sentenced to life in prison for premeditated murder and obstruction of justice, among other crimes.
In a sense, Herschik flourished during his time in prison. He won two doctorates in mathematics and chemistry and married three separate times. He said he had set up 31 companies, selling six of them.
Apart from the physical limits of life behind bars, Israeli law does not prohibit prisoners from doing business, although Hershchik’s success is rare.
“You are limited by reality. You are in prison, “Hershchik said. “You run a company. You can’t get him out of jail alone. You have to rely on other people to talk, to make contracts, deals. ”
To circumvent this obstacle, Herschik appointed CEOs to manage the day-to-day operations of his companies. He used the infrastructure available to him in prison, at one point receiving a computer in his cell. With limited internet access, Herschik said he had to read long documents over the phone.
His first company, which he started in 1998, focused on video compression technology. He hired a technology columnist as the company’s chief executive, which was eventually sold, providing Hershtik with an undisclosed amount.
Herschik met his first wife through regular interpersonal contacts while in custody. He met his second wife after calling a widely read women’s magazine while meeting the third in an online chat room, which sparked a relationship that lasted 14 years. He is now divorced, without children.
He said he had been in contact with some of Israel’s most prominent prisoners while behind bars, including former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former President Moshe Katsav.
But prison was also a difficult time for Hershtik. He said he had spent 11 years in quarantine due to health problems that had led to a serious deterioration in his immune system. Contact with other prisoners could endanger his condition. He was punished twice for setting up Internet access to his cell, in one case building a modem from two dismantled DVD players. He said he had spent weeks in solitary confinement – in the “dungeon” as described by Herschik – for his offense.
He also said he was stabbed by two Arab prisoners after he was caught plotting to catapult a severed pig’s head with the Koran in his mouth at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Herschik said he offered the plot to two Jewish nationalists he met in prison, but said it was hypothetical.
When the country’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, caught on to the plan, it recruited Herschik as an informant, he said. When Arab prisoners heard that Hershchik was helping Shin Bet, they stabbed him, Hershchik said.
The court documents related to the case say that Hershchik “has proven to be a very problematic witness and source of information”, saying that he has changed his story about his participation many times.
Last year, the Early Release Commission found that Hershtik had been rehabilitated and was no longer a danger to society.
“During the treatment, the prisoner presented himself as a person of particularly high intelligence, without impairment of judgment or understanding,” the Early Release Board wrote.
As part of his early release until 2026, he is under night house arrest from 11 pm to 6 am. He must wear a tracking device around his ankle at all times and is prohibited from leaving the country.
A free man, Hershtik recently sat with the AP in his office in the central city of Rehovot, Israel. An electric toothbrush and an energy drink landed on his desk next to a long curved computer screen. He wore a gray shirt with only a hint of wrinkles, but two spare ironed shirts were delivered to him in case he needed to be more presentable. He did not change during the interview.
He owns an Audi and is driven around without two driver’s licenses.
Its launch is awaiting regulatory approval to merge with a company called NextGen Biomed, which trades on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and will make Scentech public. The talks that led to the merger are still ongoing while Herschik is in prison.
Hershchik said the company’s product is being finalized to detect COVID-19 through the patient’s breathing and is working to add other diseases such as some cancers as well as depression. The product is designed to provide on-site results in a non-invasive way.
The company received a patent for its technology in Israel and said it was preparing to apply for FDA approval soon. Diagnosing respiratory diseases is a growing field, and other companies say they are doing similar things, but Hershchik said his patented technology allows unique chemical indicators in respiration to be identified and used to diagnose diseases.
Herschik said he was watching his …
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