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Funds for Tel Aviv apartment given to Putin’s former teacher came from Roman Abramovich, records reveal
(JTA) — After Russian President Vladimir Putin reunited with his Jewish high school teacher on an official visit to Israel in 2005, he bought the elderly widow an apartment in Tel Aviv.
That’s according to a widely circulated story based on an interview that the former teacher, Mina Yuditskaya-Berliner, gave to an Israeli news outlet in 2014. At the time, Putin was facing international rebuke over his invasion of Crimea, but Yuditskaya-Berliner had nothing but praise for him.
“When I got the apartment, I cried,” she said. “Putin is a very grateful and decent person.”
Newly uncovered financial records, however, reveal that the funds for the $208,000 apartment came from a bank account in Cypress belonging to Russian Jewish billionaire Roman Abramovich, according to reports published Sunday as part of a collaboration between Israeli investigative outlet Shomrim, the Washington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
A company controlled by Abramovich transferred $245,000 to Yuditskaya-Berliner on the same day she purchased the apartment, documents show.
The discovery of the transaction is notable because it undermines denials by both Abramovich and Putin that the two are financially linked and is likely to bolster suspicions that Abramovich’s ascent to the top of Russia’s business world indebted him to the country’s ruler.
Abramovich is currently under United Kingdom and European Union sanctions targeting Russian oligarchs, enacted in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last February to target his wealth abroad and penalize his associates.
“The Israeli apartment story perfectly encapsulates how unwritten understandings and winks and nods lie at the heart of the Putin-era system,” Andrew Weiss, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who previously held positions at the White House and State Department, told the Washington Post. “Tycoons like Roman Abramovich don’t need to be strong-armed into taking care of small-time stuff at Putin’s behest. They know precisely what’s expected of them and all too happily play along.”
Records of the transaction are part of a trove obtained by the nonprofit group Distributed Denial of Secrets and shared with journalists at several outlets, including Shomrim’s Uri Blau, Greg Miller with the Washington Post, and Spencer Woodman of ICIJ.
Asked to respond to questions, a spokesperson for Putin referred reporters to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia and said the organization would have been responsible for “any charitable work in Israel.”
Through his own spokesperson, Abramovich said he donated the funds for the apartment but not at Putin’s request. The gift was made in response to “a request received from the Jewish community,” the spokesperson said. Abramovich amassed his wealth by buying state assets on the cheap after the fall of the Soviet Union and has used his fortune, estimated at as much as $13 billion, to become a major philanthropist. He says he has donated more than half a billion dollars to Jewish causes, including to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.
Rabbi Alexander Boroda, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, was quoted in the Jerusalem Post Sunday saying that it was he who had asked Abramovich for a donation for a new apartment after learning that Yuditskaya-Berliner was living in a fourth-floor public housing unit with no elevator and a leaky ceiling.
Putin was a student in Yuditskaya-Berliner’s German class at High School 281 in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg in the 1960s. She left for Israel in 1973 during a wave of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, which Yuditskaya-Berliner said was characterized at the time by “suspicion, terror and fear.” Putin went on to become a KGB officer in East Germany.
She shared the story of her reunion with Putin and credited him with buying her an apartment in an article published by Ynet in 2014 under the headline, “I was Vladmir Putin’s teacher.”
She said she had lost track of Putin for decades until seeing his face on television next to that of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the late 1990s. Putin was in charge of Russia’s internal security agency but soon succeeded Yeltsin as president.
Ahead of an announced state visit by Putin to Israel in 2005, Yuditskaya-Berliner decided she’d like a chance to see Putin in person and reached out to the Russian consulate. She was eventually invited to an event honoring World War II veterans at the King David Hotel and seated across the table from Putin. Afterward, the Russian president invited her to have tea with him in a private room.
The two reminisced about their shared history and before the meeting ended, Putin had his former teacher write down her address. Gifts started arriving, including a commemorative watch and an autographed copy of Putin’s book. Soon someone showed up and arranged to move her into a new apartment.
