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They texted about Torah and mitzvahs. Feds say they were insider trading
The suspects texted one another as though they had everyone fooled.
“How’s the rabbi?” one asked in a message. “Is he still scheduled for surgery?”
“We are still waiting for the doctor to check if it’s still needed,” came the response.
But there was no surgery, authorities say, and there was no rabbi. Instead, prosecutors allege, the men were referring to Amazon’s impending acquisition of the vacuum company iRobot, hoping to trade on what was then still a closely guarded secret. According to a pair of federal indictments unsealed last week, the deal was one of dozens leaked to a criminal network that used Jewish code words to plan their investments.
At the center of the alleged insider trading scheme was Nicolo Nourafchan, 43, a corporate lawyer who prosecutors say used his access to company files to collect and share deal information with a sprawling network of middlemen and investors. Capitalizing on the lawyer’s knowledge of in-progress mergers and acquisitions, the crew allegedly racked up tens of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds over the course of a decade.
The indictments are rife with Jewish code words that the defendants used in the alleged plot. “Torahs” and “mitzvahs” were stock tips, and a merger was a “flight to Israel.” A “chavrusa” — Aramaic for study partner — meant another lawyer or investor, and a company was a “shul.”
And to share the ticker symbol of a company soon to be acquired, one alleged co-conspirator spelled out its initials using Jewish names.
Nourafchan and the other lawyers received kickbacks when the deals hit, according to prosecutors.
Nineteen of the case’s 30 defendants have been arrested in Los Angeles, New York and Florida and have appeared in federal court. (Two located in Russia and Israel are considered fugitives, according to the Department of Justice.)
Of those, 16 defendants are each charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, two counts of securities fraud and one count of money laundering conspiracy. The conspiracy charges carry a combined sentence of up to 30 years in prison, while the fraud charges carry a sentence of up to 45 years and money laundering up to 20 years. Fines could exceed $5 million per defendant.
Those charged in the first indictment include Nourafchan, who prosecutors say drew extensively on a network of family and friends to build the scheme, and David Bratslavsky, the former director of the U.S. Israel Business Council, a group that brings together business leaders from those two countries.
An additional five alleged co-conspirators, including Nicolo’s brother Lorenzo Nourafchan, face two counts of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, two counts of securities fraud and one count of money laundering conspiracy.
Reuters has reported that Avi Sutton, a former Israeli Supreme Court law clerk, is among the unindicted co-conspirators involved in the alleged scheme. (Sutton could not be reached for comment.)
The prosecutions have caused an earthquake in the world of M&A law, with the Wall Street Journal calling it “one of the most brazen insider-trading schemes in years.” Nicolo Nourafchan had worked at top M&A law firms and leaked information on corporate giants that included Amazon, Johnson & Johnson and Burger King.
“Everyone charged today is accused of scoring significant profits from expected market moves and making out like bandits,” Ted Docks, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston division, said May 6 after the charges were announced. “That’s not merely gaming the system — it’s a federal crime.”
If proven guilty, the Nourafchan brothers, who have not yet entered a plea, could face decades in prison. Lawyers for each did not respond to a request for comment.
No attorneys are on record for other defendants and no pleas have been entered yet in the case. The Forward could not reach them for comment.
Ask the ‘rabbi’
To most who knew them, Nicolo and Lorenzo Nourafchan were LA brothers who had made good. They had graduated from top schools — Nicolo from Yale Law School, Lorenzo from Yeshiva University — and gone on to careers in corporate law and finance.
Nicolo bounced around between major law firms including Sidley Austin, Latham & Watkins and Goodwin Procter. At each stop, authorities said, he used internal document management systems to access information about deals that were in progress. He recruited Robert Yadgarov and Gabriel Gershowitz, respectively his former roommate and classmate, to gather tips from their firms, prosecutors allege.
The three would allegedly then pass on the tips to middle-men, who would share the knowledge with investors. (Yadgarov is among the 16 charged in the first indictment. Gershowitz has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with authorities, who have recommended a sentence of two years in prison.)
Eager for the next tip, the investors often badgered the middlemen in code, authorities say.
“Gavy, we are all just waiting for you to tell us when the next flight to Israel is,” one investor named Simon Fensterszaub asked alleged middleman Gavryel Silverstein. “It’s coming soon,” Silverstein replied. (Silverstein is also charged in the first indictment.)
In June 2022, court documents say, Fensterszaub, who had invested in a company expected to be acquired, asked Silverstein for an update on the deal: “Any chance you can find out how the rabbi is feeling?” Fensterszaub wrote.
“Unfortunately nothing,” Silverstein replied.
Then Fensterszaub dropped the code entirely: “Should I tell ppl to pull out?” he said.
