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Criticism of rabbi’s salary may have been erased from the internet due to fraud, investigation claims
(JTA) — Did someone associated with the late Rabbi Yehiel Eckstein’s nonprofit pay a company to remove criticism of his and his daughter’s salaries from the internet?
That’s the question being raised by a recent Washington Post investigation into the allegedly fraudulent activities of a firm that launders clients’ online reputations.
The large organization Eckstein founded, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, raises funds from evangelical Christians and other donors for impoverished Jews. It also facilitates Jewish emigration to Israel, including from Ukraine. Eckstein founded the group in 1983, and died in 2019.
But the issue of his compensation came up last week in a Washington Post expose about a company that allegedly makes baseless claims to protect the reputations of public figures. The Post reviewed nearly 50,000 records of the company, Eliminalia, documenting its activities on behalf of almost 1,500 clients over six years. Some paid more than $200,000 for the company’s services.
In the Eckstein case, Eliminalia is accused of demanding that the publishing platform WordPress erase two blog posts criticizing Yechiel and Yael Eckstein’s salaries as excessive, on the fraudulent basis that the posts were plagiarized from other sources.
The blog posts were written by Geri Ungurean, whom the Post identifies as a 71-year-old retiree in Maryland, and who also appears to identify as a “Jewish Christian.” Both posts, published in 2015 and 2018, were titled “Why Christians should Not Give Money to Rabbi Eckstein of IFCJ.”
Publicly accessible tax documents show Eckstein’s total compensation in 2018 was more than $700,000, and that his daughter Yael Eckstein, who then served as executive vice president, earned more than $400,000. In 2019, the year the elder Eckstein died, his total compensation jumped to roughly $3 million, which an IFCJ spokesperson, Shavit Greenberg, said was due to a death benefit paid out to his widow. The nonprofit’s revenue in both years exceeded $100 million. A Haaretz article published in 2017 also questioned the size of Yechiel Eckstein’s salary.
The top salaries of Jewish nonprofit executives and their employees has long been a topic of discussion and concern among Jewish groups. In 2017, the Forward counted 18 CEOs who were earning more than half a million dollars. The introduction to the survey said that since the Forward’s previous survey of CEO compensation, “the gender gap at Jewish non-profits has only widened and a few non-profit executives are receiving extraordinary payouts.” This year, a survey of Jewish nonprofit employees by Leading Edge, which focuses on workplace culture at Jewish groups, found that fewer than half of respondents said their “salary is fair relative to similar roles at my organization.”
In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Greenberg said the organization “has never engaged Eliminalia or any firm that engages in unethical practices.”
Greenberg’s statement added that the organization could not say whether Yehiel Eckstein paid for the service himself — though it did not rule that possibility out. If Eckstein did have a role in hiring Eliminalia, it would have been well before the company’s alleged activity on his behalf took place: The Post article made clear that Eliminalia was hired on the Ecksteins’ behalf in 2020, more than a year after the elder Eckstein died.
“If there is a record of Rabbi Eckstein making such payment over five years ago, it was a personal decision made completely independent of The Fellowship,” Greenberg said. “Rabbi passed in 2019 and is the only one able to comment on the alleged payment to Eliminalia.”
Asked about the discrepancy in dates, Greenberg wrote via email, “The Fellowship nor our current president has ever engaged with Eliminalia and had never heard of the company until the article.”
The Post wrote the expose with the assistance of Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based consortium of investigative journalists. Forbidden Stories had obtained internal documents detailing Eliminalia’s methods. Eliminalia did not respond to the Post’s requests for comment, citing “business secrecy.”
Eliminalia’s techniques, according to the Post, include burying negative stories in search results by supplanting them with positive ones from fake news sites — a practice that media watchdogs see as unethical, but not illegal. What is illegal is another practice: making false claims to web hosts that content on their sites has been previously published by other outlets, and is therefore copyright protected and should be erased.
That, according to the Post, is how Eliminalia approached WordPress about Ungurean’s blog in 2020. Two companies claimed copyright of Ungurean’s 2015 and 2018 blog entries. According to the Post article, those companies show no sign of existing other than to make those claims.
