By: JV Staff

Tamir Sapir, Former Taxi Drive Turned Real Estate Billionaire

The Sapir family is reportedly at it again.

Relatives of the late taxi driver who became a real estate billionaire, Tamir Sapir, is said to be battling with another member of the clan over $102 million worth of the estate.

Sapir’s son in law Rotem Rosen is entitled to nothing, according to Sapir’s son Alex. The comment was included in Manhattan Surrogate Court papers.

Rosen, who is currently in the process of ending his marriage to Sapir’s daughter Zina, says the Sapir Organization owes him for services rendered involving selling properties. By his estimation, that includes the building at 11 Madison Ave, which sold five years ago for an eye-popping $2.6 billion.

Rosen formerly served as chief executive officer of the Sapir Organization. His argument in court has reportedly centered on his being excluded following what he terms a “falling out” with Alex three years ago. According to spokespersons for Sapir’s family, Rosen has, in fact, received payment for services rendered, and is entitled to nothing more.

As therealdeal.com has reported, Sapir Corp. went private last week. Shareholders in Israel gave the thumbs up to a buyout plan of the real estate investment firm set as a loftier price than was original envisioned. The price: a nifty $5.54 million, or approximately 19.26 million shekels. A similar move was made, and failed, in 2017.

Sapir’s estate “had sunk to a measly $600 million by the time he died, according to court records,” according to the New York Post. “He was once slammed with $150,000 in fines when the feds discovered a gross collection of elephant tusks, animal hides and barstools upholstered in python and anaconda skins about his Florida yacht.”

Owned, Developed, Managed

Certainly, there is still plenty of moolah to fight over. The Sapir Organization is, as its web site points out, a multidisciplinary real estate investor, operator and developer currently led by Sapir’s son, President and Chief Executive Officer, Alex Sapir. “The firm has owned, developed and managed more than 7 million square feet of Manhattan real estate, including some of the world’s most iconic commercial assets throughout various cycles.

The portfolio spans multiple property classes, including commercial, residential and hospitality assets. The firm’s holdings in Manhattan include 260-261 Madison Avenue and 2 Broadway, which currently serves as the MTA headquarters of New York City.”

Two years ago, management launched Sapir Corp Ltd., a publicly traded real estate development company listed on the Tel-Aviv stock exchange. “Through Sapir Corp Ltd.,” the company noted, “Mr. Sapir has expanded the geography of the firm’s portfolio to Miami, Florida, which currently includes over 1M square feet of ground up, mixed-use development, and a luxury condo development in Surfside, Florida. In New York, the Sapir Corp portfolio also includes NoMo SoHo and 218 Madison Avenue.”

260 and 261 Madison Avenue were purchased by The Sapir Organization in 1997. Together, the properties hold a combined 1 million square feet. Located at the epicenter of Midtown East and steps from Grand Central Terminal, 261 Madison Ave. is a 28-story classic Manhattan office building, designed in the mid-century international style, updated for the 21st century. Freshly renovated spaces have been given a modern industrial redesign to emphasize natural light, openness, utility and a cutting edge design. The building is home to WeWork, Knotel, the acclaimed restaurant Zuma, major law firms and national banking institutes, while also serving as headquarters of The Sapir Organization.

2 Broadway is an office building at the south end of Broadway, near Bowling Green Park in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York City. It was built on the site of the New York Produce Exchange, and now houses the headquarters of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It is probably better known for its appearance in motion pictures. The building was featured prominently throughout the comedy-drama film The Apartment (1960), produced and directed by Billy Wilder, as the building in which the characters played by stars Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray work. It was also a filming location in the thriller Mirage (1965), with Gregory Peck and Diane Baker.

