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(MAY 3, 2022 / JNS) Israel has been suffering rising terror attacks from its enemies on multiple fronts these past few weeks. Palestinian Arab and Bedouin Islamist terrorists murdered 15 innocent Jews and others in cold blood. The Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and ISIS are inciting more terror with calls to “escalate confrontation with the Israeli occupation and force it to retreat from Palestinian soil.” Hamas is “celebrating” Ramadan by firing rockets from Gaza into southern Israel. Palestinian Arab factions are firing rockets from Lebanon into northern Israel. Palestinian Arabs vandalized and set fire to Joseph’s Tomb, a sacred Jewish religious site. Arab rioters are throwing rocks, pipes and fireworks at Jewish worshipers and police at the Western Wall and Temple Mount.
Outrageously, compounding this suffering, nineteen rabbis of the far-left “T’ruah” organization are attacking pro-Israel Jewish charities that help Israeli families victimized by Palestinian Arab terror. The 19 T’ruah rabbis just went public with their defamatory June 2021 letter demanding that the New York Jewish Communal Fund should stop allowing grants to the humanitarian Central Fund of Israel (CFI). Stopping such grants would harm the 350 wonderful charities funded by CFI.
T’ruah has actually been waging war against pro-Israel charities for years, including by filing complaints demanding revocation of the tax-exempt status of pro-Israel Jewish charities (including CFI).
T’ruah’s rabbis are thus making common cause with the anti-Israel squad’s efforts to persuade the IRS to remove pro-Israel charities’ tax exemption (which would constitute illegal viewpoint discrimination). In July 2021, seven notorious Israel-hating Democratic Congressional squad members – Rashida Tlaib (MI), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Cori Bush (MO), André Carson (IN), Mark Pocan (WI), Ayanna Pressley (MA) and Betty McCollum (MN) – wrote to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen demanding revocation of the tax exempt status of pro-Israel Jewish charities that provide humanitarian aid, if some of the aid helps Jews in the lawful, historic Jewish homelands of Judea/Samaria and Jerusalem. The anti-Israel squad’s letter specifically targeted CFI and American Friends of Beit El Yeshiva (previously headed by former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman).
T’ruah’s and the Squad’s harassment and malicious defamation of pro-Israel Jewish charities is an utter outrage. It is also disappointing that JTA published a one-sided article repeating defamatory claims in T’ruah’s letter.
We investigated publicly available information and spoke with CFI’s president, to provide readers with the following facts:
CFI’s Important Humanitarian Work:
The Central Fund of Israel’s over 350 grantees include: groups dedicated to caring for special needs persons; special needs children’s scholarships; nutrition; poverty relief; combating ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease); battered women shelters and assistance; other women’s assistance; helping Ethiopians and other vulnerable groups obtain jobs; providing facts about Israel; helping bereaved mothers, fathers, widows, orphans and siblings who have lost loved ones to terror and other tragedies to rebuild their lives and create meaning out of suffering; a chicken fund to provide chickens to the needy; a news agency which provides accurate information; aid for Israeli expellees from Gush Katif (in Gaza) who are still suffering; funds for purchasing land; security; medical organizations; humanitarian needs of soldiers; rabbinic training; and meals for the needy elderly.
All this is what the T’ruah’s rabbis would stop.
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