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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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Poland returns 91 Jewish objects to Greece, decades after they were stolen by the Nazis
(JTA) — A trove of sacred Jewish objects from Greece that was stolen by the Nazis and displaced for decades in Poland is finally heading back home.
Poland returned 91 religious and ceremonial artifacts to the Greek government at a ceremony in Warsaw on Wednesday. Among them were Torah scrolls, a Torah mantle and silver finials that adorned a scroll’s wooden rollers — fragments of a rich Greek Jewish heritage that was nearly wiped out.
This marks the first time Poland has repatriated cultural property held under its care that was illegally taken from another country.
The Nazis stole the objects from synagogues in Thessaloniki, a port city once known as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans.” Jews made up half of Thessaloniki’s residents in 1919. Some 59,000 Greek Jews, over 83% of the country’s Jewish population, were killed in the Holocaust.
These items were seized by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a Nazi agency dedicated to looting Jewish valuables, as it plundered homes, synagogues, cemeteries and cultural institutions across Greece in 1941. The objects were transferred to Nazi depots in southwestern Poland and rediscovered at a castle in Bożków after the war. In 1951, the Polish Ministry of Culture moved them to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, where they remained until now.
This return follows years of advocacy and provenance research. The Greek government formally requested the collection’s restitution in 2024, and the World Jewish Restitution Organization coordinated with Greek and Polish authorities to facilitate it. Now, the objects are headed to the Jewish Museum of Greece in Athens.
About 5,000 Jews live in Greece today.
Poland is the only member of the European Union with no comprehensive legislation to address the restitution of property seized by the Nazis and later nationalized by the communist regime. Since the country became a democracy in 1989, several bills have been proposed to return private property to Holocaust survivors and their descendants, but none became law.
In 2021, Poland passed a law that prevented people who sought to claim property from challenging administrative decisions more than 30 years old. This time limit made it virtually impossible for former owners, including Holocaust survivors and their descendants, to recover properties that were appropriated during the communist era.
In a statement, WRJO president Gideon Taylor and COO Mark Weitzman said the return of the Greek Jewish collection represented a milestone in international cooperation for Holocaust-era restitution.
“While Poland has broader restitution issues to address, we hope this historic act marks the beginning of a consistent, systematic approach to historical justice,” they said.
The post Poland returns 91 Jewish objects to Greece, decades after they were stolen by the Nazis appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel shoots down Iranian fighter jet; Iranian drone targets Turkey as war enters 5th day
(JTA) — Two unprecedented developments took place in the U.S.-Israel war against Iran on Wednesday, as fighting entered its fifth day.
First, Israel said its forces had shot down an Iranian plane over Iranian territory, in the first-ever direct combat between the two nations.
Second, Turkey says an Iranian drone headed toward its airspace was shot down by NATO’s missile defense system, marking the first apparent attack on a NATO country other than the United States.
In an apparent effort to ignite Arab and Muslim countries against Israel, Iran has struck even countries that historically have shared elements of its opposition to Israel, including in Qatar, which has housed Hamas leaders, and Turkey, which cut off trade with Israel as it sided with the Palestinians in the war in Gaza. It has also struck Oman, which was brokering negotiations between Iran and the United States until hours before the war began.
“They were actually acting in a way that would have benefited Iran. Despite this, Iran’s bombing of Oman as a mediator, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan — all of these places without making any distinction — is, in my view, an incredibly wrong strategy,” the Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, said on Tuesday.
The developments come as Israelis continue to experience intermittent sirens warning them of incoming missiles — including, on Wednesday, at the same time from Iran and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah. Two people were injured in a strike in central Israel on Wednesday.
Iran has said it plans to name a successor imminently to its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whom Israel assassinated on Saturday. His son is reportedly a top contender, a signal that that hard-line forces that survive in the government are prevailing. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, indicated that airstrikes had killed some of the leaders the United States thought could take over and also pooh-poohed support inside Iran for Reza Pahlavi, the son of the king deposed in the 1979 Islamic Revolution who has sought to return. Many Iranian Jews who fled at the time of the revolution have backed Pahlavi.