Eliminalia was paid roughly $6,400 for the action, the Post reported. Ungurean shared emails with the Post from Automattic, WordPress’s parent company, that said the company ignored the requests, finding them suspect.
Nonetheless, the 2015 post disappeared. The 2018 post is still online. Automattic told Ungurean that someone using her log-in erased the 2015 post in January 2022. Ungurean told the Post she did not erase her content and believes her account was hacked.
The Post compared two searches on Yahoo for “Yael Eckstein salary,” one in October 2020 and one from last month. On the 2020 search, the 2018 blog post by Ungurean shows up fifth; last month’s search did not turn up the blog post in its first 100 entries. Among the top posts, however, is an advertisement entitled “Yael Eckstein: Salary, Spending and the Non-Profit Double Standard,” in which the younger Eckstein posits that non-profit executives should get salaries commensurate with the for-profit sector.
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The post Criticism of rabbi’s salary may have been erased from the internet due to fraud, investigation claims appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Far-right Israel critic James Fishback likens abortion to the Holocaust
(JTA) — James Fishback, a fierce critic of Israel and a far-right politician, offered scathing remarks about the Jewish state and likened abortion to the Holocaust during an address at the University of Mississippi on Tuesday evening.
Fishback, a former GOP gubernatorial candidate in Florida, recalled that earlier this summer the Combat Antisemitism Movement flagged as antisemitic one of his X posts describing abortion as a holocaust.
“Abortion is a holocaust, and by every single historical metric available, it was worse than the other one,” Fishback said, claiming that “61 million children have been killed in the womb since Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided in 1973.”
He also had harsh words for the state of Israel. “It is time for President Trump to call [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and cut him off. We must decouple from Israel to save America,” he added.
Fishback was speaking at a Turn Up the Mic forum arranged by members of the University of Mississippi chapter of Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk.
Slamming immigration policies on both sides of the aisle — Republicans for too few mass deportations and Democrats for an influx of foreign workers — Fishback declared, “It’s time to stand up and tell both parties that no, American jobs are for Americans only.”
He noted, however, that making such demands could result in a person being labeled a racist or misogynist, and that “if you’re really bad they’ll call you an antisemite.” Stressing that he condemns “all forms of religious hatred,” he maintained that “the most virulent” type is the hostility “against Christians in this country.”
Fishback blamed Israel and the inability of the U.S. to “tell them no” for drawing the country into the war with Iran. That war, he argued, has pushed gas prices and Treasury yields higher.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Far-right Israel critic James Fishback likens abortion to the Holocaust appeared first on The Forward.
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Protesters stormed Mahmoud Khalil’s book release. His Israeli editor confronted them.
Minutes before activist Mahmoud Khalil was scheduled to speak Tuesday night about his new memoir at a bookstore near the Columbia University campus where he led pro-Palestinian demonstrations, protesters stormed inside with a megaphone, a sign and a large American–Israeli flag.
“Zionist Jews are here,” announced Ross Glick over the megaphone, as he entered Book Culture. “We are against intifada.”
Glick is the former CEO of Betar US, a pro-Israel organization labeled an “extremist group” by the Anti-Defamation League for its harassment tactics. Betar previously shared names of pro-Palestinian protesters, including Khalil, with federal immigration authorities. Khalil is suing Betar along with the Heritage Foundation and the Canary Mission. Betar reached a settlement with New York state over harassment allegations and wound down its operations.
Khalil was upstairs, along with most of the book event’s attendees, when the demonstrators entered the store downstairs. Employees ushered the protesters outside, but one came back inside minutes later waving the flag and singing “Am Yisrael Chai.”
A store employee tried to grab the flag from the protester. After a brief tug-of-war, the protester appeared to hit the employee’s arm as he pulled the flag from her.
Khalil’s editor Riva Hocherman, who is Israeli, confronted the protesters in Hebrew.
“I really wanted to get a sense of whether they knew Hebrew, and they didn’t,” Hocherman told the Forward. “They just enrage me.”
