In early February, days after a Palestinian terrorist opened fire in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Neve Yaakov, killing seven Israeli Jews, Israel’s newly appointed Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli ordered his staff to put together a primer showing how Palestinian schools in the West Bank and Gaza Strip celebrated the attack. The four-page report, which was filled with images of Palestinian schoolchildren from Hebron in the West Bank to Rafah in the Gaza Strip proudly displaying photographs of the assailant in celebratory ceremonies, was sent out to a long list of foreign ambassadors and dignitaries based in Israel with the aim of highlighting how the Palestinian leadership encourages the murder of innocent Jews. “They need to be named and shamed,” Chikli told Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash in a wide-ranging interview last week. 

BDS battle: “The Palestinians are the ones who need to be banned, they are the ones who need to be divested from, they are the ones who need to be delegitimized – it’s ridiculous that we need to even explain this.” Tackling the worldwide Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) efforts against Israel was added to the Diaspora Affairs Ministry’s portfolio when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set up his new government two months ago, and Chikli, who also serves as minister of social equality in that government, said he is determined to flip the approach in an attempt to defeat what he calls the most “antisemitic movement on the face of earth.” “The goal is to move to their side of the playing field, to stop being defensive and to go on the offensive,” he told JI. “It is the Palestinian Authority that must be delegitimized, they are the ones who need to be banned.”

Background: Chikli, 41, first made national headlines in 2021 as a firebrand instigator in the then-incoming government of former Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. Newly elected to the Knesset as part of Bennett’s right-wing Yamina party, Chikli declared that he would not support the new coalition, which was made up of a broad range of political parties, including, for the first time, an Arab faction, because he said the move contradicted campaign promises. His constant opposition to multiple policies and proposals over the first year, was what, in part, led to the government’s eventual downfall.

Reforming his approach: Ousted from Bennett’s party and initially banned from running for a Knesset seat in the last election, Chikli sought refuge in Netanyahu’s Likud party. His resistance had gained him admiration in right-wing circles, and Netanyahu eventually rewarded him by appointing him to head the ministry that engages and liaises with the Diaspora, despite Chikli’s having expressed hardline views against Reform Judaism in the past and also having made clear his support for controversial and sensitive reforms to the Law of Return – the immigration legislation that grants anyone with a single Jewish grandparent the right to seek Israeli citizenship. Chikli’s past criticism of Reform Jews in Israel appears to have softened slightly. During his short time in office, he has met with a wide array of Jewish American community leaders, including the head of the Reform movement in the U.S., Rabbi Rick Jacobs.

Criticism of Israel: On Saturday night, Jacobs became the first Diaspora Jewish leader to address Israel’s anti-government, anti-judicial reform protesters in Tel Aviv, saying that Diaspora Jews “are with you to fight the threats to Israel’s democracy.” His comments followed a similar sentiment expressed last week in an open letter sent to the Israeli government by the Jewish Federations of North America, which also expressed concern that the government’s plans might harm Israeli democracy. “Criticism is OK,” Chikli said. “I don’t think that these letters are negative. We are reading them all and listening to the voices, but in the end, unlike the grandchild clause in the Law of Return, it is eventually an inner political debate.” Chikli, however, was not so generous with his patience in his response to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides, who said in a recent interview that the Biden administration had been urging Netanyahu to “pump the brakes” on efforts to reform the judiciary. “The ambassador is not the federation, that is diplomacy,” explained the minister, who publicly chided Nides in a national radio interview last week. 

Read the full interview here.

Despite past disagreements with the Jewish community — most recently in 2021 over Iron Dome funding — Kentucky Jewish leaders expressed hope to Jewish Insider‘s Marc Rod that Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) will support efforts to combat antisemitism as the new ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

History: Rabbi Shlomo Litvin, the chairman of the Kentucky Jewish Council, told JI “that there have been many times where Dr. Paul supported our community” in response to antisemitic incidents, noting specifically that the senator was one of the first lawmakers to speak out out following an attack on pro-Israel students at Duke University, Paul’s medical school alma mater. “The fact that he’s willing to speak out on those issues, I think, is tremendously valuable,” Litvin said. “I think unfortunately a lot of people get caught up on the issues that we disagree on.”

Founding values: In response to emailed questions from JI about his plans for combating antisemitism as ranking member on the committee, Paul referenced America’s founding values. “George Washington provided perhaps the most inspirational statement on religious freedom in America and wrote that all possess alike liberty of conscience and that our government gives to bigotry no sanction,” Paul said in a statement. “As Ranking Member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, I will continue my work to protect religious freedom. Ensuring Americans across Kentucky and the nation are safe in their right to worship remains of utmost importance.”

Moving forward: It’s unclear whether Paul — who was outspoken last year against legislation supported by the Jewish community to combat domestic terror threats — would support new legislation to combat antisemitic threats and help secure community institutions. “We would probably disagree that we need more funding towards things like hate crimes legislation,” Melanie Maron Pell, the American Jewish Committee’s chief field operations officer, who lives in Kentucky, said. “I think he would see that as unnecessary and we think more resources need to be directed toward this. We think more resources need to be directed towards protecting Jewish communities and Jewish institutions.”

Iran angle: In an area of greater friction with the Jewish community, Paul blocked a resolution expressing support for Iranian anti-regime protesters from passing by a fast-track process in the Senate late last year. The resolution also called on the U.S. to work with European allies to crack down on malign activities being operated out of Iranian diplomatic missions, with the aim of shutting them down. Litvin said he hadn’t had a specific meeting with Paul about the Iran legislation, but said that Paul has broadly “not always been supportive of the idea of sanctions and the success of sanctions” in past conversations about Iran policy.

Read the full story here.