Both Israeli and U.S. officials say the war is advancing faster than they expected though that they cannot put a timeline on its completion. But Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth dismissed reports that Iran might be parceling out its missiles judiciously in an effort to ride out the U.S.-Israeli barrage and emerge with an arsenal intact.
“Iran cannot outlast us,” Hegseth during a press briefing on Wednesday morning in Washington, D.C.
The post Israel shoots down Iranian fighter jet; Iranian drone targets Turkey as war enters 5th day appeared first on The Forward.
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Tensions in Israel loom large in these Oscar-nominated shorts
Despite a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, two Oscar-nominated short films show that the deep division that the war sowed in Israeli society will take a long time to mend.
Butcher’s Stain, a nominee for Best Live Action Short Film, is the debut of Israeli director Meyer Levinson-Blount, who based it on an experience he had working at a supermarket. Samir, a Palestinian employee at an Israeli grocery store, is accused of tearing down hostage flyers in the breakroom. A single dad who can’t afford to lose his job, he sets out to find the real culprit, only to find himself betrayed by his Israeli friends.
The 36-minute documentary Children No More: “Were and Are Gone,” directed by Israeli filmmaker Hilla Medalia, follows a group of Israeli activists who silently protest the war by going to public spaces and holding photos of Palestinian children killed by the Israel Defense Forces. At the beach and on the street, they are yelled at and physically threatened by passersby who call their acknowledgement of Palestinian death an endorsement of Hamas.
Neither movie particularly stands out in its style or structure as something revolutionary. However they both capture how difficult — and sometimes impossible — it has been to have civil discourse since Oct. 7. People are quick to make assumptions about others’ motivations for sympathizing with either or both sides. Friendships fall apart. Blanket statements alienate people from one another.
The shorts also demonstrate how emotionally charged images have been during the conflict. Both the Israeli hostage posters and the Palestinian flyers showcase the victims’ humanity, hoping viewers will empathize with the subjects regardless of their politics.
But protesters across the world have called the hostage posters Zionist propaganda and tearing them down has been likened by some to a form of anti-colonial resistance. In Children No More, some Israelis respond to the faces of dead Palestinians with the middle finger. In Butcher’s Stain, Samir is accused of supporting terrorism because he posted about children dying in Gaza on social media. To recognize the humanity of someone you may not agree with has become a politically incorrect act.
Reactions to the shorts have further demonstrated the polarizing climate they capture. Israeli culture minister Miki Zohar lambasted both films as being “against Israel,” saying they “amplify our enemies’ narratives.” When I watched Butcher’s Stain at the IFC Theater in New York, the woman two seats down from me became visibly agitated, her knee bouncing up and down as she scoffed disapprovingly before loudly whispering to her partner that the “fucking film” was “antisemitic” for portraying the Israeli employees as bigoted.
There were similar reactions when the Israeli-Palestinian documentary No Other Land won best documentary last year. The film about Israeli forces destroying the Palestinian village of Masafer Yatta was accused of being anti-Israel propaganda. Conservative commentator John Podheretz congratulated “Hamas for its Oscar win” on social media.
Clearly, the Academy was not swayed by last year’s critics to back away from films about Palestinian suffering. In fact, Butcher’s Stain’s selection feels pointed, as it’s the only political drama among the five live action short competitors this year (compared to last year’s lineup that included films about poaching, immigration, child labor, and the Bosnian War). Another Oscar nominee is The Voice of Hind Rajab, a dramatization of Palestinian emergency workers efforts to save the titular five-year old, up for best international feature.
Regardless of whether or not the shorts take home trophies on March 15, they leave audiences with pressing questions about the future now that there is a ceasefire: Can people with different views — in Israel and elsewhere — learn to talk to each other again? Will images of human suffering always be seen as political propaganda? And will Israeli society ever be able to move on?
The post Tensions in Israel loom large in these Oscar-nominated shorts appeared first on The Forward.