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Floyd Mayweather showered cash on Jewish causes — and now he’s suing their ‘Robin Hood’ alleging $175 million got diverted
They made for an odd photo: The diminutive boxing legend with a platinum grin and diamond chain, and the Orthodox macher who sported a black velvet yarmulke.
But when Floyd Mayweather, Jr., appeared in public in recent years — at LA Lakers games, promotional appearances and repeated trips to Israel — he was rarely without his jeweler, friend and business adviser, Jona Rechnitz.
For a few Jewish groups, the partnership was a gold mine.
With Rechnitz in his inner circle, Mayweather donated more than $1 million to Israeli and Jewish institutions that included United Hatzalah, Magen David Adom and Aish. And when Rechnitz and Mayweather traveled to Israel after Oct. 7, they were welcomed as heroes.
Now the relationship has come to a screeching halt with a lawsuit Mayweather filed last week in a Manhattan court, alleging Rechnitz defrauded him of $175 million in jewelry consignment funds, diverted settlement proceeds and unauthorized loans against his properties.
That their relationship collapsed in a big-money dispute did not shock anyone familiar with their histories. Mayweather had a long record of domestic violence incidents, with three separate convictions over the course of a decade, and more recently had allegedly skipped out on money owed. Rechnitz pleaded guilty in 2016 in a high-profile bribery case in New York City, getting a reduced sentence in exchange for cooperation with prosecutors. (Mayweather claims in his suit that Rechnitz, serving as his financial manager, did not initially disclose his criminal past.)
The two had also been linked to an alleged cryptocurrency pump-and-dump scheme in a case that was dismissed in 2022, and both are named as defendants in separate lawsuits related to an alleged ticket selling scam. (Rechnitz has denied the claims.)
Yet while the going was good, Jewish organizations and causes lined up to take part in their largesse. Now most have gone silent. But those willing to speak out say they have no regrets about the relationship.
“I don’t give a s— if he’s a Robin Hood and he’s stealing from the rich to help the poor — good, let him keep doing it.”
Adina SashOrthodox women’s activist, on Jona Rechnitz
Adina Sash, an Orthodox women’s activist, shared on Instagram a screenshot of an April 2025 message from Mayweather, asking her to contact Rechnitz so they could help her cause. Sash advocates for agunahs, women whose husbands refuse to grant a Jewish divorce, often generating headlines for stunt-driven pressure campaigns against the men.
Sash called Rechnitz a “massive” behind-the-scenes supporter of agunahs, estimating he had donated $250,000 to cover the women’s legal fees.
“I don’t give a s— if he’s a Robin Hood and he’s stealing from the rich to help the poor,” Sash said in an interview. “Good, let him keep doing it.”
Rechnitz, who denied Mayweather’s claims through an attorney, said he was unavailable for a phone interview Wednesday. But in a text message, he said he had brought Mayweather to organizations “involved in holy work.”
“Nobody stood by our side and I asked him to do so for me,” Rechnitz added, “and I also arranged for any out of pocket costs incurred for his trips to Israel such as airfare and hotels.”
Lavish gifts
In the first few days after Oct. 7, Mayweather quickly emerged as a rare ally for the Jewish state. He made public statements defending Israel on social media to his more than 25 million Instagram followers. He sent his private jet, loaded with emergency supplies, to the country less than a week after the attack. And he visited the country at least four times over the next two years, each time accompanied by Rechnitz.
Rechnitz, a real estate scion, had begun working his way into Mayweather’s inner circle after moving to his hometown of Los Angeles in 2017. Rechnitz was coming off a stint in New York that concluded with his sentencing to five months in jail for a bribery scheme involving the city’s then-deputy mayor for public safety and the leader of the New York City correction officers’ union. (The sentence was overturned on appeal in 2023.)
Mayweather was a controversial figure in his own right. In addition to his domestic violence record, he has been ordered by a judge to pay child support, and he is currently being sued based on allegations that he failed to pay rent and the bill for his private jet.
Rechnitz said he was forewarned. “Many people told me not to deal with him and criticized Jewish organizations for honoring him,” Rechnitz said in a text message to the Forward. “People make mistakes and I do not think that anyone can pass judgment without being in the same situation. Like many people, Floyd has his faults.”