In a wide-ranging television interview with Piers Morgan last week, Rep. George Santos (R-NY) floated a new claim to defend the widely debunked story he has told about his maternal grandparents, who, he insists, escaped Europe during World War II and settled in South America as Jewish refugees. Despite evidence to the contrary, Santos, 34, now maintains that this account holds up because his grandparents had, apparently unbeknown to immigration officials at the time, “falsified a lot of their documents to claim they were born” in Brazil after fleeing Nazi-occupied Belgium in 1940 or 1941, he said on “Piers Morgan Uncensored.” “We are talking about a time in history where this was a very common occurrence in the name of survival,” the embattled congressman proclaimed, introducing a previously uncited twist to the dubious immigration tale he sold to voters ahead of the midterms, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.

Rare cases: Presented with Santos’ latest assertion, meanwhile, Fábio Koifman, a historian who specializes in the entry of foreigners into Brazil during World War II, dismissed the suggestion that using falsified documents to find refuge abroad had in any way been widespread, particularly at a time when immigration to South America’s largest country was strictly controlled by an authoritarian regime. Koifman, an associate professor at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, said in an email to JI that he was only aware, for example, of a “single foreigner” who had arrived in Brazil with an invented name between 1937 and 1945, which coincided with a short-lived dictatorship known as the “Estado Novo.”

What’s in a name: In more than 25 years “studying cases exactly at this time,” said Koifman, a leading expert on the era, he has also found records of “German Jews with purchased passports” from Haiti and other countries, as well as falsified visas, all including real names. “They tried without much success” and “were soon discovered,” he told JI, citing a heightened “concern for ‘communist infiltration’ or with criminals and scammers” from the fascist-leaning government. If Santos’ grandparents had in fact claimed citizenship with forged papers, then the real or imagined names they used on their travel documents to leave Belgium would be readily searchable, Koifman averred, noting the difficulties associated with changing such information once in Brazil. “If they did not enter their own names,” asked Koifman, who carefully reconstructed Santos’ maternal lineage in December, “what names did they use?”

Genealogical work: Renee Steinig, a veteran genealogist on Long Island who has also closely examined Santos’ family tree, agreed that there is no compelling reason to believe Santos’ maternal grandparents hadn’t simply been natives of Brazil. Usually, she said, “forged records don’t make their way into government archives.” In a recent email exchange with JI, Steinig, who has worked with a group of genealogists in recent months to poke several holes in Santos’ biography, shared a link to what she characterized with near-certainty as the birth record of Santos’ grandmother, Rosalina Caruso Horta Devolder. The document, which has not previously been reported, is written in Portuguese and listed on FamilySearch, a free genealogical reference site maintained by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The digital record confirms that Rosalina was born in Niterói, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, in July 1927, as other sources have shown.

DNA drive: Santos has continued to claim Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side, most recently in his hour-long conversation with Piers Morgan a week ago. “This is the one that I will battle to my grave to the point that I’ve already ordered those DNA test kits,” he said. “I have done four of them so far, and I’m just waiting for their returns. And I’m very curious to share those with everybody.” Whatever their results, however, such tests would not explain how Santos’ grandparents could possibly have immigrated to Brazil from Europe, not least in possession of documents that he contends were deliberately forged. In the final accounting, there were “very few people who in that time managed to travel with false documents, unfortunately,” Koifman told JI. “If it were easy and worked,” the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust “would have been a few hundred smaller.”

Read the full story here.

Aharon Horwitz, an immigrant to Israel from Cleveland, thought he had a terrific startup idea that would give small- and medium-sized businesses the types of data tools used by global operations like Pizza Hut to track customers and build sales, Brian Blum reports for The Circuit. The Jerusalem-based company, dubbed 40 Nuggets, had moderate success with clients ranging from Israeli homebuilders to newsletter publishers, but Horwitz ultimately burned through his cash reserves. After a venture capital investor advised Horwitz to pivot back to the U.S. and focus on car dealerships, the business soon took off. Israel was far from his target market.

Raising funds: Rebranding the company as AutoLeadStar with the mission to “upend digital marketing” in the car industry, Horwitz has since raised $57 million and racked up close to 1,000 dealers in cities across the country from Manchester, N.H., to Tacoma, Wash. He has doubled revenue for each of the last three years. “No one wanted to talk to a company overseas,” Horwitz told The Circuit. “I got on a plane, flew to Cleveland, where I used family connections to get introductions. I essentially started volunteering. It was like I was interning at these car dealerships.” 

Competitors ailing: Horwitz’s business is making money and attracting investment at a time that others in the industry are struggling. The online automotive retailer Carvana, for example, saw its valuation plunge 98% in the last 18 months. One of its competitors in the U.S. market, Jerusalem-based Vroom, was trading at $1 a share in recent trading, a far cry from $65 in 2020. AutoLeadStar, on the other hand, managed to raise $40 million as recently as November, at a time when investment has been drying up for startups both in Israel and the U.S., forcing many companies to lay off employees and others to shut down entirely. 

Torrents of data: Horwitz never planned to get into the car business – he studied political science at Columbia University – and knew little about it when his key investor, PICO CEO Elie Wurtman, suggested in 2015 that his customer engagement software could fill a gap in the $1.5 trillion auto industry. The systems developed originally by 40 Nuggets were able to help smaller car dealers compete with the majors in compiling torrents of customer data, massaging it through artificial intelligence and automation tools, and generating the leads that produce repeat sales – now and years in the future. “It became quickly apparent that what we were developing was exactly what they were looking for,” Horwitz said in an interview at his office in Jerusalem’s Talpiot neighborhood, which is filled with repair shops and auto parts stores alongside higher-end shopping malls. Over time, he said, he “fell in love with the industry and with the potential there.”

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