Property and Politics

In 1995, Sapir bought 2 Broadway for $20 million, with the MTA as the only tenant in the building. The MTA signed a 49-year lease in July 1998, shortly after selling its New York Coliseum. Shortly after, according to Wikipedia, Sapir and the MTA agreed to conduct $39 million worth of renovations to 2 Broadway. “However, the renovations had become delayed and over budget, and Sapir and the MTA became involved in numerous lawsuits and countersuits. By 2000, the renovations were expected to cost $135 million. By 2003, the cost of the renovations had risen to $435 million.” Part of the budget increase was attributed to corruption by contractors who were renovating the buildings. One such contractor was later ordered to pay restitution to the MTA for corruption.

Strangely, the controversy has also been tapped by those on the political Left as a tool with which to pummel the Trump Administration. England’s DailyMail.com has used the Sapir/Rosen contest to try and paint President Donald Trump in a negative light. Its coverage back in February repeatedly stressed Rosen’s alleged connection to the president:

“Court papers show that Rosen, who is close friends with President Donald Trump, is renting a $50,000 a month penthouse at Trump Park Avenue… The couple married in 2007 in a lavish wedding hosted by President Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort  in Palm Beach, Florida… Rosen went with Trump to Moscow for Miss Universe in 2012, invested heavily in his failed Trump SoHo hotel, and is believed to have pulled strings to try to make Trump Tower Moscow a reality.”

Sacramento Real Estate Mogul Michael Lyon Back in Jail

Michael Lyon used to be a high-powered real estate CEO. Now he is back in jail on drug charges. His name was seen all over Sacramento homes at one point.

He once headed the largest real estate firm in the region, along with a number of other companies, and was a philanthropic mainstay for charity groups ranging from the UC Davis Children’s Hospital to Loaves and Fishes, Sacramento Bee reported.

Lyon, 64 years old, was let out of a state prison in 2019 having spent a segment of his 76-month sentence from 2018 stemming from a conviction on charges of electronic eavesdropping and videotaping connected to sex tapes filmed in 2013 and 2014.

Michael Lyon was sentenced than six years in prison for secretly filming the women he paid for sex, concluding the fall of a man whose name for decades was all but synonymous with home ownership in Sacramento, The Bee stated.

The women had no idea they were being videotaped until they were contacted by Sacramento district attorney’s investigators in 2015 and never would have agreed had they known; prosecutors argued.

This was the second time he faced similar charges. Lyon pleaded guilty in 2011 to felony counts of electronic eavesdropping and served a portion of his one-year sentence in the county jail and on home detention. He later settled a civil suit for $2.5 million and an apology to former nannies, babysitters and friends who said he had secretly taped them in bathrooms, bedrooms and showers.

In early April, Lyon returned to the prison amid allegations of drug and parole violations. Less than a year after being released from prison. Methamphetamines became his new poison, once clandestine pornography was out of question, KCRA reported.

According to online sources, Lyon was placed under arrest on a felony charge of possession for sale of controlled substances. There was also a misdemeanor count of possession of dangerous drug-controlled substances.

Sacramento Police spokesman Officer Karl Chan wrote in an email to The Sacramento Bee that “Officers conducted a parole search on Mr. Lyon, and during the course of the search located narcotics. He was arrested in the 300 block of Las Palmas Avenue.”

Lyon’s fall from grace reads like something out of Homer. His success began to fracture in 2009 with the end of a more than two-decade marriage to Kimarie Lyon. In the course of what the Bee termed an “extraordinarily nasty” divorce, the one-time wife “told federal investigators that her husband “had spent approximately $300,000 in one or two months on hookers, drugs and pornography,” according to a confidential law enforcement document reviewed by The Bee.”

The one-time mogul “was once one of the most prominent business and philanthropic figures in the Sacramento region, and until his legal troubles headed the Lyon Real Estate firm and other companies,” according to the Bee. “He was a Boy Scout leader and civic activist who donated time and money to various charitable causes. But his weakness for prostitutes and secret videotapes led to a stunning fall from grace that began with an acrimonious divorce.”

The Strange Case of “Lucky Luke”  Brugnara

It was nearly five years ago – October of 2015, to be exact – that the strange case of “Lucky Luke” Brugnara was, in the words of San Francisco Weekly, “finally over.”

