November 19, 2008
ODESSA, Ukraine (JTA)—Across the former Soviet Union, Chabad’s outreach network is facing an acute financial crisis that has slashed budgets across the board and left the region’s largest network of Jewish schools scrambling to stay afloat.
Accounts of the depth of the financial crisis for Chabad in the former Soviet Union vary widely among rabbis and professionals working for the organization. But everyone agrees that the group’s main benefactor, Lev Leviev, racked by the world financial crisis, has been forced to dramatically scale back funding for the Or Avner network of schools, which he founded.
The repercussions of the setback run deep in a community that has relied greatly on Leviev’s largesse to proliferate its operations throughout the Soviet Union.
Leviev’s main holding company, Africa Israel, has lost some 85 percent of its value this year. Israeli news reports suggest a steady sell-off of other assets in recent months.
Forbes estimated Leviev’s wealth at the beginning of 2008 at $4.5 billion. Though local Chabad officials are mum, most estimates put Leviev’s yearly funding of the Chabad-run Federation of Jewish Communities and the Or Avner Foundation at $60 million. The Or Avner school system was founded by Leviev in 1992 as a tribute to his father. It serves 13,000 people through its network of 75 day schools and 20 other programs.
Leviev’s woes come as the global financial crisis takes particular hold in the two largest countries of the former Soviet Union—Russia and Ukraine. The crisis has hit the region’s oligarchs the hardest and drastically reduced the pool of capital available for local charitable donations.
Share prices on the Russian stock exchange have fallen 75 percent since May, and the oligarchs have been the hardest hit so far. Their net worth has fallen from $300 billion in May to just over $70 billion today, according to an article in the leading Russian business daily Vedomosti.
The financial crisis has constricted all the usual pipelines through which Jewish money flows into the former Soviet Union to educate the young, feed the infirm and bolster community ties.
The two other networks of schools in the region, the secular ORT system and the Orthodox Shma Yisrael, have suffered from cutbacks undertaken by the Jewish Agency for Israel. Shma Yisrael has lost $200,000 in funding and the ORT schools are struggling through a budget cut of $1.2 million in recent months, according to ORT officials.
Two of the largest local funders of Jewish causes in Ukraine, Igor Kolomoysky and Gennady Bogolubov, also have lost billions since the financial crisis hit, according to a report by Dragon Capital published in the Kyiv Post.
Here in Odessa, the southwest limit of Chabad’s reach in the former Soviet Union, the head rabbi has already relegated Leviev’s charity to the past tense, a luxury no longer to be relied upon.
"The help that Mr. Leviev gave, it was unique help. It was stable and every month you knew the foundation was good," Avraham Wolf said, sitting behind the desk of his office in the back corner of a two-story synagogue. "We were very thankful that he opened the schools. He gave us a big help. Now it depends on every city and every rabbi."
The rumblings of a coming crisis appeared in mid-August, Wolf said, and the money from the Or Avner Foundation stopped coming at the beginning of September.
He has closed one section of a school and started bussing children across town for classes. Four school branches are now consolidated into three with 490 students. They have shortened the hours of the schools. School directors across Ukraine described similar situations.
"You can’t tell a child that lives near you that tomorrow morning there won’t be a glass of milk," Wolf said, referring to the kosher breakfasts they serve each morning.
Thirteen Israeli families living and working in Odessa had gone without pay for two months because of budget shortfalls, he said.
Some employees of the Chabad-run Federation of Jewish Communities in Moscow also have been working with reduced or no salaries for two months, said one local community member with close ties to Chabad.
Ukraine is one step removed from Leviev’s funds, which are sent to local accounts from the Russian foundation, and that money stopped coming this fall, according to a Jewish community leader in Ukraine.
Russia’s head Chabad Rabbi Berel Lazar met with rabbis from across Ukraine in Kiev last week to discuss the financial crisis.
Speaking by phone Wednesday from New York where he was attending an annual gathering of Chabad emissaries, Lazar told JTA that the rabbis were determined to continue in the face of the crisis.
"They are going to places where there are no local sources to fund raise, and they are not giving up," Lazar said. "Our rabbis are standing out there, saying we’re not going to let the rebbe down," referring to the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who inspired Chabad’s emissary missions.
