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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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Tucker Carlson’s ‘Banned in Israel’ Film Is Just Old News Repackaged
Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
From the man who revived the “Al-Aqsa is in danger” conspiracy for a Western audience and falsely claimed he was detained at Ben Gurion Airport, comes yet another round of misinformation.
This time, Tucker Carlson is promoting via his online channel, what he calls a “banned in Israel” documentary exposing the alleged dark dealings of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Corruption. “Anti-U.S. geopolitical maneuvers.” “A side of power that regular citizens were never meant to see.”
Sounds explosive.
It isn’t.
As noted by analyst (and occasional HonestReporting contributor) Nick Matau, this is little more than a “nothing-burger.”
The documentary Carlson is selling to his subscribers — at $6 a month — was not produced by his network and is hardly new. It was released in 2024 and has been widely available online and in select theaters ever since.
In fact, it was prominent enough to be nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2025 Academy Awards.
So much for “hidden truth.”
Yes, the film cannot be officially screened in Israel. But not for the reasons Carlson suggests.
The claim that it is banned because it “exposes” Netanyahu is misleading. The real reason is far more mundane: the documentary includes leaked police interview footage tied to Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial.
Under Israeli law, broadcasting such material would violate privacy protections, which is why it cannot be formally shown. As reported here, this is a legal issue, not a political cover-up.
And in practice? Israelis can still watch it online via VPNs or streaming platforms. It has also been reviewed across the Israeli media spectrum.
Hardly the mark of a suppressed exposé.
Carlson’s promotion leans heavily on one supposed bombshell: that Netanyahu allowed Qatari funds to flow into Gaza.
One advertisement claims: “We were lied to about Benjamin Netanyahu’s dealings with Hamas.”
But who exactly is “we”? Anyone following Israeli politics over the past decade would recognize this as old news.
This policy has been:
- Widely discussed after October 7
- Examined in a 2021 analysis
- Criticized by Israeli politicians as early as 2020
- Reported in 2018
To name only a few examples.
Whether one views the policy as pragmatic containment or strategic miscalculation, it was never secret.
The only people likely to find this “shocking” are those newly introduced to the subject or who, like Carlson, have only recently found the Jewish State to be a significant topic of interest.
Why push a two-year-old, widely discussed film as if it’s breaking new ground?
A few possibilities stand out:
1. Exploiting Audience Gaps
Carlson’s audience may not be deeply familiar with Israeli politics. By framing old information as newly uncovered, he creates the illusion of exclusive insight — and monetizes it.
2. Advancing a Narrative on the Iran War
Carlson has positioned himself as a leading critic of US involvement in the war. The documentary is being repurposed to suggest shadowy forces are driving American policy. Or as he puts it, “As America dives deeper into the Iran War, understanding who is pulling the strings matters more than ever.”
3. Staying Relevant in a Shifting Debate
As segments of the American right reassess US-Israel ties, repackaging familiar material as scandal helps Carlson remain central to the conversation even if the premise is misleading.
There is no hidden documentary.
There is no suppressed truth.
There is only old information repackaged, reframed, and resold.
And once again, Carlson is counting on his audience not knowing the difference.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Atlanta movie exec who complained of ‘nasty Jews’ is running for Congress
Ryan Millsap, a prominent film and real estate executive in Atlanta who made antisemitic and racist comments in private text messages, is now running for a congressional seat in rural Georgia.
ProPublica and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported two years ago that Millsap had sent the offensive texts to a girlfriend.
“Just had a meeting with one of the most nasty Jews I’ve ever encountered,” Millsap wrote in a 2019 text message viewed by the Forward. John Da Grosa Smith, Millsap’s former attorney, filed the text messages in Fulton County Superior Court in Georgia in 2024.
The news outlets also reported that Smith said in court documents that Millsap had allegedly made derogatory comments about Jews while they worked together, including referring to his Jewish colleagues as “the Jew crew” and calling one of them “a greedy Israelite.”
ProPublica and the AJC reported that during arbitration with Smith, Millsap said the comments Smith had described represented “locker room talk.”
