The thing I find really weird is that telling fortunes using
coffee grounds is illegal but you can tell fortunes using tarot
cards.
Coffee grounds brewed trouble for Israeli
fortuneteller
By Dion Nissenbaum, McClatchy NewspapersFri Jul 20, 10:10 AM
ET
JAFFA, Israel For nearly a quarter-century, Sana Kuma has been
staring into the bottoms of coffee cups to divine the future for
top Israeli models, actresses and businessmen.
It is in the chocolate swirls of coffee grounds that the dark-eyed,
lemon-blond- haired, 40-something fortuneteller can see what lies
ahead.
Her fawning customers consider Kuma a sage and soothsayer.
To the Israeli government she was a witch and a fraud.
This year, Kuma became one of the few people ever to be charged in
Israel with practicing magic, a unique crime punishable by up to
five years in jail.
In short, Kuma was the target of a modern-day witchhunt.
"Life is enemies and friends," Kuma said recently after doing a
coffee-ground reading for a former Miss Israel . "I have to accept
the good and the bad."
Kuma's transgression is something known to its practitioners as
tasseography. Put more simply, it is the ancient art of overturning
a coffee cup usually a demitasse used for Turkish coffee and
looking for answers in the patterns left behind by the
grounds.
And that, under Israeli law, can be grounds to charge someone with
illegally practicing magic.
"It's against the law to be a fortuneteller," said Ofer Almog , a
Tel Aviv attorney who represented Kuma and has become something of
a specialist in defending accused witches.
The law, said Almog, is vague and imprecise: It is OK to offer
advice based on tarot cards and the stars. But not coffee
grounds.
More importantly, the Israeli government has to prove that people
reading coffee grounds know they are charlatans. And that is a
difficult hurdle to overcome.
Almog had no trouble finding well-known people willing to testify
to Kuma's talents. The walls of Kuma's waiting room are covered
with tattered photographs of the fortuneteller with some of
Israel's entertainment elite. There she is with model Miri
Bohadana. And television star Dan Shilon . And former Miss Israel
Nicole Halperin , who stopped by Kuma's home last week with a
friend to have her coffee grounds read.
"She has special abilities," Halperin said after her reading. "She
gives you ideas, names and events, and when she gives you specific
names and events, it makes you know that she's special."
It was the praise of people like Halperin that attracted Avraham
Beihou to Kuma.
In 2004, the Israeli police officer was looking for help on the eve
of his marriage.
According to the government charges, Kuma looked into the coffee
grounds and saw a cursed bride.
To remove the curse, Beihou agreed to pay Kuma about $1,000 for the
help of a special "Jordanian sheik" brought in to deal with the
problem.
When that was done, Beihou turned to Kuma for advice about his
ailing father. Kuma told the police officer and his sister that
their father was likely to die in two months if they didn't act
quickly.
So Beihou paid another $2,200 for a series of amulets, which he was
to dip in honey, burn or throw into the sea.
But Beihou's father didn't get better. So, earlier this year, he
turned to the government, which filed fraud and magic charges
against Kuma.
"She has no talents she can't heal people," Beihou said. "If you
know how to read people, you can talk like you know their horoscope
or can read their future. Every person can figure out a person, but
only a doctor can heal someone. She can't."
Kuma took the charges in stride. She hired Almog, who set about
preparing testimony from celebrities to show that Kuma was the real
deal.
"There is a problem defining magic in the law," Almog said. "You
have to be pretending for this law to include you."
If you ask, Kuma will tell you that she is the descendent of a
famous fortuneteller, that she has seen dwarfs, and walked in the
company of saints.
"Maybe you would say that I am crazy or strange," Kuma said. "But
what I'm saying is true."
In the end, the Israeli government decided that proving that Kuma
was faking it was too difficult. Almog cut a deal. The state agreed
to drop the charges, and Kuma agreed to give Beihou a full
refund.
"In light of the fact that there is no clear judicial decision how
to determine the crime of magic, and in light of the willingness of
the accused to fully return the money to the complainant, we
decided that public interest would best be served by withdrawing
the indictment in this case," the Justice Ministry said in a
prepared statement.
That might have been the end of it. But Beihou said last week that
he's not satisfied.
"I mean to sue her in civil court," he said. "She's cheated a lot
of people."