The relationship between the two seemed to serve them both: Mayweather was flattered by Jewish leaders willing to look past their bad qualities, and bringing the boxer around helped rehabilitate Rechnitz in the Jewish world. Mayweather’s lawsuit described Rechnitz as his “de-facto” investment manager, real estate advisor, and banking liaison; it did not say how much Rechnitz was paid for those services but said it was a “constructive fiduciary relationship.”
They also made money together, according to one filing against them related to the cryptocurrency EthereumMax. Mayweather promoted the token at a boxing match and a Miami bitcoin conference in 2021. A class action lawsuit against the company alleged that Rechnitz had made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling his tokens after a raft of promotions from celebrities like Mayweather inflated their value. The filing claimed Mayweather was paid $2.5 million to be a “marquee promoter” of the coin. A judge later dismissed the case.
Despite the checkered past of both the boxer and his confidant, Jewish groups received them enthusiastically. United Hatzalah festooned its headquarters with Mayweather banners upon his first post-Oct. 7 visit to Jerusalem, with its president, Eli Beer, donning a Mayweather-branded cap during the visit. Magen David Adom’s American fundraising affiliate presented the boxer with a rhinestone-studded emergency vest.
Aish, an international Orthodox outreach group, bestowed Mayweather with a “Champion For Israel” award, with Mayweather and Aish CEO Rabbi Steven Burg posing for a photograph overlooking the Western Wall.
Mayweather also spoke to students and faculty at Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School, an Orthodox institution in New Jersey, last year, accompanied by Beer and Rechnitz and introduced by head of school Rabbi Eliezer Rubin, who said he was “exhilarated” to have Mayweather there.
Jewish groups characterized Mayweather’s support for the Jewish people as authentic and purely motivated. But it was also clear that it was driven by Rechnitz’s ties to the community. At a 2025 gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Jona’s father, Bobby — himself an eminence grise of the pro-Israel lobby — proudly told those gathered at the event that his son was the boxer’s entree into Israel and Jewish affairs. When Mayweather took the mic, he said he saw Bobby as a “father-like figure” and Jona as a brother.
Responding to questions about the lawsuit, United Hatzalah spokesperson Simmy Allen said in a statement Wednesday that the organization would not comment on legal matters between private parties.
“Mr. Mayweather visited United Hatzalah’s headquarters in Jerusalem twice and saw firsthand how United Hatzalah is on the frontlines of emergency medical services in Israel and we are grateful for his support,” Allen wrote. He did not mention Rechnitz.
In an email, Rubin, Kushner’s head of school, said he did not regret welcoming Floyd and that Rechnitz did not facilitate the visit.
“When even influential Jews are remain silent about the malicious and vile attacks against the Jewish people, we need to commend and support people outside of our faith who are standing with us,” Rubin wrote.
He added that the school had no relationship with Rechnitz.
Representatives from Aish and the Republican Jewish Coalition did not respond to questions.
The new allegations
Mayweather’s lawsuit alleges that Rechnitz exploited the boxer’s trust — and his property — to enrich himself.
The bulk of the $175 million claim relates to jewelry belonging to Mayweather that Rechnitz allegedly pawned to a Miami jeweler for $13 million. Mayweather says its real value was closer to $100 million, and that Rechnitz did not have permission to borrow against the assets.
Mayweather also claimed that Rechnitz drew loans totaling tens of millions of dollars on various properties owned by Mayweather entities without his consent, and diverted at least $15 million in funds intended for Mayweather into accounts controlled by co-defendants.
Morris Missry, an attorney for Rechnitz and co-defendants Ayal Frist and Alexander Seligson, said Wednesday in a statement that Mayweather’s claims were “utterly baseless.”
“Mr. Mayweather’s gambling issues, prolific spending habits, monies owed to third party creditors and IRS tax liens and levys, as well as other unseemly behavior will be exposed and we believe that Mr. Mayweather will be the one paying significant damages to our clients,” Missry wrote.
Mayweather’s lawsuit is not the first lodged against Rechnitz since his 2016 plea agreement. In 2023 a judge granted $17.7 million plus interest to a jeweler who said Rechnitz’s checks to him had bounced. Separate lawsuits filed by a former neighbor of Rechnitz’s, Joe Englanoff, alleged that Rechnitz convinced Englanoff to invest $1.4 million in tickets to a Mayweather fight, which Rechnitz promised he could resell at several times the value.