Millsap apologized for the offensive text messages in a 2024 statement to the news outlets, saying “comments which I never intended to share publicly have come to light, and people I care about and who put their trust in me have been hurt.”
He also spoke directly at the time to the racist and antisemitic remarks.
“I want to extend my sincere apologies to my dear friends, colleagues and associates in both the black and Jewish communities for any and all pain my words have caused,” his statement continued. “My sincere hope is that the bonds and friendships that we have forged speak far louder than some flippant, careless remarks.”
Millsap is running in the Republican primary for the open seat in Georgia’s 10th Congressional District, which stretches from the far outskirts of Atlanta to the South Carolina border and includes the college town of Athens. The district is outside of the major Jewish population centers in Georgia and had fewer than 7,000 Jewish adults, according to the American Jewish Population Project.
The election is on May 19 and Millsap is running against a popular state lawmaker Houston Gaines in what is expected to be a competitive race.
Gaines called Millsap’s reported text messages “disqualifying.”
“Antisemitism has no place in this country, and as a Christian, I’ll always stand firmly against it,” Gaines said in a statement to the Forward.
Millsap did not respond to a request for comment about the text messages or whether he has conducted any outreach to the local Jewish community as part of his campaign.
In an interview last month with the Washington Reporter, Millsap said that negative interactions with local protesters had pushed him into politics. Millsap’s studio controlled land adjacent to the construction site for Cop City, a planned police training ground near Atlanta, and both sites were targeted by activists.
“They tried to ruin my reputation,” Millsap said in the interview. “Leftist journalists at ProPublica were enlisted to write hit pieces on me, call me a racist, antisemite, anything they could do to hurt my life and put me in a bad political position, because obviously DeKalb County is mostly black Democrats.”
Millsap’s Blackhall Group, whose studio produced movies including “Venom,” “Blockers,” and “Loki,” purchased the property in a county forest near the future Cop City site in 2021. Millsap said activists violently attacked construction workers on his property, burned a pickup truck and left threatening messages in 2022.
He has referred to the demonstrators as “antifa” and made his dispute with them a cornerstone of his campaign.
Antisemitism does not seem to be a major issue in the congressional race, in which Millsap and Gaines have focused on immigration and election security. The seat is considered a safe Republican district and the winner of the GOP primary is expected to win the general election.
According to the text messages filed in court and reviewed by the Forward, Millsap and his then-girlfriend, Christy Hockmeyer, complained about Jews and Black people on several occasions. “F—king Black people,” Millsap wrote in one message reported by ProPublica and AJC after Hockmeyer complained about a Black driver whose car she hit.
Hockmeyer also apologized for her role in the text message conversations with Millsap. “Those comments do not reflect who I am and I disavow racism and antisemitism as a whole,” she wrote in a statement to ProPublica and the AJC.
The ProPublica and AJC article noted that Millsap had built close ties with the Black and Jewish communities in Atlanta after relocating to the city from California and seeking to become active in its robust film industry. He had also been applauded for embracing workplace diversity.
His apology received a mixed response from those he had worked with in Atlanta.
Smith, Millsap’s former attorney, filed the text messages in a lawsuit after the two became embroiled in a heated legal dispute. An arbitrator found that Smith had violated his contract with Millsap when the two were working together and ordered him to pay $3.7 million for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty.
Millsap said in his 2024 apology that Smith had “violated the most basic and fundamental principle of attorney client privilege and released private text messages between myself and a former romantic partner.”
The post Atlanta movie exec who complained of ‘nasty Jews’ is running for Congress appeared first on The Forward.
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A new book explores the vibrancy of pre-war Warsaw
The Last Woman of Warsaw
Judy Batalion
Dutton, 336 pages, $30
Don’t be misled by the title of this debut novel by Judy Batalion, nor by her previous book, The Light of Days, about the role of Polish-Jewish women in the anti-Nazi resistance.
Though the specter of the Holocaust looms over The Last Woman of Warsaw, the novel is not really Holocaust fiction. It does not portray a final female survivor of that embattled city. Its subject is instead the odd-couple friendship of two young Jewish women embroiled in the artistic and political ferment of pre-World War II Warsaw.
