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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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China Slams Israel for Joining UN Human Rights Statement Condemning Beijing
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon addressing the UN Security Council on Sept. 19, 2024. Photo: Screenshot
China slammed Israel on Wednesday for joining a United Nations declaration condemning its human rights record, accusing some nations of “slandering” Beijing on the international stage as bilateral relations between the two countries grow increasingly tense.
Last week, Israel endorsed a US-backed declaration, signed by 15 other countries — including the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan — that expressed “deep and ongoing concerns” over human rights violations in China.
In a rare move, Jerusalem broke with its traditionally cautious approach to China — aimed at preserving diplomatic and economic ties — by signing on to the statement as Beijing continues to strengthen relations with Iran, whose Islamic government openly seeks Israel’s destruction, and expand its influence in the Middle East.
China, a key diplomatic and economic backer of Tehran, has moved to deepen ties with the regime in recent years, signing a 25-year cooperation agreement, holding joint naval drills, and continuing to purchase Iranian oil despite US sanctions.
China is the largest importer of Iranian oil, with nearly 90 percent of Iran’s crude and condensate exports going to Beijing.
Iran’s growing ties with China come at a time when Tehran faces mounting economic sanctions from Western powers, while Beijing itself is also under US sanctions.
According to some media reports, China may be even helping Iran rebuild its decimated air defenses following the 12-day war with Israel in June.
With this latest UN declaration, the signatory countries denounced China’s repression of ethnic and religious minority groups, citing arbitrary detentions, forced labor, mass surveillance, and restrictions on cultural and religious expression.
According to the statement, minority groups — particularly Uyghurs, other Muslim communities, Christians, Tibetans, and Falun Gong practitioners — face targeted repression, including the separation of children from their families, torture, and the destruction of cultural heritage.
In response, China’s Foreign Ministry accused the signatories of “slandering and smearing” the country and interfering in its internal affairs “in serious violation of international law and basic norms of international relations.”
The UN declaration also voiced “deep concern” over the erosion of civil liberties and the rule of law in Hong Kong, citing arrest warrants and fines for activists abroad, as well as the use of state censorship and surveillance to control information, suppress public debate, and create a “climate of fear” that silences criticism.
Western powers called on China to release all individuals unjustly detained for exercising their human rights and fundamental freedoms and to fully comply with international law.
Israel’s latest diplomatic move comes amid an already tense relationship with China, strained since the start of the war in Gaza. In September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Beijing, along with Qatar, of funding a “media blockade” against the Jewish state.
At the time, the Chinese embassy in Israel dismissed such accusations, saying they “lack factual basis [and] harm China-Israel relations.”
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‘Dead on Arrival’: Inside the Breakdown of Second Phase of Gaza Ceasefire and Hamas’s Resurgent Control
Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard at a site as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, Dec. 3, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
The second phase of the Trump administration’s Gaza plan has collapsed into “stalemate,” according to Gaza-born analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, derailing plans to disarm Hamas and enabling the terrorist group to reassert control over aid convoys and Gaza’s three main hospitals, which he said have turned into interrogation centers for political opponents.
“Phase Two is not going to proceed,” Alkhatib, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said in a call with journalists on Tuesday.
Under the plan, the first stage included Hamas releasing all the remaining hostages, both living and deceased, who were kidnapped by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists during their Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel. In exchange, Israeli released thousands of Palestinian prisoners and detainees and partially withdrew its military forces in Gaza.
Currently, the Israeli military controls 53 percent of Gaza’s territory, and Hamas has moved to reestablish control over the other 47 percent. However, the vast majority of the Gazan population is located in the Hamas-controlled half, where the Islamist group has been imposing a brutal crackdown.
The second stage of the US plan was supposed to install an interim administrative authority — a so-called “technocratic government” — deploy an International Stabilization Force — a multinational force meant to take over security in Gaza — and begin the demilitarization of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that has ruled the enclave for nearly two decades.
“The International Stabilization Force is dead on arrival,” Alkhatib said. “The gap between what the force is meant to do versus the expectation of the volunteers is too wide.”
Alkhatib’s comments stood in stark contrast to those of US President Donald Trump, who on Wednesday told reporters at the White House that phase two of his Gaza peace plan was “going to happen pretty soon.”
