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Moldovan oligarch, wanted at home in billion-dollar scandal, backs Russian interests from a haven in Israel
CHISINAU, Moldova (JTA) — Perched on a sofa somewhere in Israel, fugitive Moldovan-Jewish businessman-turned-politician Ilan Shor is seen in a video from last month speaking to his supporters back home. His message is, by his standards, relatively mild.
“Maia, you really are Hitler,” he says, addressing Moldova’s pro-European president, Maia Sandu. “Whether you like it or not, I will make sure my people live well.”
With backing from Russia, Ilan Shor has become a leading figure in Moscow’s campaign to destabilize Moldova, a tiny impoverished country wedged between Ukraine and Romania. Facing charges — and since last week, a conviction in absentia — that he stole $1 billion dollars from the Moldovan banking system in 2014, he has been sheltering in Israel.
From there, the opposition leader who is still a member of Moldova’s parliament has been denouncing his charges as politically motivated, organizing regular protests in his native country and spreading disinformation that critics say is designed to undermine Moldova’s efforts to align itself closer with the European Union and away from Russia. Last June, Moldova — which has repeatedly condemned the Russian war in Ukraine — was granted candidate status to the European Union, together with Ukraine. (A previous government collapsed in February under the weight of economic and political stress amplified by Russia’s invasion.)
Whether a fugitive from justice or a target of political retaliation, the presence of the pro-Russian oligarch has become frequently awkward for Israel, which has in recent years become more willing to extradite its citizens facing charges abroad. Shor is an Israeli citizen, and yet he has been sanctioned by the United States in October and the United Kingdom in December. The Israeli foreign ministry declined to comment on any issues related to Shor’s activities, with officials saying that it was a legal issue.
“We do not want the territory of other countries to be used as a launching pad for hybrid attacks against us and for attempts to bring violence here,” said one senior official in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital, when asked how they felt about Shor’s presence in Israel.
Last week, a court in Chisinau sentenced Shor to 15 years in prison for his involvement in the heist and ordered the confiscation of $290 million of his assets. Shor claims that the verdict was “revenge for the protest movement” and promised that it would be “annulled the day after the change in regime.”
Before the recent sentencing, Nicu Popescu, Moldova’s foreign minister, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from his office in downtown Chisinau that Moldova had established information about “clear coordination between Shor and Russia in their joint attempts to destabilize Moldova.”
“The reality is that Shor is trying to bring violence onto the streets,” Popescu added. “He is operating from Israeli territory and that is problematic. This situation related to Shor is a factor that is problematic for our country, its stability, and for the stability of the region. The scale of the attempts to destabilize Moldova through violent means have risen recently and that is something that matters a lot.”
Ahead of a protest in downtown Chisinau last month, where 54 people were arrested, Moldova police said that they had detained seven people who had been promised up to $10,000 each to stir violence during the protests. Media here reported that the Shor Party, which Shor created in 2015, has been bribing people to attend protests and busing them in from towns across Moldova.
JTA requested an interview with a representative of Shor’s political party but received no response.
Ilan Shor was born in Israel to Moldovan Jewish parents who moved to Israel in the late 1970s, then moved back to Chisinau in 1990. He inherited from his father a successful chain of Moldovan duty-free stores and built a network of businesses across the country. He entered politics in 2015, in a move widely seen as an effort to try and protect himself from the legal fall-out of the banking scandal and fled to Israel in 2019.
Intelligence assessments in both Moldova and the United States have determined that Russia had been seeking to use such protests as a platform to topple Moldova’s government. Shor regularly addresses the protests on videos from his base in Israel.
Ukrainian and Western officials say Shor has links with the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, which has been channeling money into Moldova as part of its attempts to support pro-Russian voices, The Washington Post reported. Shor, who is married to a Russian pop star, is allegedly known to the FSB as “the Young One” (he is 36).