Hocherman specializes in publishing books on the Middle East and previously worked with Rashid Khalidi as his editor on The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. She said she was motivated to work with Khalid because, “His story was one that was really worth telling, and a great injustice was perpetrated.”
Khalil’s memoir, No Land to Stand on, focuses on his 2025 detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Khalil was held for more than 100 days and became the face of the debate over free speech on campus and when anti-Zionism crosses the line into antisemitism.
In his book, Khalil, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, says that pro-Palestinian protesters were peaceful, while “it was the pro-Israel students and Zionist groups that had provoked confrontations, harassed Palestinian students, and in some cases physically attacked them.”
Khalid mentions Hocherman in the acknowledgments section of his book: “Riva, my editor, is not only a champion of the book but of the cause.”
Hocherman addressed the protesters because she said they lie about Khalil, and because she wanted to show that not all Jews and Israelis think the same.
“Our opinion is not a monolith,” she said. “There is a range of opinion among Israelis and Jews. We don’t all think like they do.”
The event, only slightly delayed, carried on without further interruptions. Khalil spoke with environmental lawyer and activist Steven Donziger and answered a few questions from attendees before signing books. He received a standing ovation from the crowd of more than 85 people.
The post Protesters stormed Mahmoud Khalil’s book release. His Israeli editor confronted them. appeared first on The Forward.
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If Trump makes good on offering Canadian Jews refugee status, will they come?
(JTA) — TORONTO –- Sari Watson was too afraid to attend Yom Kippur services. Concerned by rising levels of antisemitism in Canada, she was safely at home 25 minutes away when a gunman charged at her childhood synagogue.
“My internal alarm has been going off, and you begin to think about escape routes or backup plans,” said Watson, 39, who lives in Quinte West, Ontario, about 15 miles west of Belleville, where the attack during Kol Nidre on Sept. 20 culminated in a shootout that left the gunman dead and one policeman hospitalized. “The only reason I wasn’t at synagogue was because I have been terrified of this exact situation, or worse, happening.”
Florida Sen. Rick Scott, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and President Donald Trump himself, all Republicans, have proposed extending refugee status to Canadian Jews who fear the spike in antisemitism in their country.
“’It’s so amazing to know that the Republicans understand the level of antisemitism we’re dealing with here,” she says. “President Trump gets the climate and the danger.”
Still, Watson has mixed emotions about the thought of leaving her home country. “I want to stay here and fight for our safety in Canada,” she said. “The option to come to the U.S. is really important, but we shouldn’t have to need it.”
The Trump administration has imposed stringent restrictions on immigration and is carrying out mass deportations, but is inviting South African whites – and now, potentially, Canadian Jews – refugee status. Critics accuse Trump of playing politics with refugee status, but some Canadian Jews see it as a lifeline.
Talk of Jews feeling compelled to leave Canada gained momentum last week when a well-known Jewish journalist posted publicly on social media about getting a foreign passport. Neil Herland, a newsreader for the national broadcaster, the CBC, wrote on X about his encounter with pro-Palestinian protesters outside Toronto’s Meridian Arts Centre, where Yom Kippur services were being held. Herland said that, concerned about rising antisemitism in Canada, he recently acquired his Austrian passport as a safety precaution. (Independent Press Gallery, a press freedom advocacy group, condemned the CBCfor reportedly suspending Herland after pro-Palestinian advocates lodged a complaint about his post.)
Some Jews are past the precaution stage. Sheldon Shugal, 64, and his wife are currently researching how to move to the United States.
“If I were able to claim refugee status to come to the U.S., I’d do it without hesitation,” said Shugal, who lives in Calgary. “I used to love our country … but it’s just not a place that I want to continue to live in.”
Shugal, a property manager, said he has seen increased antisemitism in Canada in the wake of the deadly Hamas raid in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the war it launched. He said he and his wife have been struggling to overcome the complexity of acquiring an American visa.
“The Jew-hatred is no longer rising in Canada, it’s fully immersed here,” says Shugal. “It’s not the country I grew up in. I don’t feel affinity to Canada anymore.”