Brugnara was born in the Sunset District of San Francisco, the son of a “juvenile hall manager”. He went to school at St. Ignatius College Preparatory, a private preparatory Jesuit school.  Brugnara was a competitive flycaster during his teenage years and set several national accuracy flycasting records in the American Casting Association which still stand today.  Brugnara graduated from San Diego State University in 1987.

Brugnara started his real estate career in San Francisco in 1993 by buying a note for $1.5M for the Kress Building at 939 Market Street, foreclosing on the note, and then borrowing $3M against the property. Brugnara’s proceeded buy and sell a series of office buildings in San Francisco. In 1997, he owned 500,000 square feet of office space in downtown San Francisco, SF Gate reported in an article called “Young Gun” .

Brugnara first became involved in Las Vegas real estate in 1999, when he attempted to buy the Desert Inn for $270 million but lost out to an all-cash offer from Sun International and Steve Wynn. In November 1999, he bought the Silver City Casino and the Las Vegas Shopping Plaza on the Las Vegas Strip for $40 million, with plans to replace it with a larger casino and hotel, but converted the property into a shopping center in 2004 after the Nevada Gaming Commission denied him a gambling license in 2001, The Las Vegan documented.

Gaming Commission had cited poor financial recordkeeping, claims that Brugnara had failed to file tax returns, conflicts with San Francisco regulators, and allegations that Brugnara had made death threats. In response, Brugnara stated that the Nevada Gaming Commissioners were “a bunch of wind-up dolls” representing Las Vegas incumbents, and threatened to file suit, but eventually decided not to do so, preferring to re-apply and address the Gaming Commission’s concerns, Las Vegas Sun reported.

In 1998, Brugnara was sued by the SF City Attorney for improper disposal of medical waste at his Medico-Dental Building. In 2000, the San Francisco Superior Court decided against Brugnara, and imposed a $1 million penalty, SF Gate reported.

A decade later the troubles of “Lucky Luke” continued to mount,

In 2010 Brugnara pleaded guilty to charges of tax evasion related to the sale of $45 million in commercial property and violations of the Endangered Species Act for blocking an opening in a private dam to prevent trout migration, according to Wikipedia. “He was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison on the tax charges. Brugnara’s later request to withdraw his guilty plea and go to trial was denied by the trial judge, and the decision was affirmed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2011. Brugnara was released from prison in 2012.”

Bragnara did not learn his lesson, only 2 years later “Lucky Luke” was back in court on more serious charges.

Citing ABC 7, the publication reported that the one-time real estate mogul had been given a sentence of seven years in federal prison. The sentence was the cherry on the icing of a cinematic spree of “art scams, jailhouse escapes, and courtroom theatrics.”

“Brugnara, a San Francisco native who made a fortune snapping up commercial office buildings in the city, along with casinos and shopping plazas in Las Vegas (and a mansion once leased to singer Michael Jackson), has a checkered legal history,” noted sfweekly.com. “Per ABC 7, Brugnara pleaded guilty to “filing false tax returns, failing to report $45 million in capital gains, and violating the Endangered Species Act for poaching steelhead trout on his land in Gilroy.”

In May 2014, Brugnara was charged with mail fraud for refusing to pay for $11 million in art delivered to his Sea Cliff estate, Wikipedia added. “While awaiting trial on these charges, Brugnara was furloughed into the custody of his attorney, and escaped from the San Francisco federal courthouse. He was recaptured a week later in Los Gatos, California.”

Brugnara represented himself in the trial, which was tried before Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California. By the end of the trial Judge Alsup had sentenced Brugnara to 471 days in prison for contempt due to Brugnara’s conduct during the trial, including routinely ignoring Judge Alsup’s evidentiary and procedural rulings, yelling at witnesses, throwing tantrums, and insulting the government’s attorneys, including calling U.S. District Attorney Robin Harris a “Nazi” in front of the jury, Courthouse news reported. Brugnara was convicted on six of the nine counts he faced, and sentenced to seven years in prison

Brugnara made news once again, so to speak, in October of 2019 when his seven-bedroom, six-bathroom home with spectacular views of the Golden Gate bridge was listed for sale for $15 million through Sotheby’s. According to reports, Brugnara had purchased the property at 224 Sea Cliff Avenue through one of his companies in 2002 at a cost of $7 million.