Demonstrators in Chisinau protest the Moldovan government, Nov 13, 2022. Shor has been involved in organizing ongoing protests. (Vudi Xhymshiti/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“Moldova is facing hybrid threats,” Popescu said. “We take our security very seriously and our institutions are doing everything they can to keep peace and calm, but it is totally unacceptable that people like Shor try to bring violence onto the streets of Moldova.”
Moldova has submitted an extradition request to Israeli authorities for Ilan Shor’s role in the banking scandal but has received no response, according to senior officials at the Moldovan foreign ministry. Some officials in Chisinau say that Israel may have been waiting for the completion of Shor’s legal appeal process, and that there may now be movement following his sentencing in absentia. Shor is also currently under investigation as a suspect in a range of other cases related to his activities during and since the fraud scandal.
“He is operating from Israeli territory and that is problematic,” Popescu said. “Our institutions are and will be taking the security of our citizens very seriously and knowing how careful Israel is about its own security, I am sure that Israel can have a lot of sympathy.”
“Shor is the most important political ally of Russia in Moldova,” said Valeriu Pasha, the director of the Moldovan thinktank Watchdog.MD. “The Shor Party works as a classic organized crime group, and it looks like he is ready to be part of some of the tough scenarios of Russian influence in Moldova.”
“He has received almost total control of Russian-affiliated media which is broadcasting in Moldova,” added Pasha. Shor owns a number of channels, while outlets like Russia’s Perviy Kanal, or Channel One, are rebroadcast in Moldova, where Romanian is the state language and Russian is spoken by Russians, Ukrainians and other ethnic minorities. Pasha said that Shor was playing a “critical role” in spreading pro-Russian narratives about the war in Ukraine and the Moldovan government.
Officials in Chisinau said that they were concerned that Shor could flee to Russia if his seven-and-half year sentence is upheld by Moldova’s Appellate Court. “We would want to see him extradited now,” said Veronica Dragalin, Moldova’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, “because we do not want that to happen.”
Dragalin dismisses allegations by Shor and his allies that the case against him is politically motivated.
“This tactic of trying to claim that you are being politically persecuted is something that happens quite often in these situations in Moldova,” said Dragalin. Bringing Shor to justice in Moldova “would have a significant ripple-down effect in terms of deterring crime,” by underlining that there are consequences for the “rich and powerful” when they break the law, she said.
Some among Moldova’s approximately 15,000 Jews — who have spent the past year dealing with an influx of Jewish refugees from Ukraine — worry that increasing anger towards Shor, who has a number of close Jewish associates in the country, might blow back onto the community.
“Speaking about the consequences of everything that is going on,” said Aliona Grossu, the director of the Jewish Community of Moldova, “when it is linked to some political figures, of course there is a spill-over effect on the community.”
This, she worried, had caused an uptick in antisemitism by causing the proliferation of stereotypes that most Jews in Moldova were either “illegally wealthy” or were “connected” to Shor.
Shor is not particularly close to the Jewish community in Moldova. Grossu emphasized that despite her having worked for the community for 13 years, she had never met him, and that he had never had any involvement with the community — beyond paying his membership dues.
There are pockets of support for Shor among the local Jewish population, which is overwhelmingly Russian-speaking. On a recent day in Orhei, a sleepy town in central Moldova that Shor was once mayor of and remains its member in parliament, the leader of the tiny local Jewish community welcomed a set of Jewish visitors from Chisinau. Iziaslav Mundrean, standing outside the town’s Jewish museum, said that Shor was “a good man.”
Shor, he added, had paid for the construction of a new driveway for the collapsing Jewish cemetery and a new gate to be installed. He had also funded windows for an old synagogue that has since been transformed into the Jewish museum for the town.
Two other Jewish men from Chisinau standing nearby raised their eyebrows at Mundrean’s comments and launched into a debate about whether there was anything to respect about Shor.
Shor simply “had not been given the opportunity,” Mundrean continued, adding that the widespread dislike towards him across Moldova was because “people by-and-large do not like rich Jews.”
