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(JTA) — Did somebody related to the late Rabbi Yehiel Eckstein’s nonprofit pay an organization to take away criticism of his and his daughter’s salaries from the web?
That’s the query being raised by a latest Washington Put up investigation into the allegedly fraudulent actions of a agency that launders purchasers’ on-line reputations.
The big group Eckstein based, the Worldwide Fellowship of Christians and Jews, raises funds from evangelical Christians and different donors for impoverished Jews. It additionally facilitates Jewish emigration to Israel, together with from Ukraine. Eckstein based the group in 1983, and died in 2019.
However the concern of his compensation got here up final week in a Washington Put up expose about an organization that allegedly makes baseless claims to guard the reputations of public figures. The Put up reviewed almost 50,000 information of the corporate, Eliminalia, documenting its actions on behalf of just about 1,500 purchasers over six years. Some paid greater than $200,000 for the corporate’s providers.
Within the Eckstein case, Eliminalia is accused of demanding that the publishing platform WordPress erase two weblog posts criticizing Yechiel and Yael Eckstein’s salaries as extreme, on the fraudulent foundation that the posts have been plagiarized from different sources.
The weblog posts have been written by Geri Ungurean, whom the Put up identifies as a 71-year-old retiree in Maryland, and who additionally seems to determine as a “Jewish Christian.” Each posts, revealed in 2015 and 2018, have been titled “Why Christians ought to Not Give Cash to Rabbi Eckstein of IFCJ.”
Publicly accessible tax paperwork present Eckstein’s whole compensation in 2018 was greater than $700,000, and that his daughter Yael Eckstein, who then served as govt vp, earned greater than $400,000. In 2019, the 12 months the elder Eckstein died, his whole compensation jumped to roughly $3 million, which an IFCJ spokesperson, Shavit Greenberg, mentioned was as a consequence of a loss of life profit paid out to his widow. The nonprofit’s income in each years exceeded $100 million. A Haaretz article revealed in 2017 additionally questioned the scale of Yechiel Eckstein’s wage.
The highest salaries of Jewish nonprofit executives and their staff has lengthy been a subject of dialogue and concern amongst Jewish teams. In 2017, the Ahead counted 18 CEOs who have been incomes greater than half 1,000,000 {dollars}. The introduction to the survey mentioned that because the Ahead’s earlier survey of CEO compensation, “the gender hole at Jewish non-profits has solely widened and some non-profit executives are receiving extraordinary payouts.” This 12 months, a survey of Jewish nonprofit staff by Main Edge, which focuses on office tradition at Jewish teams, discovered that fewer than half of respondents mentioned their “wage is truthful relative to related roles at my group.”
In an announcement to the Jewish Telegraphic Company, Greenberg mentioned the group “has by no means engaged Eliminalia or any agency that engages in unethical practices.”
Greenberg’s assertion added that the group couldn’t say whether or not Yehiel Eckstein paid for the service himself — although it didn’t rule that risk out. If Eckstein did have a task in hiring Eliminalia, it will have been effectively earlier than the corporate’s alleged exercise on his behalf befell: The Put up article made clear that Eliminalia was employed on the Ecksteins’ behalf in 2020, greater than a 12 months after the elder Eckstein died.
“If there’s a document of Rabbi Eckstein making such fee over 5 years in the past, it was a private choice made utterly unbiased of The Fellowship,” Greenberg mentioned. “Rabbi handed in 2019 and is the one one in a position to touch upon the alleged fee to Eliminalia.”
Requested concerning the discrepancy in dates, Greenberg wrote through e mail, “The Fellowship nor our present president has ever engaged with Eliminalia and had by no means heard of the corporate till the article.”
The Put up wrote the expose with the help of Forbidden Tales, a Paris-based consortium of investigative journalists. Forbidden Tales had obtained inner paperwork detailing Eliminalia’s strategies. Eliminalia didn’t reply to the Put up’s requests for remark, citing “enterprise secrecy.”
Eliminalia’s methods, in keeping with the Put up, embrace burying detrimental tales in search outcomes by supplanting them with constructive ones from pretend information websites — a follow that media watchdogs see as unethical, however not unlawful. What is against the law is one other follow: making false claims to internet hosts that content material on their websites has been beforehand revealed by different shops, and is subsequently copyright protected and ought to be erased.
That, in keeping with the Put up, is how Eliminalia approached WordPress about Ungurean’s weblog in 2020. Two firms claimed copyright of Ungurean’s 2015 and 2018 weblog entries. In keeping with the Put up article, these firms present no signal of current aside from to make these claims.
Eliminalia was paid roughly $6,400 for the motion, the Put up reported. Ungurean shared emails with the Put up from Automattic, WordPress’s mother or father firm, that mentioned the corporate ignored the requests, discovering them suspect.
Nonetheless, the 2015 publish disappeared. The 2018 publish is nonetheless on-line. Automattic informed Ungurean that somebody utilizing her log-in erased the 2015 publish in January 2022. Ungurean informed the Put up she didn’t erase her content material and believes her account was hacked.
The Put up in contrast two searches on Yahoo for “Yael Eckstein wage,” one in October 2020 and one from final month. On the 2020 search, the 2018 weblog publish by Ungurean reveals up fifth; final month’s search didn’t flip up the weblog publish in its first 100 entries. Among the many high posts, nevertheless, is an commercial entitled “Yael Eckstein: Wage, Spending and the Non-Revenue Double Normal,” wherein the youthful Eckstein posits that non-profit executives ought to get salaries commensurate with the for-profit sector.
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