“It’s going very well. We have peace in the Middle East. People don’t realize it,” Trump said. “Phase two is moving along. It’s going to happen pretty soon.”
However, Israel and Hamas have not actually reached an agreement regarding the second phase.
The United States had hoped to scale back its role in its newly built Civil-Military Coordination Center in the Israel city of Kiryat Gat, Alkhatib said, while pushing regional partners to assume responsibilities they lack the capacity or willingness to take on.
However, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are “furious” that the process has placed Qatar and Turkey, both longtime backers of Hamas, in what Alkhatib called the “driver’s seat,” giving them outsized influence over Gaza without requiring them to shoulder the financial burden.
“You put the Qataris in the driver’s seat, then why don’t you make them commit a billion dollars?” Alkhatib said.
Egypt and Jordan, meanwhile, lack the money and resources to train security personnel on the ground, while other partners like Pakistan and Indonesia have made clear they will not take part in disarming Hamas.
“Israel is the only body in the world — from a brute force perspective — that can take on Hamas,” he said, arguing that the Islamist group had been “very close to defeat” before the US-brokered ceasefire took effect in October, though at an extreme cost for Gazans and after a two-year campaign he said was at times undermined by far-right elements in the Israeli government.
Meanwhile, Hamas is building a new tax economy around the flow of goods into Gaza. Alkhatib described a sharp rise in commercial shipments alongside humanitarian aid, with merchants paying 50 percent of the value of the goods in taxes and fees.
“The same Qassam brigadiers [Hamas operatives] who were in tunnels throwing IEDs [improvised explosive devices] at Israeli soldiers are now protecting commercial goods trucks,” he said.
He added that Hamas was continuing to seize control of the humanitarian pipeline, imposing charges on aid shipments and asserting authority over the 800 to 900 trucks entering Gaza each day.
Alkhatib’s comments came one day before the research institution NGO Monitor, which tracks anti-Israel bias among nongovernmental organizations, released a new report revealing how Hamas has long run a coordinated effort to penetrate and influence NGOs in Gaza, systematically weaponizing humanitarian aid in Gaza and tightening its grip over foreign NGOs operating in the territory.
The terrorist group has also stepped up the recruitment of teenagers, described by Alkhatib as “child soldiers,” to help enforce control over goods and movement.
Gaza’s three main hospitals — Shifa, Nasser, and Al-Aqsa — have been turned into “pseudo-government operation centers,” Alkhatib said, with the terrorist group embedding elements of its Interior, Economy, and Finance ministries inside the compounds, and using them to interrogate political opponents, levy financial penalties on businessmen, and oversee arrests.
Alkhatib said the difficulty of speaking candidly about Hamas’s conduct has created a distorted public conversation.
“I can’t say these things without journalists saying, ‘Ahmed, I can’t believe you’re repeating Israeli talking points,’” he said. “Meanwhile, you talk to any child in Gaza about what’s happening [in the hospitals],” he added, noting that Gazans have circulated a grim joke that Hamas has “come out of the labor and delivery department” — a reference to operatives hiding in maternity wards and using pregnant women as human shields.
Part of the postwar landscape now includes several anti-Hamas militias, loosely aligned under the Abu Shabab group. While some Muslim Brotherhood–aligned outlets, including Al Jazeera, have claimed the Israel Defense Forces plan to dismantle these militias, Alkhatib argued the opposite is more likely, predicting the IDF will lean on them as the only armed actors available for post-ceasefire “mop-up” operations against Hamas cells.
In late October, The Algemeiner reported that four Israel-backed militias fighting Hamas are moving to fill the power vacuum in Gaza, pledging to cooperate with most international forces involved in rebuilding the enclave but vowing to resist any presence from Qatar, Turkey, or Iran.
Iran, like Qatar and Turkey, has spent years supporting Hamas.
Based in Khan Younis, Hossam al-Astal, commander of the Counter Terrorism Strike Force, said his group and three allied militias had coordinated in recent weeks to secure areas vacated by Hamas.
The militias, mainly in southern Gaza, are not part of US President Donald Trump’s proposed plan for a technocratic administration in the enclave.