Rabbi Shmuel Kaminetsky, the head rabbi of the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk, said that last week the Or Avner schools in Ukraine received their first infusion of cash from the Moscow-based foundation in two months, though it wasn’t as much as the schools usually receive.
Both Chabad officials in Moscow and a spokesman for Leviev say that the funds have not stopped, rather that there has been a cut of 30 percent across the board. Leviev also has asked the Chabad-run Federation of Jewish Communities to cut costs, according to Chabad officials in Moscow.
Lazar said that rabbis had been told not to take out loans to cover the costs of their communities, because of credit rules and cultural norms in Russia that make credit more problematic.
He said the cuts came as no surprise to Chabad leaders in the former Soviet Union.
"Mr. Leviev was one of the first people that said it looks like the crisis is going to hit us and that we have to get ready it for it," Lazar said.
Chabad’s other major funders include Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and the New York-based philanthropist George Rohr. British newspapers abound with accounts that, in the wake of the financial crisis, a cash-strapped Abramovich has been forced to cut back the budget for his Chelsea soccer team, but Chabad representatives would not disclose drops in funding from other donors.
In Ukraine, a collapse of the commodities market forced the country to seek a $16.5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund this month. There, Ukraine’s oligarchs have born the brunt of the collapse as well.
Kaminetsky said that even the billionaires themselves had no idea how much they had lost and that their commitments had not changed.
Vadim Rabinovich, a Ukrainian media magnate and donor, said during a panel on fundraising in October that he hoped to meet with rabbis to discuss the financial crisis and its impact on Jewish education.
In Ukraine, each Chabad rabbi is more reliant on his own efforts to find local or international sources to fund community projects. There has been no head Chabad rabbi for the country since the post was vacated in September.
Russia has a more centralized model built on the fund-raising contacts of the Moscow-based federation that are then distributed to communities.
Whether the funds have been completely frozen or slashed by a third, the Chabad-run federations of both countries have been forced to tighten their belts and make cuts.
David Mondshine, the head of the Or Avner Foundation, said that schools had been consolidated, hours had been shortened and some programs had been pared down in recent months.
Funds from larger and richer communities have been diverted to smaller schools, he said. But in Ukraine, it’s been more difficult. One school in the town of Khmelnitsky has already shut down, though Chabad officials in Moscow said it was preparing to close anyway for lack of local support, and there may be more closings.
No rabbi wants to be the first to close the doors.
Showing posts with label Lev Leviev. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lev Leviev. Show all posts
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Sunday, December 30, 2007
A Lifestyles Exclusive: Lev Leviev The Benefactor
Lifestyles
BY GEORGE EDELSTEIN
NEW YORK, USA - For many, the name Lev Leviev is synonymous with the most beautiful and rare colored diamonds in the world. Lifestyles Magazine was granted an exlusive look recently at the man behind the image. What we saw was that Leviev, 51, is an active philanthropist, donating more than $50 million annually with a special and passionate commitment to Jewish causes and heritage, which has provided the spiritual compass in his life. "A lot of very rich men wait too long to give their money away," Leviev told The New York Times Magazine recently. "Bill Gates is a young man, and he's already giving to help the world, That's the right way to do it."
Leviev's philanthropy is an extension of who he is and what he can do, representing the art of the possible. Growing up as an impoverished immigrant in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, Leviev attended a yeshiva but only stayed for a few months; he readily admits that it wasn't in his destiny to become a rabbi like his father. He wanted to start a business. Soon after leaving yeshiva, he traveled to the headquarters of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in Brooklyn, New York, for guidance on whether to leave home and set out toward his goal.
"I spoke to the rebbe in Hebrew. I asked him, 'Should I go or not?' recalled Leviev in the Times. "He answered me in a kind of antique Russian. He said: 'Go. Go to Russia and do business, but don't forget to help the Jews. Remember your family tradition.”
More than three decades later, Leviev - a member of the Lubavitch community-has followed that advice.
As the chairman of the Leviev Croup of Companies, he heads a fast-growing multibillion-dollar global group of companies that encompasses diamonds, real estate, construction and infrastructure, energy, industries, financial services, tourism and leisure, telecommunications, fashion, and high-tech. He is ranked among the wealthiest men in the world and he is admired as the leading Israeli entrepreneur. But Leviev is also making a name for himself for his generosity.
