Ruthie Leviev-Yelizarov’s Full Kaykov TV Interview: A Grandfather’s “Real Diamonds,” a Son’s Crisis and a Turn to Marriage Counseling

Kaykov TV on Monday, Oct. 26, released its full interview with Ruthie Leviev-Yelizarov, a daughter of the businessman and philanthropist Lev Leviev. The channel describes her as a marriage counselor, author, podcast host and mother of seven. The episode runs about 50 minutes and premiered at 12 p.m. ET on the channel’s YouTube page. In it she talks with host Roman Kaykov about growing up in the Leviev household, leaving the family business, and the family crisis that she says led her to counsel couples.

Bukharian Jewish Post reported on three short clips from the conversation before it aired. This report covers material from the full episode that was not in those clips.

Video: Kaykov TV on YouTube.

“The real diamonds are people”

Leviev-Yelizarov said she is the third of nine children and grew up in a busy, open house that was always full of guests. Her father was often away on business, she said, and her mother did most of the child-rearing. She recalled her mother helping new immigrants from Russia at a time when few people around them spoke Russian, including teaching them Hebrew.

She told a family story about her grandfather, who she said once walked into her father’s office while her father was examining diamonds, turned the tray upside down and told him that the diamonds to look at are people, and bringing the community closer to Judaism. The channel’s chapter list titles the segment “The grandfather’s powerful lesson: ‘The real diamonds are people.’”

From her mother, she said, the children learned that whatever the family had, they had to earn it: “There is no shortcut in life.”

From the family business to her own path

She said she joined the family business at 18. “You get a free ticket to get into the business, but you have to work harder than anybody else in order to be worthy of it,” she told Kaykov. She said she worked in selling apartments and later ran the company’s shopping-mall division.

At 18, she said, she did not want to marry, seeing marriage and children as something that would stop her career. After she and her husband moved to London to work at the family office, life became quieter and she worked from home, which she called the biggest change of her life. She said she began studying Judaism seriously there in her mid-20s, and that the study changed how she understood Jewish marriage and the place of women in Judaism.

She described leaving the family business, where her siblings all worked, as something that “wasn’t even a decision,” saying she felt led to her new work. She said her family supports it.

A son’s crisis and family purity

Leviev-Yelizarov said the turn came when her eldest son, then a young child, suddenly became angry, refused to go to school and lashed out at his siblings while she had four small children at home. She said therapists did not help. She said two people she turned to for advice told her that the Lubavitcher Rebbe gave couples with family problems the same advice: to study the laws of family purity together with a tutor and keep them in every detail. She said she and her husband were surprised, since they had kept those laws since their wedding, but that studying the details “opened up a whole world” to her.

She said her work since then has focused on teaching brides and couples about family purity and the mikveh. She said many people in the religious world ask her how she is not ashamed to talk about the subject in public. She has written a first book, in Hebrew, with a long chapter on the subject; she said an English edition is planned. She also said she now trains women to become marriage counselors, drawing on about 15 years of her own work, and that her podcast is approaching 100 episodes.

Bukharian pride, faith and loss

Asked what she most wants to preserve from earlier generations, she named Jewish education, which she said is the main thing she takes from her father. The conversation turned to Bukharian identity. She said people tell her that they were once shy to say they are Bukharian and now say so proudly, and that at her family’s Shabbat table the children sing in the Bukharian melody.

She spoke about the death of a nephew two years ago, whom she described as a 23-year-old doctor, and said faith had carried the family through that loss and other hard times. She said she had never seen her father lose his faith in her 45 years.

She also spoke about asking for help, saying that as one of nine she believed she had to do everything alone, and that she later learned asking for help is a strength, not a weakness. Her closing message, as the channel summarizes it: “If you come home and you don’t have anyone to share it with, nothing you have is really worth it.”

Quotations and paraphrased statements are taken from the episode’s audio as rendered by YouTube’s automatic transcript, and from the channel’s own description and chapter list. Where the automatic transcript was unclear, Bukharian Jewish Post left the passage out.

Sources: Kaykov TV, “Ruthie Leviev-Yelizarov: Marriage, Faith, Family & the Leviev Legacy” (YouTube, premiered Oct. 26, 2026; episode audio, description and chapter list); Kaykov TV clip, Oct. 22, 2026; Kaykov TV clip, Oct. 23, 2026; Kaykov TV clip, Oct. 25, 2026.