THE PULSA DE NURA CURSING RITE is back in the news (Haaretz), apparently due to the recent publication of a scholarly article on it:

Texts describing the ritual describe 10 sages who gather at midnight, following a three-day fast. As they blow on a shofar, they extinguish black candles. Those invoking the curse are required to name the guardian angel entrusted with safeguarding the condemned. The process of invoking the pulsa denura carries the danger of transforming it into a blessing, or even worse; of causing the curse to be turned back onto themselves.

And that means the cursers are covered no matter what happens, which is a closed-thought system typical for magic. Presumably the instance aimed at Teddy Kollek belongs to the transformed-into-a-blessing variety.

The hype around the pulsa denura, and its strangeness, led some researchers to question its origins, and its place within Judaism. Dr. Zion Zohar, of Florida International University's religious studies department, claims to have discovered that the ceremony in its current form 'is not of Jewish origins.'

According to Zohar, who published his findings recently in the periodical Modern Judaism, the ceremony took shape in Israel in the first years after the state's founding. It had its beginnings in disputes within the ultra-Orthodox community.

Zohar says he sees no evidence of the pulsa denura having been performed prior to 1948. The first instance ever recorded, he says, was in the 1950s, when members of Jerusalem's tiny anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect cast the curse on a burial society undertaker who had agreed to relocate graves from the site that later became the government complex at Givat Ram, in the capital.

"It was a political tool, which the extreme right later adopted for its own purposes," Zohar says. Although the term 'pulsa denura' does appear in the Zohar, the Florida researcher says that its original meaning was the opposite of its modern understanding. "Pulsa denura appears there as a divine force that protects from evil," Zohar says

Background here and here.