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In ‘The Secret Agent,’ a peek into Brazilian Jewish history — and a warning against propaganda
When we first meet Marcelo in the fiction film The Secret Agent, the only thing that’s clear is that he’s on the run — we’re not sure that Marcelo is his real name, who he’s on the run from, or why. As the story, set in 1977 Brazil, unravels, we learn government officials and hired killers are working together to take Marcelo down and strip him of any credibility he had in his pre-fugitive life — even if that means manipulating the press.
But the film also spends time on the characters Marcelo meets while hiding among others being persecuted by the military dictatorship in the city of Recife, illustrating the diversity of the people affected by the fascist regime.
One of those characters is a man many assume is an escaped Nazi; in fact, however, he is a Holocaust survivor.
The audience’s introduction to the survivor, Hans, played by German actor Udo Kier in his final film role before his death, is not a pleasant one. A corrupt police chief named Euclides brings Marcelo to Hans’ tailor shop, insisting there is something interesting he must see there. Euclides then forces Hans to lift his shirt and show his scars — something Euclides clearly regularly has the man to do as we can see by Hans’ immediate sour reaction to the chief.
Euclides believes the intense, sprawling scar tissue tells a glorious military story of a Nazi who evaded capture.
“He’s just fascinated with, I don’t know, maybe Nazi Germany, with the German soldier, or the idea of the German soldier,” explained director Kleber Mendonça Filho in a video interview. “And he seems to have a one track mind in terms of thinking that Hans, because he’s German, must have been a heroic soldier in the German army in the Second World War, which explains why he’s still alive.”
But, as the audience learns through a conversation Hans has with an employee in German — and a shot of the menorah he has tucked away in his office — he is actually a Jewish Holocaust survivor. His wounds are a testament to surviving violent antisemitism, not markers of fighting for militaristic ideals the police chief believes they share.
“Identity can be on your body,” Filho said. “In the scars that you have, in the tattoos that you have, in the way that you have collected physical experience throughout life.”
Like many of the elements in the film, the character of Hans was inspired by Filho’s own memories of growing up in Recife during the Brazilian military dictatorship, known for its violent suppression of media and political dissidents, that ruled the country from 1964-1985. Even though Filho was only 9 years old at the time the film is set, he remembers a lot from that time in his life, including an old Romanian tailor his father visited in the downtown area that they recreated in the film.
Filho combined this character from his life with the experience of growing up in an area with a strong Jewish presence. Recife was the site of Brazil’s first organized Jewish community, which consisted of Dutch Jews, who arrived with other Dutch colonialists, and Sephardic Jews escaping the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions. Between 1636 and 1640, these Jews built the first synagogue in the Americas, Kahal Zur Israel, which was turned into a museum in 2001.
In 1654, the Portuguese expelled Dutch Colonists and Jews from Brazil, but another wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe in the 1910s revitalized Recife’s Jewish population. Even though Filho isn’t Jewish, he had a lot of Jewish friends throughout his life, even styling the marine biologist in the film off of one of them.
Although The Secret Agent takes place in 1977, Filho saw events similar to those he wrote into the film play out around him under the presidency of Jair Messias Bolsonaro, which lasted from 2019 to 2023.
Filho said that “a lot of the logic of what was happening under the Bolsonaro regime seemed to mimic” the military regime of the 20th century “in a fetishistic way.”
“Words like torture were now being thrown around,” he said, “misogynistic treatment of women in words that would be questionable in 1977 and completely alien and unacceptable today.”
Filho said the country also experienced a renewed period of racism and xenophobia under Bolsonaro, encouraged by the policies of the government. And those were sometimes overtly inspired by admiration for Nazi Germany; then-Special Secretary Roberto Alvim was removed from his post after just a few months for plagiarizing a speech from Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.
Today, in the United States, many are worried that Nazis are being reimagined as the good guys, as Holocaust deniers like Nick Fuentes are given increased attention by news pundits and the Trump administration normalizes relations with the far-right groups.
Much of the plot of The Secret Agent concerns the rewriting of history through propaganda and media censorship. And the intimate and abusive interaction between the police chief and Hans feels like a particularly salient demonstration of how easily facts can be written over to fit the world someone might want to see.
The post In ‘The Secret Agent,’ a peek into Brazilian Jewish history — and a warning against propaganda appeared first on The Forward.