Englanoff, who was renting Rechnitz the house next door, moved to evict him and separately sued Mayweather and Rechnitz for $15 million, citing breach of contract. Rechnitz countersued, saying the property was in worse condition than what Englanoff advertised. Rechnitz said in a text that Englanoff “is a serial litigant whose greed has blinded his ways.” Litigation is ongoing.
Englanoff did not respond to an inquiry.
Some on social media called Mayweather’s Instagram post attacking Rechnitz into question for antisemitism, noting that Mayweather had compared him to vermin and chosen a picture of Rechnitz wearing a yarmulke.
One who appeared to side with Mayweather was Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School teacher Rabbi David Schlusselberg, who said on X that Mayweather had spoken admirably to his students when he visited last year.
“When a Jewish person in his inner circle backstabs him and is being sued for $175 million, it isn’t antisemitic for Floyd Mayweather to post about this,” Schlusselberg wrote on X. “I feel terrible for Floyd Mayweather who has only showed love and support for the Jewish people.”
But Schlusselberg later deleted the post. Though he did not want to say why, he told the Forward he did so after speaking to Rechnitz on the phone.
Sash, the agunah activist, said any sentiment supporting Mayweather for pro-Israel advocacy was naive.
“The only reason he ever stood with Israel is because that’s how Jona puppeteered him,” Sash said. “Floyd is a puppet. Jona was the puppet master.
“He told me explicitly that his goal was to position Floyd as a representation of someone who supports Israel,” she added. “He knew that it would be monetarily beneficial for Mayweather’s portfolio to align himself that way.”
Rechnitz said he told Sash he was behind Mayweather’s charitable giving to Jewish groups and that his goal was to position Floyd as a supporter of Israel, but denied mentioning any underlying financial motive.
And he added that he was surprised Sash disclosed his involvement in her cause, which he said was supposed to remain confidential. He said he helped agunahs independent of Mayweather, with the assistance of family and friends.
Despite Rechnitz’s overt machinations with regard to his friend and client, Sash saw Rechnitz’s support for agunot as genuine. In one instance, she said, he had offered an agunah’s husband $500,000 to grant a Jewish divorce. (The man did not accept, Sash said.)
What financial benefits Rechnitz believed would accrue to Mayweather from his pro-Israel support was unclear, but Sash — who said she never took money from Rechnitz or Mayweather — speculated it had to do with real estate, a shared area of interest for the two men.
As to the possibility that Rechnitz paid for his support with someone else’s money, Sash said it didn’t matter.
“Even if it were to be proven that that exact money was taken from someone else, good, because the system is so rigged against agunahs,” she said. “If there is someone else willing to do illegal activity to help agunahs, amazing — we need every ounce of help we can get.”
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Toronto police say young people are being recruited online to shoot at synagogues
(JTA) — Police in Toronto announced on Tuesday that they believe young adults are being hired and paid online to shoot at local synagogues.
The announcement follows a string of arrests in connection with shootings at a range of targets in the Canadian city, including multiple synagogues.
“What we know is bad actors are using criminal elements in our city to carry out these dangerous incidents,” Toronto Police Service Chief Myron Demkiw said at a press conference. “It is clear that some of the people hiring these criminals want to create a sense of fear in our communities, including the Jewish community.”
Demkiw said the suspects were being recruited through online networks and offered payments if they filmed themselves engaging in the shootings.
“Who’s paying for this?” he asked. “This is what we are trying to determine.”
The methodology and tactics being used in Toronto appear to mirror those laid out in a U.S. criminal complaint against Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, an Iraqi man charged last month in New York with orchestrating attacks on Jewish targets in multiple countries on behalf of Iran since the start of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran in late February. (He railed against the United States while pleading not guilty earlier this month.)
Previously, police in Australia, too, said they believed paid criminals, possibly hired on behalf of Iran, were behind a string of non-lethal incidents targeting Jewish communities there.
No one has been injured during any of the shootings on Jewish targets in Toronto, which in addition to synagogues have included schools and at least one restaurant.
Last week, a Canadian police officer was killed while executing a search warrant connected to a March shooting at the U.S. Consulate in Toronto. The criminal complaint against al-Saadi attributed that shooting to his network.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Feds investigating antisemitism allegations at American Psychological Association
(JTA) — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is opening an antisemitism investigation into the American Psychological Association, the largest professional organization for mental health professionals, the agency announced Wednesday.