“The home had been where comedian Cheech Marin lived while filming Nash Bridges, with a 2003 Forbes article describing the Hollywood figure’s art collection, hung on the home’s walls, as a trigger for Brugnara’s own artistic passion,” reported Australia’s domain.com.

By: Dr. Yvette Alt Miller

“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.”

That was the frank assessment of an internal report at Facebook’s corporate headquarters in 2018. The algorithms employed by Facebook – deciding what ads and posts we see based on our past behavior on the site – were designed to inflame our passions. If a user clicked on a political post, for instance, Facebook would suggest further reading a similar point of view, but with one crucial difference: the new suggested content would be of an ever more extreme nature. This would ensure that Facebook users would see “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.”

The report drew on two years of internal research and painted a troubling picture of social media users being manipulated to become ever more extreme and radical. In 2017, Facebook formed a committee called “Common Ground” made up of engineers and researchers to assess how divisive content was being shared on Facebook. What they found was deeply troubling. The algorithms governing Facebook’s user experience were designed to maximize “user engagement”. Success was judged by the length of time users spent on Facebook, the number of posts and articles they shared, and the number of “likes” and other reactions they clicked. The most effective way to do this, the committee found, was to feed users ever more extreme content.

Instead of acting on the internal report, Facebook experts shelved it. They felt that changing the algorithms would weaken the addictive hold that the site held for many of its users. The report was buried, and only reported recently by the Wall Street Journal.

This means that for years, billions who regularly use Facebook have been unwitting subjects in an experiment of mass radicalization. Our emotions have been manipulated, our dislikes and hatreds amplified, and we’ve been fed an ever-increasing diet of content that’s designed to provoke outrage. What’s the result? Just look around: it’s not hard to find division and hatred permeating every facet of modern society. While it’s hard to know exactly where all this bad feeling came from, viewing angry, screaming social media posts can hardly help.

It’s not only Facebook: a whole host of other media have found that stoking hatred and extreme views is a winning formula, racking up user engagement while diminishing our civility and stoking division. Just eight years ago in 2012, researchers at Emory University in Atlanta polled US voters and found that fewer than half felt deep anger towards candidates or voters from the other party. By 2016, that changed and nearly 70% of Americans reported feeling deep anger at those who supported candidates from the opposite political party.

“We find that as animosity toward the opposing party has intensified,” noted Stanford University researchers in 2018, “(anger) has taken on a new role as the prime motivator in partisans’ political lives… today it is out-group animus (hatred towards one’s political opponents) rather than in-group favoritism (supporting one’s favored candidate) that drives political behavior.”

Online hate is a “disease” that spreads according to Princeton Professor Joel Finkelstein, who studies extremism on the internet. He’s examined hate speech on American online message boards, and has found startling similarities between some popular American sites and radical Islamist message boards. In both cases, users exposed to divisive messages can become radicalized. In some cases, Dr. Finkelstein has found that radical content viewed online can mutate into the “real” world, motivating some people to commit hateful acts after viewing extreme content online.

The shooter in the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburg, who murdered eleven Jewish worshippers, and the attacker who shot fifty people in two mosques in New Zealand a few months later, both acted after viewing extremist content online on popular social media sites. “Both attackers were enmeshed in online communities that exposed them to content designed to make them hateful and potentially violent,” Dr. Finkelstein found.