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As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich
In Munich on Sept. 30, 1938, the leaders of Britain and France signed an agreement with Adolf Hitler that caved to the Nazi leader’s demand that Germany be given a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Five months later, Hitler ordered the German military to forcibly take the remainder of the neighboring country.
On Oct. 9, 2026, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin struck a deal allowing Russia to sell diesel fuel to global markets, most importantly to the US. Then Trump waived a package of sanctions on Russia that had been passed by Congress. By replenishing Russia’s war coffers, it is likely more Ukrainians will die because of these twin gifts from America’s president to the warmongering Russian autocrat.
Why is Trump doing this? He seems to be hoping the diesel deal will help him avert disaster in the upcoming midterms. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. Perhaps Trump seriously thinks that this will get him the Nobel Peace Prize by ending the war in Ukraine through helping Putin win it. Perhaps it’s one more scheme to further enrich himself and his family. Or maybe Putin really does have something on Trump.
In any event, it feels like Munich all over again.
There are some remarkable parallels between Czechoslovakia’s predicament in 1938 and Ukraine’s nine decades later: separatists in two vulnerable Central European democracies were encouraged and supported by a neighboring authoritarian regime that sought to seize adjacent territory under the pretext of protecting a minority from oppression.
And at the center of both narratives is betrayal: of Czechoslovakia by Britain and France, and Ukraine by Trump.
In the spring and summer of 1938, Konrad Henlein, leader of the Nazi-allied Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia, held secret meetings with Hitler and other Nazi officials. They concocted a plan: Cause so much disorder in the Sudetenland that the Czech government would declare martial law, thus creating an excuse for German troops to march in to protect the ethnic German minority.
Tensions that had long existed along the Czech frontier erupted into gunfire and death in the Sudeten town of Habersbirk on the morning of Sept. 13, 1938. A mob of German separatists hung a swastika banner from a church tower, stormed the police station, kidnapped the wife of a cop, and engaged in gunfights with police officers that lasted hours. Four Czech police officers and four insurgents died. Outbreaks of violence, terror and torture raged along the border for days, backed by Freikorps paramilitary troops who crossed from Germany and by SA and SS men who took part in cross-border sabotage and armed attacks.
The uprising had the desired impact. Just 17 days later — on Sept. 30, 1938 — Britain, France, Italy and Nazi Germany signed the Munich Agreement, yielding to Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland be ceded to him. After landing at an airport outside London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved a document in his hand and jubilantly proclaimed:
“The settlement of the Czechoslovak problem which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.”
“I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain said later that day.
But it didn’t take long for Hitler to show he could not be trusted. Hitler’s army marched into Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Germany’s invasion of Poland followed less than six months later, and by 1942 German forces controlled territory spanning from the Atlantic Ocean to deep inside the Soviet Union.
Ethnic Germans’ uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1938 found an echo nine decades later in Ukraine’s Donbas region, where unrest that began with pro-Russia protests in 2014 evolved into the war Russia has been waging on its neighbor for nearly five years.
In the spring of 2014, paramilitary units led by Russian intelligence officers stormed government office buildings in several towns and cities in Donbas, seizing weapons and clashing with police. In a scene reminiscent of the Habersbirk siege of 1938, on April 14, 2014, pro-Russian militants seized the police station in Horlivka, beat up the police chief, and murdered a member of the city council, whose body was found in a river. Similar clashes occurred throughout Donbas.
Two Kremlin-backed pseudo-states soon emerged: the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Russia funneled tanks, artillery, air defense systems and fighters into Donbas, fueling a war between separatists and Ukrainian forces that dragged on for years.
Like Hitler in the Sudetenland, Russia’s de facto occupation of Donbas was not enough for Vladimir Putin. His eyes were on all of Ukraine, and he spent years manufacturing pretexts for the full-scale invasion that began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Trump has been buttering up Putin for more than a decade, starting with his 2015 campaign for president, when he effusively praised the ruthless Russian autocrat’s leadership style. Putin is a “strong leader,” is “far more respected than our president,” meaning the immensely popular Barack Obama, and was someone he “would get along with very well,” Trump said back then.