Ultimately, he didn’t — and the brothers netted about $179,000 from their iRobot trades.
In another instance, one of the investors, unable to remember the name of the company being purchased, asked a co-conspirator to remind him. The company’s name was Momentive — ticker symbol MNTV.
According to authorities, the person replied:
“Menachem
Nachman
Tuvya
Vladmir”
Silverstein and Simon Fensterszaub, who do not have lawyers currently assigned in court documents, could not be reached for comment.
Family affairs
The Nourafchans are not the only brothers named in the indictments, which in total run more than 120 pages. Text messages from Brian and Mark Fensterszaub, of Hollywood, Florida — Simon’s brothers — show the two using code to discuss Nourafchan with Silverstein, who is their brother-in-law.
The first indictment shows the brothers as regularly agitated about the status of deals. “We need that damn rebbe already,” Mark Fensterszaub allegedly told Silverstein in 2022 as the two discussed money issues.
Soon after, Silverstein came through, court documents say. With Amazon on the verge of acquiring iRobot, he used Hebrew letters to allude to iRobot’s stock symbol in a text, allegedly tipping the brothers to the opportunity.
The traders in Nourafchan’s network made a total of $1.7 million trading on the Amazon/iRobot deal, according to court documents.
After Nourafchan lost his job at Goodwin Procter in September 2023, the Fensterszaubs appeared worried that the tips might stop coming.
“Let’s say he’s not davening or doing any Torahs, mitzvahs,” Brian Fensterszaub told Silverstein that October. “Let’s say he said ‘I don’t have anything, f”ck you, give me my money.’ We’d still be like alright, torah and mitzvahs. We gotta do what we gotta do.” (The three Fensterszaub brothers are charged in the first indictment.)
Nicolo Nourafchan reassured Silverstein that December that more info would be on the way soon. “I’m working on getting a job,” he said, according to court documents. “So baruch hashem we’ll have more.”
Silverstein’s brother-in-law Yisroel Horowitz is also charged in the scheme, as is Brian Fensterszaub’s brother-in-law Joseph Suskind; Eliyahu and Daniel Kavian, another sibling duo, were allegedly connected to the plot through Simon Fensterszaub.
It was the relationship between the Nourafchan brothers, however, that may have led the decade-long scheme to unravel.
Lorenzo Nourafchan, 38, ran a business he started called Northstar Financial Consulting Group, and on LinkedIn had accrued several thousand followers. He also wrote a money column for the Los Angeles Jewish Home, an Orthodox print weekly, in which he wrote about the challenges and opportunities of being an Orthodox business owner. (The LA Jewish Home did not respond to an inquiry.)
Lorenzo was looser with the information, court documents show, recruiting his hair stylist to the scheme, who then involved nearly a dozen of his friends and relatives. Lorenzo instructed the stylist, Miakel Bishay, not to do the trading himself so the trail would not lead back to him, authorities say, but Bishay did anyway. Bishay’s friend, Nowel Milik, netted more than $700,000 in the iRobot deal, according to one of the indictments. (Bishay and Milik are both charged in the second indictment.)
Soon, the jig was up. In March 2024, a federal agent posing as a representative from FINRA, a regulatory organization that monitors trading activity, called Brian Fensterszaub asking for more information about the iRobot trade. The call alarmed Fensterszaub, who immediately called Silverstein to let him know.
“Listen, God forbid that I don’t think anything should come of it,” Fensterszaub told Silverstein, “but God forbid if something did, you don’t need it pointing back to you and you having to deal with it.”
A legal filing from Tuesday by lawyers for the Nourafchan brothers asked the court to grant Lorenzo permission to use the proceeds from the sale of his business to pay for Nicolo’s legal representation. Judge Leo T. Sorokin granted the request.
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UK threatens sanctions after Israel opens bids for E1 settler homes
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – The United Kingdom threatened to sanction Israelis involved in West Bank settlement expansion after the Jewish state’s Lands Authority opened bids for 1,234 homes in the largely underdeveloped E1 section of the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim.
Construction in E1 “would cut across the heart of Palestine and risks separating the West Bank from East Jerusalem, which would endanger the viability of a two-state solution,” the British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said in a special statement he posted on X on Thursday.
Targeted sanctions, Miliband wrote, would be part of a series of measures his government would take. His office also summoned Israel’s charge d’Affaires Thursday to demand a closure of the bidding process, which first opened on Tuesday, and a withdrawal of the construction project altogether.
“Britain will not stand back and accept the destruction of the two-state solution,” he wrote. Miliband has held his position for a month and is part of the new leadership Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham appointed when he took office in July.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar attacked Miliband on X, stating that Britain’s “decision to damage the relationship between our countries is deeply unfortunate.”