Yuditskaya-Berliner died in 2017 at 96. In her will, she instructed that her apartment be given to the Russian government.
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Like Trump, Hitler also wanted to build monuments to himself — so did Franco, Gaddafi and Alexander the Great
As the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler laid out plans for structures that would serve as monuments to himself. His grandest scheme was predicated on his absolute certainty Germany would conquer the world: rebuilding Berlin into a Wagnerian monument to Teutonic superiority and renaming the city World Capital Germania.
Just as Hitler sought to inscribe himself onto Berlin’s skyline, Donald Trump has been pursuing his own form of self-mythologizing — having his name added to the Kennedy Center façade; proposing an arch larger than the Arc de Triomphe; floating other grandiose ideas meant to ensure the world doesn’t forget him.
All around the globe, wherever you find megalomaniacs you will find monuments to their egos. Among them are Francisco Franco’s “Valley Of The Fallen,” a colossal bust of Ferdinand E. Marcos on a hillside in the Philippines, Joseph Stalin’s Stalingrad, streets in Syria named after the Assads, a Libyan square named after Muammar Gaddafi, North Korean streets and institutional buildings named after the Kim dynasty, and a Turin stadium that bore Mussolini’s name.
It is clear that Donald Trump envisions himself as a member of this rogue’s gallery.
Alexander the Great is among the best-known world figures to immortalize himself in this way, by founding a city in Egypt and naming it Alexandria. He was followed six centuries later by Constantine the Great, who founded a new Roman capital on the Bosporus Strait and named it Constantinople. A 100-foot column topped with a gold-encrusted statue of the emperor dominated the city’s forum.
European wars in the 18th and 19th centuries sprouted multitudes of monuments to victorious leaders — glorious and otherwise. After Kaiser Wilhelm I’s armies defeated Denmark, Austria and France, the Germans raised gargantuan memorials that blended modern triumph with mythic antiquity. Many are still standing: towering figures of Germania, medieval emperors and legendary warriors.
“Herman the German,” an 82-foot-tall tribal chieftain in a winged helmet, and mounted atop an 88-foot temple-like pedestal, looms over the north German countryside with his sword raised as if daring anyone to challenge him. The figure is actually Hermann — the Germanized name of Arminius, as the Romans called the Cheruscan leader who annihilated three legions in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 A.D.
At the Deutsches Eck in Koblenz, an enormous bronze statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I astride his horse rises above the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle, announcing Germany’s arrival as a great power. Forty miles upstream, on the east bank of the Rhine, stands the Niederwalddenkmal, a 125-foot colossus celebrating Germany’s victory over France and the founding of the Reich in 1871.
On the other side of Germany, perched on a mountain in Thuringia is the Kyffhäuserdenkmal — 266 feet of terraces, arches and towers built to celebrate Kaiser Wilhelm I and the new German Empire he presided over. At its base sits a massive stone figure of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, the 12th-century ruler who, according to legend, never died but sleeps inside the mountain, waiting to return when Germany needs him.
All of these monuments, bespeaking the glory of Germans and their ancestors, were repurposed by the Nazis to project a sense of historical inevitability — as if Hitler’s regime were the next chapter in a lineage stretching from Arminius to Barbarossa to Wilhelm I.
Long before Hitler became chancellor, Berlin already possessed grandiose monuments to Teutonic greatness: the Siegessäule (Victory Column) and the Brandenburg Gate, crowned by a bronze quadriga driven by Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory. Hitler and his architect, Albert Speer, envisioned even grander transformations. The centerpiece of World Capital Germania was to be a structure called the Volkshalle (People’s Hall), a domed monstrosity that would be able to hold 180,000 people. Also on the drawing board was a Triumphal Arch, so large that the Arc de Triomphe would have fit within its opening.
After France’s defeat in 1940, Hitler signed a decree asserting: “In the shortest possible time Berlin must be redeveloped and acquire the form that is its due through the greatness of our victory as the capital of a powerful new empire.”