The investigation stems from several complaints by Jewish and Israeli psychologists alleging that the association has promoted or failed to discipline anti-Israel activism among some of its affinity groups. The complaints also allege that the APA has encouraged “decolonizing therapy” methods that attack Zionism.
These allegations are part of a sweeping complaint filed in August by the legal group Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which has frequently filed similar antisemitism complaints against educational institutions that it says are in violation of federal anti-discrimination rules. This is the center’s first complaint against a healthcare organization to result in a federal investigation.
“We want to see the APA brought into compliance with federal civil rights laws,” Rebecca Harris, litigation staff attorney at the Brandeis Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We want the APA to stop promoting discriminatory and harmful psychology practices.”
In its August letter to HHS, the Brandeis Center accuses the APA of being “one of the worst purveyors of anti-Semitism and extremist ideology in healthcare.” It adds, “HHS should not fund groups that use taxpayer dollars to engage in anti-Semitic and discriminatory behavior.”
A representative for the APA did not immediately return a request for comment. In response to recent Congressional inquiries, from both Republicans and Democrats, into similar allegations of antisemitism at the organization, the APA has stated, “Some of our Jewish members and community organizations have voiced concerns about antisemitism within the broader psychology field and within APA’s divisions. We have taken and continue to take those concerns seriously.”
Jewish mental health professionals have been raising concerns about antisemitism and growing anti-Israel sentiment within the profession since Oct. 7, 2023, including in a letter signed by more than 3,500 mental health professionals last year. That letter, referenced in the Brandeis Center complaint, criticizes the APA for failing to discipline a former division president, Lara Sheehi, for various incendiary comments about Zionism.
In another prominent incident, the psychiatrist and bestselling author Bessel van der Kolk faced discipline and apologized for comments that Jewish attendees at a seminar of his deemed antisemitic. In June 2025, Democratic New York Rep. Ritchie Torres urged the APA to address antisemitism in its ranks, prompting the organization to commit to new listening sessions and “strengthening discourse standards.”
Under the Trump administration, HHS has also mounted several antisemitism investigations at medical schools, pulling millions of dollars in federal funding for medical research over the issue.
The APA’s alleged encouragement of “decolonizing therapy,” Harris said, is harmful to Jews and Israelis. “It’s essentially a pathologizing of Zionism and Jewish identity,” she said. (A past president of the organization has advocated for decolonial psychology, and the organization has offered webinars and other training modules based around decolonizing trauma healing.)
The center also alleges that the APA has put up roadblocks to allowing an official Jewish affinity group to form, while excusing inflammatory language about Zionism from an Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern and North African affinity group.
The news of the APA’s federal antisemitism investigation came as the Trump administration announced it would be moving the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which handles antisemitism complaints, to the Department of Justice.
The move, being done as part of a larger effort to dismantle the education department, drew praise from Brandeis Center chair Kenneth Marcus, himself a former OCR official under the first Trump administration. It also drew criticism from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and other Jewish groups that said the move to the justice department would make it harder for students alleging discrimination to file complaints.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In Britain, a Jewish Culture Month aims to move the conversation beyond Oct. 7
(JTA) — In the almost three years since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel, Great Britain has seen “a relentless focus on everything to do with the Jewish community in the public domain, and it’s about antisemitism or Israel,” said Adam Ma’anit, the communications manager for the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
Over the past four weeks, a flurry of performances, lectures and art exhibits has been an opportunity to move past that.
The Board of Deputies, which represents a community of diverse and often competing views under its umbrella, created Jewish Culture Month, a first-of-its-kind series held under the banner of “Less Oy, More Joy.” The month was designed to bolster Jewish communal confidence and to introduce wider audiences to aspects of Jewish life that rarely make headlines.
The month, which wrapped up Tuesday, sought to make clear that British Jewish identity is, and always has been, about far more than conflict. “We’re not defined as a community by pain,” Ma’anit told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’ve got great architects, writers, and musicians as well.”
Those artists were featured in more than 150 events over four weeks across the country at major museums and galleries , including London’s British Museum, Oxford’s Bodlein Library, Bath’s Little Theatre Cinema, Nottinghamshire’s National Holocaust Museum and local synagogues and private homes nationwide.