He said that the U.K. government’s “systematic policy of blaming only Israel while ignoring Palestinian extremism has already contributed to a massive wave of antisemitic hatred and attacks against the British Jewish community.”
The Jewish people have the same right to “live throughout the Land of Israel” just as the British people have a right to live anywhere in the U.K., Sa’ar wrote.
Plans to expand the built-up area of Ma’aleh Adumim settlement by constructing some 3,400 housing units on a largely underdeveloped hilltop within the city’s boundaries have been in place since 1994 when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister.
Israel mostly froze those plans under pressure from the international community, including the U.S., with many countries warning that building homes in E1 would harm their diplomatic ties with Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began to advance the project in earnest in 2012 to protest the United Nations General Assembly decision to grant the Palestinians the status of a non-member state and has since pushed the project forward in spurts, particularly during election seasons.
The publication of the bidding process for the homes was first announced on Tuesday and is set to close on Oct. 19, one week shy of the Israeli elections on Oct. 27. Opening the bids is a move that plays well with Netanyahu’s right-wing voter base, which opposes Palestinian statehood and believes that settlements like Ma’aleh Adumim and the E1 area should be annexed into sovereign Israel.
But the move reverberated globally, with the U.K. signing onto a joint condemnation by France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, in which they warned that settlement building in E1 distanced peace and undermined the country’s international standing.
They also reminded businesses who might bid for E1 construction that they could face legal or reputational consequences, given that such companies could be in breach of international law.
Palestinian Authority Vice President Hussein Al-Sheikh said he welcomed the condemnation, explaining on X that such a position “reflects the importance of the international role in confronting settlement activity and safeguarding the two-state solution.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Argentina removes federal judge over antisemitic remarks in historic first
(JTA) — An Argentine federal judge was removed from office Tuesday for a series of antisemitic posts on his social media accounts that constituted misconduct incompatible with his role, an impeachment panel ruled.
Alfredo Eugenio López, who headed Federal Court No. 4 in the coastal city of Mar del Plata, was removed by Argentina’s Jury of Impeachment, a special panel composed of judges, lawmakers and lawyers.
It is the first time in Argentina’s history that a judge has been removed over antisemitic remarks.
In López’s social media posts, the judge referred to the Jewish people as “a brood of vipers,” Israel as a “fictitious state” and Argentinian Jews as “foreigners.” He has also used such terms as “Zionist” and “gay” as insults.
According to the panel, the judge committed acts of “discrimination and the denial of equal rights against the Argentine Jewish community. For the purposes of these proceedings, it is particularly significant that, by acting in this manner, he shattered public confidence in his continued fitness to administer justice impartially.”The case reached the panel through Argentina’s Council of the Magistracy, based in Buenos Aires, the constitutional body responsible for the selection and discipline of federal judges.
The first complaint against López was filed in February 2025 by the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas, which is the umbrella organization representing Argentina’s Jewish community. One month later, the Argentine Forum Against Antisemitism also filed a complaint. In July 2025, attorney Yamil Santoro from Apolo Foundation added another one.
In his defense, López argued that his messages were “ subjective and decontextualized interpretations of exchanges on social media, which in no way affect the administration of justice or his impartiality” as a judge. He added that his remarks were unrelated to any pending case and that he had never been recused or removed from any judicial case.
Neither Lopez nor his attorney were immediately available for further comment.
“He was removed because he simply would not stop engaging in hate speech,” jury member Alberto Maques said during a live interview Tuesday on the A24 news channel. “It is absolutely disgraceful for a federal judge to engage in this kind of conduct.”
Maques said there were 15 social media posts that he acknowledged, but more than 50 posts in which he said “outrageous things that are not worth repeating because they truly constituted hate speech.”
“This is not merely an issue of hate speech against the Jewish community. This is someone who lacks common sense,” he added, interviewed by A24 news channel.
Prosecutors in the impeachment proceedings argued that the messages were not isolated political comments but reflected a pattern of hostility toward Jews, Zionism, and the State of Israel.
“No position of authority can shield hatred. This is not a matter of punishing an opinion. It is about sanctioning repeated conduct involving antisemitism, hostility and dehumanization, conduct incompatible with the impartiality, dignity and public trust required of the judiciary,” DAIA said Tuesday in a statement.
“This case sets a precedent: for the first time in more than a century, DAIA initiated proceedings of this nature against a judge. No office is above democracy.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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California progressive Wahab defeats AIPAC-backed Hernandez in close race
(JTA) — California progressive Aisha Wahab defeated AIPAC-backed moderate Melissa Hernandez in a congressional runoff this week, capping off a contest that had become unexpectedly tight after the pro-Israel lobby entered the fray.