Hitler added: “I expect that it will be completed by the year 1950.”
Obviously, Hitler didn’t last that long. Neither did work on “World Capital Germania.” And all across defeated Germany, the thousands of street signs bearing Hitler’s name came down and were replaced.
Donald Trump, perhaps glimpsing his own mortality, seems to be in a hurry to leave an indelible and grandiose imprint on the nation’s capital and beyond. Much of the country watched in disbelief as heavy equipment tore into the White House East Wing to clear ground for a super-sized new ballroom designed in the gilded idiom of America’s 47th president. His name newly affixed beside JFK’s on the façade of the Kennedy Center only amplified the sense that Trump is racing to secure the permanence he has long craved.
And he is far from finished.
His most extravagant project is one reminiscent of Hitler’s ideas for World Capital Germania — that “triumphal arch” that the White House has cast as a defining pillar of Trump’s legacy.
“The arch is going to be one of the most iconic landmarks not only in Washington, D.C., but throughout the world,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle declared.
But even as Trump pursues these monumental ambitions, he keeps running into the limits of democratic resistance. In one of the more brazen episodes, he told Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that he would release long-delayed federal funds for a critical rail tunnel between New Jersey and New York if Dulles International Airport and Penn Station were renamed for him. Schumer refused, and the gambit collapsed.
The only way Trump managed to get his name onto the Kennedy Center was by replacing multiple board members with loyalists and then having himself appointed board chair. His newly installed board approved adding his name to the building’s façade — a move that cannot legally alter the institution’s official name, which only Congress can change. This particular gambit backfired, prompting a long list of prominent performers to cancel appearances in protest.
Trump’s plans for a grand arch could also face some obstacles, because of laws designed to protect the capital’s commemorative landscape.
Who knows how much of Trump’s ambitions to remake Washington, D.C. in his own image will come to fruition. But even if a Trumpian analog of Germania never arises, with the way he has disrupted this country and the world, he’s already molded himself into something like a menacing monument in human form.
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Jeremy Carl is latest Trump nominee facing Senate pushback over history of antisemitic remarks
(JTA) — A key GOP senator is opposing the appointment of a Trump nominee over his past remarks about Jews, the Holocaust and Israel, potentially dooming Jeremy Carl’s bid for a top State Department post.
Carl, who is seeking the role of Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, drew scrutiny during his Thursday confirmation hearing for past writings and statements about Jews. Those included a 2024 interview on a podcast called “The Christian Ghetto” in which the first-term Trump official said, “Jews have often loved to play the victim rather than accept that they are participants in history.” On the same podcast, he opined that there was “an extent to which the Holocaust kind of dominates so much of modern Jewish thinking, even today.”
Following his appearance, Utah Sen. John Curtis, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, announced he would not be supporting Carl’s nomination.
“After reviewing his record and participating in today’s hearing, I do not believe that Jeremy Carl is the right person to represent our nation’s best interests in international forums, and I find his anti-Israel views and insensitive remarks about the Jewish people unbecoming of the position for which he has been nominated,” Curtis said in a statement.
Carl, however, is continuing to push for the post on X. Since the hearing, he has used the platform to defend his performance and repost allies, including some who responded directly to Senate accusations of his antisemitism. Vice President JD Vance this week also shared a post of Carl’s, though not one directly related to his confirmation bid.
Carl also denied accusations from Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy that he is a white nationalist, though he continued to insist that “white culture” is under threat.
A Claremont Institute fellow, Carl was born Jewish but has since converted to Christianity. He served in the first Trump administration’s Interior Department and has argued that “white Americans are increasingly second-class citizens in a country their ancestors founded.”
The White House also continued to defend its pick of Carl after the hearing in a statement to the New York Times late Friday.
And at least one of Carl’s defenders is Jewish: Michael Rubin, a conservative historian and longtime government advisor on Middle East affairs, called the campaign against his former Yale classmate a “lynch mob” in the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.
