Charity: Where Did All That Evangelical Money Go?Laura Schlessinger/Olmert`s
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Evangelical Money Go?
Foundation never spent a significant amount of funds raised in
American South for Israeli terror victims in 2002.
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Thursday, July 17, 2008
With some 53,000 residents in the state’s rural north-central
flatlands, Monroe, La., is not the kind of town that would normally
expect to play host to the mayor of Jerusalem. But in October 2002,
Ehud Olmert came to the county seat of Ouachita Parish to urge 500 to
1,000 Evangelical Christians to give, and give generously, to support
victims of terrorism in the Holy City he then governed.
The vehicle Olmert offered for their donations was the New Jerusalem
Foundation (NJF) — a charitable organization he had established as
mayor two years earlier to fund civic projects in Jerusalem with
philanthropic money and municipal cooperation.
Now, three members of the charity’s board, including Olmert, have come
under the investigative lamp of Israel’s National Fraud Unit for their
complex financial relationships.
And the charity’s own financial peculiarities may be part of a broader
story.
Long Island resident Morris Talansky, NJF’s U.S. treasurer, is already
the focus of intense attention after testifying that he gave Olmert
envelopes stuffed with $150,000 in cash. And this week the Israeli
daily Ha’aretz reported that Joseph Elmaleh, another board member,
gave Olmert a low-interest loan of $75,000 in 1993 – now worth
$150,000 – that the current prime minister never repaid. At the time,
Olmert sat on the board of a company Elmaleh led, and joined other
board members in approving huge and controversial salaries and options
for him.
In Monroe, of course, Olmert’s audience knew none of this. They were
just giddy with the exciting improbability of the visit.
“It was a big event,” recalled Mike Downhour, a local Christian radio
broadcaster who helped organize the Monroe gathering. “They brought in
one of the largest security details I’ve ever seen here.”
And this was just part of the extensive speaking tour Olmert conducted
that year. At mega-churches in Marietta, Ga., San Diego and Irving,
Texas, Olmert called on audiences to donate to his new foundation to
support victims of terrorism, during the height of the Second
Intifada.
Olmert’s partner on this road trip was Rev. Mike Evans, an
apocalyptic, Jewish-born Pentecostal preacher with a history of
proselytizing Jews and a gospel describing mass Jewish death at the
imminent End of Days. Together, the two of them appear to have raised
nearly $1 million.
But today, the current general director of the New Jerusalem
Foundation acknowledges that much of this money was never spent on the
terror victims on whose behalf it was raised.
“We’re in negotiations regarding what to do with [these funds],” said
Pinchas Weil, who succeeded an Olmert aide to the post two years ago.
Weil declined to say exactly how much remained unspent, but said it
was “more than 2 million shekels [$602,000].”
“We got millions of shekels for victims of terrorism,” he said. “But
we didn’t spend all of the money. We didn’t need it. The terror wave
stopped. We basically raised a lot more money than we needed for
this.”
That might be news to Israeli victims in need of long-term counseling
for post-traumatic stress, amputees with ongoing medical needs or even
recent victims of rocket attacks in Sderot, near the Gaza border.
But a two-month investigation by The Jewish Week has found many
financial anomalies in the operation of the New Jerusalem Foundation
and its American fundraising arm.
It was Talansky’s testimony last May that set off the original outcry
in Israel that has imperiled Olmert’s tenure and intensified a police
investigation into his financial dealings.
Olmert says the funds Talansky gave him were for political campaigns,
and not personal use. Talansky, testifying in Israel this week, failed
to return a phone call seeking comment on this story.
But while much attention has focused on what Olmert did with this
money, relatively little attention has been paid to where Talansky may
have gotten it.
It could not be learned whether Israeli investigators were looking
into the affairs of the charity as part of their Olmert corruption
probe. But The Jewish Week found, among other things, that:
• NJF’s annual reports with the Government of Israel’s Charities
Registrar show millions of dollars less in contributions than what its
officials told the press it had collected at the time.
• NJF’s U.S. arm reported transferring to Israel some $271,000 more
than the Israeli operation reported receiving between 2003 and 2006.
• The foundation’s U.S. arm, incorporated in 1999, did not hold board
meetings in which its trustees could approve funding decisions, as
required by U.S. law.
• NJF officials acknowledged to the Charities Registrar that it had
kept more than $1.15 million in 2004 contributions off its books,
saying it had instead channeled this money directly into charitable
projects of its choosing.
• The foundation’s U.S. fundraising arm failed to disclose to the
Internal Revenue Service its ties to the Jerusalem operation, as
required by law, and the salary of its Jerusalem director general,
Olmert aide and fundraiser Zvi Raviv. According to Israel Charities
Registry files,
Raviv received steady salary increases leading to $136,000 in
compensation in 2006.
Nevertheless, Raviv states adamantly, “My salary has not changed by
one cent since I became director of the NJF.”
William Josephson, a former chief of the New York State Charities
Bureau, informed of The Jewish Week’s findings, said, “Were this a New
York State charity, its performance would certainly bear inquiry,
perhaps even investigation.”
Raviv stepped down from his NJF post in 2006, three years after Olmert
left the mayor’s office to become a national cabinet member and then
prime minister. Weil, his successor, was appointed by current
Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski. But Weil cut all ties to the group’s
U.S. branch after he came into office. And records in New Hampshire,
where NJF is incorporated, show the U.S. group dissolved itself in
March 2006.
Setting Up A Foundation
http://www.israelenews.com/view.asp?ID=2665
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Laura Schlessinger
http://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/xero/xero_71904.html