Shugal’s concerns are reflected in the findings of B’nai Brith Canada, which recently reported a 9.3% increase in antisemitic incidents from 2024-2025. According to this report, online harassment has surged dramatically, while Ontario saw the greatest total number of antisemitic incidents out of all the Canadian provinces and territories.
Antisemitic attacks have proliferated. In March of this year, Toronto synagogue Temple Emanu-El was shot at following Purim celebrations. The next week, two more Toronto synagogues were hit with gunfire over Shabbat, causing damage to the buildings, though no injuries were reported. In late April, assailants allegedly fired replica guns at “visually-identifiable” members of the city’s Jewish community, with one of the men sustaining minor injuries.
Shugal said reports of antisemitism have rattled him as well as the pro-Palestinian encampment his daughter encountered on her campus. “There hasn’t necessarily been anything I’ve personally experienced. It’s just what I’ve seen throughout the country,” Shugal said.
Lauren Cohen, an immigration lawyer based in Boca Raton, Florida, said that since the Oct. 7 attacks, about half of her Canadian clients cite antisemitism as a primary reason for wanting to leave Canada for the United States.
“In the past three months, I’ve noticed a very significant increase in the number of people between 55-70 who are contacting me,” said Cohen, who is originally from Toronto. “They have grown children or no children, and they have a little bit more money,” she said. “They want freedom.”
Antisemitism is not the only consideration for her clients, Cohen said. “The economy’s struggling. It’s not just antisemitism,” she said. “That might be the straw that broke the camel’s back, but it’s so many other factors as well.”
Cohen founded the Jewish Community Collective, an organization which helps Jewish Canadians and “displaced Jews” find connection in America. Another option for Jewish Canadians looking to make a new home in the States is Lech L’Tulsa, a program cosponsored by the Jewish Federation of Tulsa that helps settle Jewish newcomers, “designed to help Jewish Canadian citizens relocate to Tulsa.”
Some Canadian Jews do not see greener grass south of the 49th parallel, however. They point to Canada’s more expansive social safety net as one of the many reasons life in the Great White North” is better.. “Unquestionably, the answer to whether I’d consider moving to the States is emphatically ‘no,’” said Lawrence Stanleigh, a dentist in Calgary.
“I believe our country is a better place to live,” said Stanleigh, 67. “The U.S. doesn’t have a public healthcare system. Why would I want to leave our safety net for the U.S.?”
Stanleigh said the idea that the United States is a safe haven for Canadian Jews is misleading. “As bad as things are in Canada, I think they’re worse in the United States,” he said. “It’s not a better place for education or for healthcare. The whole idea of moving there for our safety is a fantasy that the Republicans believe in.”
Substituting the United States for Canada is shortsighted, Stanleigh said. “There are failures on behalf of Canadian leaders to stand firm in their support of the Jewish community,” he said. “But as bad as things are, I think they’re worse in the States. Our American cousins are blithely unaware of the problems they have at home.”
Anthony Housafather, a Jewish Canadian Member of Parliament representing a riding, or electoral district, in Montreal, is skeptical of the notion that the United States would offer Jews better protection.
“I think this idea is inspired by some right-wing Jews who have decided that their mission is to attack the Canadian government, and to make it look like somehow, Donald Trump and the Republicans are the savior of the Jewish people,” Housefather said in an interview.
Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney are at a low point in their relationship, with tensions over trade intensifying – and Trump seeks opportunities to take potshots at Carney.
Housefather also does not believe that leaving for the United States is gaining traction among Canadian Jews. “There are some people who have decided that Florida or Israel is a greener pasture,” he said. “But that does not represent a significant or a predominant view, and the idea that everybody’s leaving Canada is actually not true.”
The increase in antisemitism is universal – and should be treated holistically, he said. “What I do agree with is everywhere there’s a very serious problem with antisemitism,” he said. “Everywhere Jewish communities don’t feel safe, and all levels of government need to keep doing more.”
Housefather encourages his Jewish countrymen to remain proud Canadians. “Antisemitism has grown to an unacceptable level in this country,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that you should have less pride in being Canadian because there’s a loud, angry, small group of Canadians trying to make us scared.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post If Trump makes good on offering Canadian Jews refugee status, will they come? appeared first on The Forward.