Trump’s admiration for Putin took on ominous tones after becoming president. During a press conference after the two leaders’ 2018 Helsinki summit, Trump questioned intelligence findings on Russian election interference and said he believed Putin’s denial. “I don’t see any reason it would be Russia,” Trump told reporters, with the Russian strongman standing at his side.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, during Biden’s presidency, Trump called it “a pretty smart move,” praised Putin as a “genius,” and also said it wouldn’t have happened if Trump was still president, remarks that were amplified by Russian state media.
During Trump’s second term, his buddy-buddy relationship with Putin has turned into a virtual strategic alliance, as the American president repeatedly makes moves and statements that seem designed to please the Russian autocrat. There are Trump’s threats to abandon NATO, his humiliation of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky during a February 2025 meeting inside the Oval Office, and most recently Trump’s demand that Ukraine cease its drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, his call for Zelensky’s ouster, and envoy Steve Witkoff thanking Putin for being a “humanitarian.”
Putin has proposed a summit between himself, Trump, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. It’s notable that Ukraine has not been invited. This is also what happened in Munich nine decades ago, when Czech delegates were excluded from the room, and others decided Czechoslovakia’s fate.
Last October, aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters the Donbas region should be “cut up,” leaving most of it in Russian hands.
“Let it be cut the way it is,” he said. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.”
It seems the fate Trump envisions for Ukraine is similar to the one Hitler envisioned for Czechoslovakia. It would be naïve to think that Putin’s expansionist ambitions would stop there.
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A Chabad Jew was stabbed in NYC. He returned the next day to continue wrapping tefillin.
(JTA) — Less than 24 hours after he was stabbed in midtown Manhattan, Yosef, a Chabad-Lubavitch man from Crown Heights, was back on the same street where he’d been assaulted, popping into Diamond District businesses as usual to help employees wrap tefillin.
Yosef, 26, who did not share his last name to maintain his privacy, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he was back on 47th Street on Thursday afternoon, the day after the stabbing, without missing a beat in his Monday-through-Thursday rounds even as police investigate the incident as a possible hate crime.
A number of the people he visited pieced together that the widely circulated footage of a man being stabbed the previous night was of him.
“They were in shock. They were obviously scared for me,” said Yosef, who has been wrapping tefillin and distributing Shabbat candles to Jewish Diamond District employees for about three years. He started that routine when his father, a Chabad Jew who works in the jewelry business, realized he needed his son’s help to handle the demand for those acts. Yosef told Chabad.org that he was “still shaken” by the attack a day later.
Still, he told JTA, “We can’t allow some hate to stop us.”
Yosef said he felt it was important to communicate that message because “we need more mitzvahs in the world, we need more light in the world.”
Yosef was taken to Bellevue Hospital on Wednesday evening around 6 p.m., where medical staff assessed that he had no internal bleeding and would not need stitches. No arrests have been made, but the assailant has been described as a woman in her 40s.
The attack has renewed concerns about security that have faced Chabad adherents and institutions, which often host public events and maintain a visible street presence. But the threat didn’t diminish their presence in midtown Manhattan on Friday.
Multiple Chabad men stood under a bright yellow tent on the sidewalk wrapping tefillin for a steady stream of workers in the heavily Jewish Diamond District.
“The Rebbe says that the way to defeat darkness is only through the addition of light,” said Shmuel Cohen, who was handing out small photographs of the movement’s late leader, the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
Cohen told JTA that he had not heard about the attack that took place just down the block two days earlier, though his partner under the sidewalk tent had. Cohen said that the best way to respond is through “the observance of Torah and mitzvot without being ashamed of our Judaism but presenting it to everyone.”
Also on Friday, Chabad officials met with New York Police Department representatives for their annual meeting about security ahead of Chabad’s international conference in Crown Heights, the Brooklyn neighborhood where the movement is headquartered. The conference begins on Nov. 5.