For Batalion, recreating the atmosphere and quotidian life of this cosmopolitan city, which once elicited comparisons to Paris, was a major aim. “In our contemporary minds, historical Warsaw conjures images of gray and death,” she writes in a lengthy author’s note. But that shouldn’t negate its more vibrant past. “Long before Vegas,” Batalion writes, “Warsaw was the capital of neons, its night skyline dotted with glittering cocktail glasses and chefs carrying platters of roasts. Much of this artistic production was Jewish.”
Even this brief excerpt shows that Batalion isn’t much of a prose stylist. But awkward locutions and diction mistakes aside — including the repeated use of “cache” when she means “cachet” — Batalion generally succeeds in immersing readers in Warsaw’s lively urban bustle and heated street politics. Here, skating on the edge of catastrophe, Polish Jews of varying ideologies and backgrounds face off against antisemitic persecution and violence.
Batalion’s handling of the historical backdrop is defter than her fledgling fictional technique. The narrative of The Last Woman of Warsaw is a plodding and repetitive affair that ultimately turns on an improbable coincidence.
The plot involves the sudden disappearance of a photography professor with communist ties and the halting efforts of the novel’s two protagonists to find and free her. The pair, whose initial antagonism mellows into friendship, are Fanny Zelshinsky, an upper-middle-class Warsaw University student, and Zosia Dror, who hails from a religious shtetl family. Her adopted surname references the Labor Zionist group that now claims her loyalty. Despite their differences, the two women have in common a desire to shake off the past and forge new lives. They also share an attraction to a single man, Abram, who can’t seem to decide between them.
When the story begins, Fanny is engaged to the perfectly nice, highly suitable Simon Brodasz, whom she’s known since her teenage years. Her mother is pushing the match. But Fanny is not in love and dreads the loss of freedom marriage entails. Her true passion is photography – in particular, fashion photography, to which she brings an idiosyncratic, modernist flair.
Zosia’s passion is political activism, and she aspires to a more prominent leadership role in Dror. Like Fanny, she is at odds with her mother, who is urging her to return to the shtetl for the festivities preceding her sister’s wedding.
What brings these women together is the arrest of the famous photographer Wanda Petrovsky, to whom both are connected. Wanda is one of Fanny’s professors, and Fanny needs her help to enter a potentially career-making exhibition. Wanda also happens to be a political activist, a leader of Zosia’s Zionist group, and Zosia hopes she’ll provide her with a visa for Palestine.
As Batalion’s narrative alternates between their perspectives, the antisemitic fervor in Warsaw mounts. Polish right-wing groups have started terrorizing Jews. Police invade clubs where Jewish comedians are mocking antisemitism. At Warsaw University, where Jewish students already have been subject to admissions quotas, the humiliation of being consigned to a “Jew bench” in class comes as a humiliating shock to Fanny.
Zosia, by contrast, has seen far worse. She and her family were victims of one of the murderous pogroms that periodically roiled the Polish countryside. She has been traumatized by the burning of her home, her father’s injuries and the refusal of her neighbors to offer refuge from the catastrophe.
In late 1930s Warsaw, Polish Jews are fighting back – with protests, hunger strikes and more. But what will any of this accomplish? Will Wanda attain her freedom, with or without the help of her protegees? Will Zosia and Fanny successfully defy their families and find meaningful lives? Which woman will Abram ultimately choose? And will any of this matter as both Poland and Polish Jewry hover on the brink of destruction?
Batalion answers these questions in an epilogue describing the fate of both women and of Fanny’s photographs, which eventually take a political turn, and in her author’s note. In the note, she reveals that all four of her own grandparents “spent their young adulthoods in interwar Warsaw.” That heritage helps account for her own passion: “to memorialize Warsaw’s golden age of creativity and the Jewish art and culture that, along with six million lives, was also decimated in the Holocaust.” A worthy endeavor, however clumsily executed.
The post A new book explores the vibrancy of pre-war Warsaw appeared first on The Forward.