Extremist content is poisoning the current atmosphere of protests and riots sparked by the murder of George Floyd. “On Twitter and Facebook,” the New York Times recently reported, “hundreds of posts are circulating” providing distorted, hateful and flat out wrong information and conspiracy theories, fanning the flames of mistrust and hatred. Social media posts about George Floyd surged in the days after his death. Nearly nine million posts mentioned him in a given day: that’s more than the number of social media posts that mentioned pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong (1.5 million) or the Yellow Vest protests that rocked France last year (just under a million mentions on social media per day at its peak). Many of these posts were inflammatory, stirring up yet more hatred and ill feelings.

With the aid of social media, we’re increasingly talking past each other, demonizing our perceived opponents and embracing extremism and anger. While it’s not easy to resist the siren lure of ever more extreme social media, there are few concrete steps we can take today that offer a powerful antidote to the current stew of anger, recrimination and outrage that many of us view daily online and elsewhere.

1. Get off social media.

Heavy social media use is associated with poor mental health. One large study found that people who spent more time on social media were three times as likely as people who were “light” users of social media to be depressed. Social Media use was “significantly” associated with increased depression. Another study found that young people who interacted with social media for two hours a day or more were much more likely to rate their mental health as “poor” than those who used social media only occasionally or not at all.

Interacting with people in the real world is much more satisfying – and can protect us from viewing extreme content online. Try turning off social media; consider taking a week-long detox. Shabbat is a reprieve from social media and other electronics.

2. Be a more discerning media consumer.

“When people are fearful they seek information to reduce uncertainty,” explains Stanford Communications Professor Jeff Hancock, who has studied the role of extreme and misleading social media posts in the current coronavirus pandemic. “This can lead people to believe information that may be wrong or deceptive because it helps make them feel better, or allows them to place blame about what’s happening” elsewhere, he warns. With so many people fearful and anxious about the state of the world today, radical social media posts can offer a reassuringly simple lens through which to view current events.

Instead of blindly accepting extreme posts, take the time to look where they came from. Are they from a reputable source? Can you verify them elsewhere? A few weeks ago a friend of mine posted a long article on Facebook purporting to be from a medical expert at a major hospital; to my friend’s chagrin, it turned out the author of the article didn’t exist, and much of the information contained in it was wrong. Sadly, that’s the case with many social media posts.

Prof. Hancock suggests subscribing to a few reputable news sources and getting our news from there. If a story looks interesting on social media, check it out on mainstream news sites to make sure they’re true and to get a background to the story.

3. Take the time to listen to other people’s points of view.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks likes to tell the story of attending a conference years ago. After the first day, his wife asked him how it was going. “The speaking is brilliant,” he told her; “the listening is nonexistent.” It’s all too easy to assume that we know what other people are going to say, or to dismiss our interlocutors. To truly learn and grow, however, we have to take the time to listen to others – to hear their stories and strive to understand their points of view.

This isn’t easy to do in the universe of social media of course, where loudness and brio are prioritized over real listening. But if we truly want to engage with other people, we have to take the time to truly pay attention to what they have to say and spend time imagining the world from other people’s points of view.

4. Watch your words.

Online words can have real world consequences. Connect Safely, a Silicon Valley organization that helps monitor social media use, has noted that Facebook and other social media sites frequently contain offensive words and phrases used to demonize ethnic minorities and other social groups. Words like “animals”, “garbage”, “trash”, “invaders” and calling people names of insects or diseases dehumanize groups of people online.

Make a decision not to use these terms and only speak about people respectfully. This can go a long way in helping to keep online exchanges civil, and tone down the outrage in social media posts.

(Aish.com)

By “giving educators the tools they need to teach about the Holocaust and the dangers of anti-Semitism and hate, I believe we can stop anti-Semitism before it starts,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), who introduced the newly signed Never Again Education Act in the U.S. House of Representatives.

By: Jackson Richman

Amid the rise in anti-Semitism in the United States and abroad, President  Trump signed the Never Again Education Act into law on Friday as part of Jewish American Heritage Month, one month after the 75th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany.