Chabad has been targeted in multiple high-profile attacks in the past year, including the deadly Bondi Beach shooting in Australia in December. The following month, a man rammed a car into the doors of the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn, raising further questions over how the movement should balance its commitment to making its events accessible with security.
Meanwhile, Jews have been targeted in more than half of hate crimes committed in New York City in 2026, despite making up about 12% of the city’s population.
“Security is our top priority. Our goal is to provide an environment where every participant feels safe and can fully experience the purpose and spirit of the gathering,” said Rabbi Mendy Kotlarsky, a top organizer of the upcoming conference.
In the wake of the attack, Yosef said he is not concerned about going out in public as a visibly Jewish person and doesn’t plan to change how he approaches the world.
“I was wearing the same clothes on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday,” he said. “I didn’t change my routine.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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They met on a Birthright trip then married. Now this American Israeli couple’s internet fame has turned to infamy.
Ethan and Hila Klein first met at Yad Vashem — Israel’s Holocaust museum — in 2007, a meet-cute they recounted, giggling, years later for their millions of YouTube followers.
“I think I went up to her and said something like, ‘They had it coming, don’t you think?’” said Ethan, known for his edgy humor and infamous internet trends, including Vape Nation and Papa Bless. “No I didn’t say that. I wonder if you would have laughed though.”
They were on a Birthright trip, Ethan an American and Hila an Israeli soldier on leave to join the group. Soon after the trip ended, Ethan moved to Israel to be with Hila, and the two began making videos under the name H3H3 Productions (the H for Hila and the 3 standing in as an E for Ethan). They married, moved to America, and started a popular podcast.
A Jewish love story, until Thursday, when Hila, now mother to their three children, accused Ethan publicly of having a months-long affair.
“The betrayal I feel is immeasurable,” Hila said in an Instagram post. “My only family on this side of the world. How do I even begin to make sense of this?”
Ethan reposted her statement.
Their podcast is run by a handful of crew members who often chime in and participate in various skits and bits. The crew also shared a statement saying they stand with Hila and refuse to work with Ethan, though they added they don’t know what this will mean for the future of the show.
A couple roiled by Oct. 7
The left-leaning, secular couple’s videos and podcasts focused primarily on pop culture, internet drama and general politics, not Jewish or Israeli issues.
Both Ethan and Hila would make statements sometimes when tensions in Israel flared, and they would occasionally speak out against IDF actions that upset them.
In 2021, Ethan started a podcast with political commenter Hasan Piker, a controversial left-wing influencer, called Leftovers, a nod to their leftist politics.
Then came Oct. 7.
Ethan, an American Israeli dual citizen like Hila, was horrified by the attacks but quick to call the IDF genocidal in the aftermath. In their first episode together after Oct. 7, Ethan and Piker said the show would continue through their disagreements. The episode was tense, and it was their last.
As Piker’s rhetoric on Israel intensified and became at times antisemitic, the two began a nasty internet feud, culminating in a nearly five-hour livestreamed debate.
Piker posted about the news of the affair on X, sharing a video of Ethan and expressing disgust for men who cheat.
“Now this is a high caliber man [with] good morals,” Piker said sarcastically. He also posted “Judge me by my enemies” after sharing Hila’s statement.
Hila, who owns a makeup and clothing company, increasingly came under scrutiny by Piker and others after Oct. 7 for her service in the IDF. Artists refused to work with her. One model she hired publicly disavowed her after finding out she was Israeli.
The couple was harassed, sometimes online, sometimes in-person, as they attempted to take what they viewed as a nuanced stance in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. The united front seemed to fortify their relationship, as Ethan, ever outspoken, routinely came to his wife’s defense.
Their show lost thousands of subscribers, but loyal fans stuck with them — fans who now say they are gutted and confused by the news of the affair. Many in disbelief noted that Ethan had Hila’s face tattooed on his arm less than two years ago as a surprise for her.
“The greatest thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother,” says the quote surrounding the tattoo.
The Forward attempted to contact the Kleins through their work emails and did not immediately hear back.
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