Carl, Rubin wrote, “is a man whose record of action and allies belie any serious consideration that he is antisemitic, anti-Zionist, or racist.”
Carl’s grilling came days after Republicans booted another Trump appointee from the administration’s religious freedom commission over her remarks about Israel and Zionism during an antisemitism hearing.
If Carl’s bid fails, he would not be the first Trump nominee with a history of questionable comments about Jews to fail to clear the Senate — though other Trump officials remain in their positions despite histories of antisemitic posts.
On the “Christian Ghetto” podcast interview, Carl also gave advice to Christians “looking to convert Jews” like him. He did, however, reject certain conspiracy theories about cabals of Jewish power. “I’m very critical of, overall, the political stance and the sociology of the Jewish community, particularly in this century. It’s been very destructive overall. But I don’t think that that’s a result of a conspiracy,” he said. His other podcast appearances include Tucker Carlson in 2024.
His new role — if confirmed — would put him in a critical position of influence over U.S. policy related to the United Nations, at a moment when both Israel and the U.S. are highly critical of that governing body over its perceived anti-Israel bias.
That concerned Curtis, who said that Carl’s past comments that the U.S. “spends too much time and energy on Israel, often to the detriment of our own national interest” would damage his credibility at the UN.
“Share with me specifically, what in the US interest has been harmed by sustained American support of Israel?” Curtis asked. Carl did not directly answer the question, instead pivoting to criticizing the UN for antisemitism.
“In the UN context, I wish the UN would stop being antisemitic all the time, and so therefore we could stop — there’s a million other problems, like the Rohingya,” he said. Upon Curtis’s repeated questioning, Carl added, “I think diplomatic support of Israel in the UN context is absolutely critical.”
Curtis also noted that Carl seemed to agree with a podcast host’s remarks that Jews were “claiming special victim status because of the Holocaust” and that “the state of Israel is not a victim but instead a perpetrator,” among other remarks.
“This was your response: ‘Right, right, yeah, no, I mean, I think that’s true,’” Curtis said, of Carl’s appearance on the “Christian Ghetto” podcast.
“I do a lot of podcasts,” Carl responded, adding that he was “sure” his quotes were “accurate.”
Democratic Senators, including some Jews, were more forceful in condemning Carl’s remarks about Jews.
Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada, quoting a recent American Jewish Committee study that one in three Jewish Americans have experienced antisemitism, produced placards of some of Carl’s past pronouncements on Jews, including that “the Jews love to see themselves as oppressed.”
“To my colleagues that may consider voting for Mr. Carl’s nomination, understand what the vote signals,” she said. “It tells Jewish Americans they simply don’t matter.”
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Spike Lee says his pro-Palestinian NBA All-Star Game fit wasn’t meant as a dig against Deni Avdija
(JTA) — The director Spike Lee says he was not targeting the first Israeli NBA All-Star when he wore a pro-Palestinian outfit to the All-Star Game on Sunday.
Lee’s outfit which featured a keffiyeh-patterned sweater and flag-themed bag strap. Some of his critics charged that he had chosen the outfit especially because Deni Avdija, the Israeli star of the Portland Trail Blazers, was taking the court.
Lee put that idea to rest in a post on Instagram late Tuesday, saying that he had not known Avdija was Israeli because the Trail Blazers are a West Coast team. (Lee is a New York Knicks superfan.)
“There has been some conjecture about what I wore to the games on Saturday and Sunday. The clothes I wore are symbols of my concern for the Palestinian children and civilians, and my utmost belief in human dignity for all humankind,” Lee wrote. “What I wore was not intended as a gesture of hostility to Jewish people or to support violence against anyone, nor was it intended as a comment on the significance of Deni being an an All-Star.”
About his lack of familiarity with Avdija, whose World Team fell short in the round-robin contest featuring 28 NBA stars, Lee added, “He can BALL. NOW I DO KNOW.”
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