Like his business ventures, Leviev's philanthropy is global. He is the president of the FJC (the Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS (Common-wealth of Independent States)), which supports Jewish communities in Russia and the CIS, Israel, Germany, and the United States, funding Jewish schools, synagogues, orphanages, as well as an international group of 10,000 employees and collaborators around the world. Leviev's philanthropic activities have also touched U.S. cultural institutions, such as the Musei of the City of New York, and U.S. char ties, such as the annual Angel Ball (which raises money for cancer research;, the Carousel of Hop Ball (one of the most prominent and influential charitable even of its kind), and Oxfam America.
Guiding Leviev's charity is a belief that philanthropy should build communities. In Queens New York, which is home to thousands of immigrants, Leviev has brought this community closer by founding educations ventures, inter alia, a school for 1,000 students. "All I want is for people in these places to know they are Jewish and to learn about their history," Leviev said in 2003. In the Ukrainian village of Zhitomir, Leviev rebuilt the area's only synagogue, restoring pride for the residents. And in Dresden, he established a school to educate nonreligious Jewish emigres about Judaism.
As one of his earlier philanthropic missions, Leviev established the Ohr Avner Foundation in 1992 in memory of his father Rabbi Avner Leviev, a leader ir the Bukharan Jewish community in Uzbekistan and Israel. The foundation, which has started over 100 schools, universities, kindergartens, and camps in former Soviet states and Easts European countries, is the largest supporter of the Jewish communities in the region.
Supporting the cultivation of Jewish culture has also been the aim of his work as president of the FJC. The group formed after the breakup of the Soviet Union to restore Jewish life and culture to Eastern Europe and represents 500 Jewish communities in the former Soviet republics and Eastern European countries. Like Ohr Avner, FJC funds schools, public kitchens, and orphanages in these communities. The schools, in particular, have helped to revive the Jewish community in an area where anti-jewish restrictions were prevalent prior to the fall of communism.
Leviev is also a generous giver to the Chabad-Lubavitch community, supporting the work of their shluchim (missionaries) who are sometimes sent to the farthest corners of the globe to establish communities where there is little or no Jewish life.
Lev Leviev’s career as a leader in the diamond industry started when his family escaped the yoke of Communism in Uzbekistan and moved to Israel in 1971. Leviev, then 15, took a job as an apprentice diamond cutter through a family friend. Although it was an industry tradition never to teach anyone all 11 steps of the diamond-cutting trade, Leviev was driven to learn and persuaded colleagues to teach him each step. Within six years of starting as a diamond cutter, he achieved his goal of working for himself. He set up his own diamond-cutting business and grew it to a dozen small factories. His success over the next decade caught the attention of De Beers, which invited Leviev to be among its 150 sight-holders—an elite group of individuals who have access to De Beers's diamond supply. Though considered a privilege to join the group, Leviev had bigger ambitions. In 1989, he seized an opportunity to purchase state-owned mines in Russia, It was the first of many mines he has purchased over his career.
With his own stones from his mines, he was no longer dependent on De Beers. Leviev streamlined the diamond process under his company— from "mines to misses" as he has been known to say. In 1995, he broke off from the De Beers Group and has since expanded his holdings in the industry. Leviev owns mines in Russia, Angola, Namibia, and other countries, and has the distinction of being the largest diamond cutter and polisher in the world, supplying several of the world's luxury jewelry brands with thousands of diamonds. In his own words, Leviev has said that "nothing is stable unless you own your own mines." When he spoke to Women's Wear Daily recently in a feature story announcing the new Leviev diamond boutique on Madison Avenue, he noted the importance of the diamond structure he has created; "We feel that our complete control from production to retail, entailing an unsurpassed inventory, coupled with extremely high levels of design, workmanship, and service, will place us in a unique position to market directly to serious diamond buyers."