Among them was The Klezmer Village Band, which introduced Jewish culture to primary schools in Plymouth. “We wanted to bring Jewish culture back into the community,” Plymouth Jewish Community Director Louise Clements said. “This is the first time in many years that something like this has happened here.”
One of the band’s musicians, Ilana Cravitz, also noted after the event that “music is a wordless language. People respond from inside — they stop thinking, they feel. And we really saw that today.”
Notables featured throughout the celebrations included British broadcaster and television personality Vanessa Feltz, who spoke at the opening at London’s Freud Museum; comedian Bennett Arron, who performed stand-up routines in Hampstead, London; and acclaimed British artist and vocal Israel critic Anish Kapoor, whose exhibit opening on Tuesday closed out the month.
“Part of Jewish Culture Month is about us celebrating our own culture and being proud, British Jews, and asserting ourselves in an environment where it has been the most challenging to be that very British Jew,” said Ma’anit.
The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust noted another aspect of the festival soon after it kicked off on May 16. “At a time when division and prejudice continue to affect communities across the country, initiatives like Jewish Culture Month can help build understanding and strengthen social cohesion,” it posted social media.
However, some thought it difficult to focus on social cohesion when discussing contemporary British Jewish identity without discussing how that identity dovetails with British Jews’ relationship with Israel.
It’s something that Jewish Renaissance, the online magazine of Jewish culture, raised ahead of the opening. Freelance writer and former Jewish Quarterly editor Matthew Reisz wrote that while there was definitely diversity in the program, “We seem unlikely to hear much about the deep divisions within the community, not least in relation to Israel/Palestine, or the crucial, though often tense dialogue with other minority communities on both shared and contentious issues.”
Ma’anit insisted that the choice was a deliberate one. “It’s not a rejection of Zionism or distancing ourselves from Israel,” he said. “Quite the opposite. The board’s leadership remains openly supportive of Israel and many of the figures involved in the project have deep personal and family ties to the country.”
Israeli-born Ma’anit is one of those figures. He is the cousin of the Idan family of Nachal Oz, a kibbutz close by the border with Gaza. Eighteen-year-old Maayan Idan was shot and killed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 while trying to help her father, Tsachi, hold their safe room door closed. The entire event was livestreamed by the terrorists. Tsachi was abducted into Gaza, where it was believed he was still alive as the war on Gaza raged. It was discovered only later that he had been murdered, with his body finally returned in the hostage deal in February 2025.
Ma’anit, who spent those years lobbying for the hostages’ return, appearing on news programs and organizing hostage vigils in his hometown of Brighton, has been forced to meld the personal with the professional when it comes to the post-Oct. 7 era.
It’s why, he said, Jewish Culture Month is about creating space for aspects of Jewish identity that have been overshadowed post Oct. 7. “The argument is not that Israel is unimportant,” he said, “it’s that Jewish life cannot be reduced to Israel alone.”
Yet even without a focus on Israel and Zionism, the month did not pass without the conflict in the Middle East affecting the program. In May, a culture month lecture titled “Ancient Israel and Judah” at the British Museum had to be postponed, the museum said, because of “security concerns” over potential “disruptions” by protesters who had obtained tickets. The rescheduled event, held June 11, was the best-attended of the entire series, with around 4,000 people joining in person and online.
Ma’anit called the incident “overblown. It was just procedural,” he said. “People fill in the blanks and then it gets out of control.”
However, the speed with which the controversy escalated and elicited angry reactions from many in the community only served to highlight how questions about Jewish visibility and any event with “Israel” in the name — even a reference to thousands of years ago — have become highly charged in the last three years.
“It just shows how on edge the community is,” Ma’anit said.
That has intensified the need for something like Jewish Culture Month in the eyes of many British Jews. Steph Thwaites, head of a group dedicated to helping Jewish publishing professionals navigate an increasingly hostile publishing industry, said after a Jewish Culture Month event on the topic that the professionals felt “a sense of community and a source of comfort,” as well as a space to “combat anti-Jewish racism in publishing and to support Jewish creatives.”
Ultimately, as UK Communities Secretary Steve Reed put it in his speech at the launch of the festivities, Jewish Culture Month “is a time to celebrate Britain’s Jewish community and its contribution to our shared story. It’s a time for coming together. It’s a time for friendship. Jewish experience cannot just be about defending against fear; it also has to be an expression of hope and joy and freedom.”
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