The Associated Press called the race between the Democrats — who were vying to replace a disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell — a full two days after polls closed, when Wahab secured 53.1% of votes to Hernandez’s 46.9%, with 95% of ballots tallied. The gap between them grew by four percentage points from Tuesday evening, when Wahab had held a narrow 51% lead to Hernandez’s 49%.
“We stayed focused on the people, and I will fight for this district that raised me,” Wahab said in a Thursday statement, noting her journey “from foster care to Congress” in her East Bay community.
Although Wahab ended up victorious, the narrow initial margin on Tuesday shocked California’s 14th District, given that she had secured a double-digit lead in preliminary races two months ago.
But in the past few weeks, an unforeseen variable appeared to influence the trajectories of the two campaigns: a massive spending push from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee aimed at turning the tides for Hernandez.
Since the beginning of August alone, AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, and other affiliated groups spent more than $2.5 million on both boosting Hernandez and denigrating Wahab with negative ads and mailers, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
“This was not a landslide for Wahab by any means,” local Democratic strategist Noah Finneburgh, who is not affiliated with either candidate, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“They narrowed the gap for sure,” Finneburgh added, referring to AIPAC. “They spent millions of dollars attacking Wahab very aggressively.”
These attacks, he explained, did not involve Israel and instead focused on divisive issues for the Bay Area, such as public safety and protecting kids.
“Negative advertising with a persuasive message can be very effective,” Finneburgh said.
In her Thursday night statement, Wahab declared that her “district cannot be bought,” describing the race as “one of the ugliest, most expensive elections we’ve ever seen.”
Prior to this influx of cash and related ads, neither AIPAC nor Israel had played a significant role in this short-lived race — which began in April following Swalwell’s resignation over allegations of sexual assault.
When the district held a special primary to seek Swalwell’s replacement on June 16, Wahab and Hernandez finished as the top-two candidates and moved on to this week’s special general runoff election.
California primaries are “nonpartisan” or “top-two” races, in which the two highest ranking candidates move on to the general election, irrespective of their parties. The top-two in this case were both Democrats, like Swalwell, in a district that the Cook Political Report deems solidly blue.
Even though Wahab will now finish the remainder of Swalwell’s term, she will have to compete with Hernandez again in the November general election for a full term that begins on January 3, 2027.
In a June 16 special primary that preceded this week’s runoff, there was still a massive gap between the two candidates, with Wahab accruing 42.8% of the votes, compared to Hernandez’s 16.8%. A separate primary for the November race, which occurred two weeks earlier, placed Wahab at 38.3% and Hernandez at 17.2%.
Wahab, who will be the first Afghan American in Congress, has focused on affordability, civil rights, education and climate change. Her campaign calls for an end to wars and “prolonged occupations” but only specifically calls out U.S. military activity in “Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.”
Though Wahab has been critical of Israel and its operations in Gaza, she has not been as vocal about the issue as many other progressive colleagues nationwide. She responded “yes” when asked if Israel was committing genocide in a primary debate, but she didn’t include Israel or Gaza in her campaign priorities.
During a recent appearance on far-right influencer Hasan Piker’s livestream, Wahab acknowledged that “it’s not a zero-sum game in the Middle East,” adding that “we can care for all people.” She also referenced a resolution she introduced last year in the California legislature, pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza but also condemning Hamas and demanding the release of the hostages.
“We talk about both Palestinians and the Israeli victims there,” Wahab told Piker. “We talk about holding the perpetrators accountable from both sides.”
Asked if she was in favor of “ending all U.S. aid to Israel,” she responded “yes,” while stressing that “humanitarian aid is important to me, too.”
Wahab has earned the backing of multiple labor unions, the California Democratic Party and Our Revolution, the group formed by Sen. Bernie Sanders to advance the progressive movement. The liberal pro-Israel group J Street also recently invested $108,000 in her campaign, according to the FEC. American Priorities, a pro-Palestinian PAC, also spent at least $200,000 on supporting her.
Hernandez has received endorsements from several police and fire unions, as well as Democratic Jewish Reps. Lois Frankel of Florida and Brad Schneider of Illinois.
Come November, Hernandez will gain one additional asset. Due to statewide redistricting, the 14th District will gain about 26,000 new voters from Dublin, where Hernandez previously served as mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
But Finneburgh said he believes that Hernandez has only a minimal chance of winning that race, especially because Wahab will be heading into that election as an incumbent.
He also suggested that if “she plays her card right,” Wahab could even take some endorsements away from Hernandez.
“There’s going to be people who are going to probably move over from the Hernandez camp and back her,” Finneburgh added. “It’s going to be hard to unseat her.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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