The "crown jewel" of Leviev's work in the diamond industry has been Leviev diamonds. The brand has been chosen by celebrities like Drew Barrymore, Salma Hayek, as well as by cognoscenti. As a rigorous supporter of the U.N.-mandated Kimberly Process, which ensures that rough diamonds are not obtained from war-torn regions, Leviev has also upheld the industry's top standards. When the first Leviev store opened on Old Bond Street in London last spring, it caused a sensation. Newspapers called the store a blazing "fireworks display of colored diamonds." This fall it opened its 6,200-square-foot New York store with more than 4,000 carats of diamonds ranging from the purest whites to the deepest blues, and the most precious of all colored diamonds, green and red. According to Thierry Chaunu, the president and chief operating officer of Leviev, as in London, it contains more carats than all the other jewelers on Madison combined. "It's like building an extraordinary art collection," says Chaunu. "Just as you can't have just one beautiful painting, you can't have just one beautiful diamond, especially when it comes to colored diamonds."
The stores have been designed to have the feeling of a private salon, with a soft pink, cream, and platinum decor accented by crystal chandeliers. Other Leviev store openings in cities such as Dubai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris, and Beverly Hills will follow, but at a pace consistent with the brand's hyper-exclusivity.
All of this has made the public focus on Leviev and his diamonds. But Leviev continues to focus on the work his groups have done to improve communities and help them realize their Jewish heritage and faith "I am a believer; I believe in G-d. I believe that we, as people, have to do good acts." Indeed, in the Jewish community, there is a tradition that whatever charily one gives will be rewarded in multiples.
Leviev prefers to keep a low profile even as he is so active, attending global roundtables, like the World Economic Forum last year in Davos. He grants few interviews and though he circulates among world leaders like Russian president Vladimir Putin - whom he calls a "true friend"- he stays close to his home in Israel, where he lives in a modest house with his wife, Olga, and nearby their nine children and several grandchildren. Leviev likes to be the force behind change rather than the face of it. But there are times when Leviev can't escape the appreciation. He has been described as being in "a class by himself" when it comes to supporting the Jewish community. In 2004, when the government in Baku, Azerbaijan, threatened to close down all private schools – including a local Jewish school - because a growing number of madrassas were becoming influential in the area, Leviev flew to the city to speak with the Azerbaijani president and convinced him to keep the school open. It's actions such as this that have made Leviev a hero in many communities. When he returns to communities in the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, or anywhere else to visit philanthropical projects he funds, he receives a warm welcome. Last month, Leviev traveled to New York City to receive the Partners for Democracy
Award from the America-Israel Friendship League. The award recognizes individuals who have worked to develop the U.S.Israeli relationship.
Leviev works to transform the communities he reaches out to like the many stones he has transformed into jewels. He has stayed true to his faith and to the advice given him by the Luabavitcher Rebbe as he develops his businesses and expands his philanthropy. "In the Holy Book, King Solomon said a man is born to work hard, to maximize himself, and to achieve something," Leviev told the London Times last year. "I believe that if I can work hard, as the Holy Book says, and do good things for others with my money, that's my mission in life."
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Diamond Billionaire Takes New York
Lev Leviev, the Israeli diamond billionaire, had a busy schedule during his visit to New York this week.
On Sunday, he flew to New York to appear in front of 4,300 black-hatted Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis. The Uzbekistan-born Leviev, who made his fortune cracking the De Beers diamond cartel, is the most powerful lay leader of the Chabad movement’s rapidly growing branch in the former Soviet Union, and he was given a standing ovation by the gender-segregated crowd.
Two days later, Leviev was still wearing his yarmulke, but this time around he appeared in front of women in low-cut dresses who had come for the opening of LEVIEV, the magnate’s flagship American diamond retailer on Madison Avenue.
Asked by the Forward about moving between such different worlds, Leviev said: “It is nice to put these worlds together, to make money and then convert the money into the spiritual. That is why I make money.”
Leviev was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and immigrated with his family to Israel in 1971. He learned the diamond trade and, after coming up with an innovative method for processing diamonds, started his own diamond-polishing plant.
At the Chabad event, he spoke at length, in Hebrew, about the profound influence Chabad has had on both his personal and business philosophy. The late Chabad leader Menachem Schneerson blessed him, he said, when Leviev was a young man with no money to his name.
“I did better in every business venture since,” Leviev said.
His rise has not been without controversy. Leviev has been accused of profiting from diamond mines in apartheid-era South Africa, Angola and Burma. His closeness to Russian President Vladimir Putin has also raised some eyebrows.