The story behind the passage of this landmark legislation is one that transcended the usual partisan politics of Washington, D.C., bringing together Jewish and Christian groups, and liberal and conservative lawmakers in a rare display of bipartisanship to have a measurable impact on awareness and understanding of the ramifications of the Holocaust.

“Unfortunately, we have an seen a significant spike in anti-Semitic attacks and vandalism over the past few years, and these undeniably disturbing events spurred action,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), who introduced the bill in the House and who has waged a multi-decade effort to pass such legislation.

Citing an Anti-Defamation League report released this month that showed that 2019 consisted of the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents in four decades, she said that “both sides of the aisle saw how urgent this is, and this bill was bipartisan from the start.”

The new law seeks to expand the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s education programming to teachers nationwide, requiring the museum to develop and disseminate resources to improve awareness and understanding of the Holocaust and its lessons.

There will be $2 million allocated annually for this year and each of over the next four years to the Holocaust Education Assistance Program Fund, administered by the USHMM’s governing body, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. Private donations for the fund would also be permitted.

Maloney,  the 13-term lawmaker who represents New York’s 12th Congressional District, noted her experience as a former educator played a role in pushing for the bill whereby “education is a key tool in fighting all forms of hate and bigotry, and by reaching children in the classroom, we can make sure they learn understanding and acceptance rather than discrimination.”

Anti-Semitism must not only be punished but also prevented, she said. By “giving educators the tools they need to teach about the Holocaust and the dangers of anti-Semitism and hate, I believe we can stop anti-Semitism before it starts,” said Maloney.

‘Support was built inch by inch’

The bill had the support of “more than 50 national organizations and more than 250 local partners,” according to Maloney, who credited the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Hadassah and the Jewish Federations of North America as “instrumental” in getting the legislation passed.

Hadassah CEO and executive director Janice Weinman told JNS that she attended the New York Congressional Breakfast hosted by the New York Jewish Community Relations Council in early 2018.

“I heard Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney speak about her nearly 20-year fight to strengthen Holocaust education, and I knew this was the prescription America needed to guarantee the promise of ‘Never Again,’ ” said Weinman. “And I knew it was right for Hadassah to lead the effort because we are a Zionist organization with a large national membership that believes in the power of information and education to change the world.”

“Our national president, volunteers around the country and I talked about Never Again everywhere we went for the next year-and-a-half,” she continued. “And everyone was energized by the possibility that this bill could one day become the law of the land if we fought hard enough. And fight we did.”

Hadassah director of government relations Karen Barall told JNS that Hadassah appealed to the organization’s 300,000 members and other Jewish groups.

“We started to invite representatives from other large organizations to meetings Hadassah was arranging on Capitol Hill, and our first targets were the 55 co-sponsors from the previous Congress,” she said. “Support was built inch by inch, one office at a time, and was supplemented by a grassroots effort.”

“Before and after meetings, Hadassah chapters from the representative’s district would organize to contact their offices expressing their support for the bill. Their phone calls, emails and social-media posts certainly helped to solidify support. It took more than a year to reach 300 co-sponsors, and Hadassah engaged nearly all of them one way or another.”

Ultimately, the bill had 302 co-sponsors in the Democratic-led House—205 Democrats and 97 Republicans.

While garnering support in the House, Hadassah recruited Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), who was very responsive to our request from the start” and, meeting with Republican senators, got a receptive audience in Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.).

“North Dakota does not have a large Jewish population, but Senator Cramer didn’t see this as a Jewish issue,” said Weinman. “He saw this as an American issue.”

Rosen and Cramer were joined by Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

Rosen told JNS that the Senate vote happened after “significantly increasing the number of co-sponsors of the bipartisan Senate bill and laying the groundwork for the House bill to clear committee and receive a vote from the full Senate.”

The Senate version was slightly different from the U.S. House of Representatives one, which the Senate ultimately passed, in that the former had the U.S. Department of Education—and not the USHMM—oversee the expansion of Holocaust education in the United States.

Fulfilling the promise of ‘Never Again’

As to Rosen being the leading sponsor of the bill, she pointed to her time when she was president of Congregation Ner Tamid in Nevada, where she “heard the stories of so many Holocaust survivors, stories of resilience in the face of certain death, stories of loss as so many were taken from us.”

After first being elected to Congress in 2017, first as a congresswoman from Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District, “I asked myself, what can I do as a legislator to fulfill the promise of the words ‘Never Again’ and ensure that they mean Never Again for anyone? I truly believe that education is the most powerful tool we have in the fight against hate and bigotry.”

Other groups that lobbied for the bill—an effort that included being in contact with congressional offices—included Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress), the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) and the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC).

JFNA worked “closely with Jewish communal agencies to connect with Holocaust survivors and encourage them to sign on to a letter in support of the bill. This grassroots effort collected more than 1,800 signatures from survivors in 38 states—350 community groups from every single state helped galvanize political support,” JFNA spokesperson Rebecca Dinar told JNS.

For example, in Southeast Florida’s Broward County, which is “home to one of the largest concentrations of Holocaust survivors,” Evan Goldman, vice president for community planning and government relations at the Jewish Federation of Broward County, “spearheaded the local effort to engage survivors in signing the online letter” and “emphasized the importance of collaboration in making it happen,” according to Dinar.

In Chicago, where there’s a large community of Holocaust survivors, Yonit Hoffman, director of Holocaust Community Services at CJE SeniorLife—a Federation-funded agency that serves 1,700 survivors on a regular basis—led the effort to garner 452 signatures onto the letter.

“We do lots of education, training and advocacy around their stories, which are less heard and less represented in museums and other educational settings,” she told JFNA for a story on their website.

The RJC’s legislative affairs committee “wrote to every Republican in Congress urging them to co-sponsor the bill,” the organization’s spokesperson, Neil Strauss, told JNS.

“Once the House passed its version of the bill, we began visiting Republican Senate offices, usually joined by colleagues from Hadassah and other groups supporting the bill, but we were forced to shift to most advocacy via email” due to the coronavirus pandemic making in-person meetings “impossible,” said Strauss.

The RJC put such an emphasis on the importance of the bill that the organization even withdrew its support for the four House Republicans who voted against it.

Reps. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Tom Rice (R-S.C.) and Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) cited conservative dogma on spending and the need to have small-sized government.

In response to Norman and Arrington, RJC executive director Matt Brooks told Jewish Insider that “there comes a time when you have to take votes that go beyond process. And, I think, especially now with this time of rising anti-Semitism in the U.S. and around the world, the symbolism of this and the importance of the government standing up and showing its support for Holocaust education outweighs any process concerns.”

Brooks noted that others in the Republican caucus may have had similar misgivings or concerns about this process, but “they did the right thing, and looked beyond that to stand up against anti-Semitism and to stand with the Jewish community. So we remain disappointed in their votes. We think that they voted absolutely the wrong way on that, no matter how they want to justify it.”

At the end of the day, said Brooks, “we don’t think that this vote is a reflection of their views on anti-Semitism, but it makes it so that we will not be supporting any of those individuals going forward.”

The Anti-Defamation League, in addition to its lobbying efforts, had an action alert on its website in order to allow people to better engage with members of Congress about the matter, ADL CEO and national director Jonathan Greenblatt told JNS.

Meanwhile, “AJCongress has always supported legislation promoting Holocaust education,” Akri Cipa, a policy analyst at the organization, told JNS.

Cipa cited a Pew Research study in January that only “strengthened” his organization’s “conviction” over the need for the Never Again Education Act.

The study showed that less than half of Americans, some 45 percent, know that 6 million Jews perished in the Holocaust, while 29 percent weren’t sure or had no answer. (Simultaneously, 69 percent of respondents correctly said that the Holocaust was between the years 1930 and 1950, while 63 percent of respondents correctly defined the Nazi-created ghettos as “parts of town where Jews were forced to live.”)

  (JNS.org)