This came to the fore at the store opening, when a group of protesters showed up behind the velvet rope that barred the entrance to the store. The protesters were most vocal in criticizing Leviev’s involvement in developing the Palestinian territories. But they also denounced his trade with the Angolan government, widely regarded as repressive, and his real estate holdings in New York City, which have come under fire from tenants’ rights groups.
Leviev “is destroying marginal communities in New York City the same way he’s destroying Palestinian communities in the Middle East,” said protester Ethan Heitner, who identified himself as a Jewish member of the group Adalah-NY.
A source close to Leviev said that the protesters were scapegoating the diamond merchant simply because he is an Israeli citizen. The controversies went unmentioned at the Chabad event — and they were also omitted from a lengthy recent story about Leviev in The New York Times Magazine.
“When you read The New York Times article, say a shehechianu, because this is the first time The New York Times has written an article without saying a negative thing in it,” said Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky in his introductory remarks to Leviev’s speech at the Chabad banquet.
The banquet was the final event of a four-day long international Chabad conference that brought together lay leaders and shluchim (emissaries) who work in places as far-flung as Laos, Congo and Armenia.
Earlier in the weekend, attendees discussed new Chabad initiatives, which include not only the movement’s foray into online education but also a program that will give students the tools to decipher the Talmud. Leviev is president and chief donor of the Chabad-led Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS, the most powerful Jewish organization in Russia.
“It was most gratifying to finally have the opportunity to publicly recognize Mr. Leviev for catalyzing Jewish renaissance in the former Soviet Union, as well as for his trailblazing work in other parts of the world,” Kotlarsky said in an e-mail to the Forward. “The philanthropic philosophy that he lives by, which he presented at the banquet, was deeply inspirational to both rabbi and layman alike.”
While a few Hasidic men attended the store opening several days later, the crowd was dominated by celebrities like Isabella Rossellini and Susan Sarandon. In a nod to both sets of guests, the organizers served nonkosher hors d’oeuvres but warned the Jewish attendees.
In one effort to synthesize his two worlds, Leviev employed a running metaphor during his speech at the Chabad banquet. “Every Jew is a diamond,” he said.
On Sunday, he flew to New York to appear in front of 4,300 black-hatted Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis. The Uzbekistan-born Leviev, who made his fortune cracking the De Beers diamond cartel, is the most powerful lay leader of the Chabad movement’s rapidly growing branch in the former Soviet Union, and he was given a standing ovation by the gender-segregated crowd.
Two days later, Leviev was still wearing his yarmulke, but this time around he appeared in front of women in low-cut dresses who had come for the opening of LEVIEV, the magnate’s flagship American diamond retailer on Madison Avenue.
Asked by the Forward about moving between such different worlds, Leviev said: “It is nice to put these worlds together, to make money and then convert the money into the spiritual. That is why I make money.”
Leviev was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and immigrated with his family to Israel in 1971. He learned the diamond trade and, after coming up with an innovative method for processing diamonds, started his own diamond-polishing plant.
At the Chabad event, he spoke at length, in Hebrew, about the profound influence Chabad has had on both his personal and business philosophy. The late Chabad leader Menachem Schneerson blessed him, he said, when Leviev was a young man with no money to his name.
“I did better in every business venture since,” Leviev said.
His rise has not been without controversy. Leviev has been accused of profiting from diamond mines in apartheid-era South Africa, Angola and Burma. His closeness to Russian President Vladimir Putin has also raised some eyebrows.
This came to the fore at the store opening, when a group of protesters showed up behind the velvet rope that barred the entrance to the store. The protesters were most vocal in criticizing Leviev’s involvement in developing the Palestinian territories. But they also denounced his trade with the Angolan government, widely regarded as repressive, and his real estate holdings in New York City, which have come under fire from tenants’ rights groups.
Leviev “is destroying marginal communities in New York City the same way he’s destroying Palestinian communities in the Middle East,” said protester Ethan Heitner, who identified himself as a Jewish member of the group Adalah-NY.
A source close to Leviev said that the protesters were scapegoating the diamond merchant simply because he is an Israeli citizen. The controversies went unmentioned at the Chabad event — and they were also omitted from a lengthy recent story about Leviev in The New York Times Magazine.
“When you read The New York Times article, say a shehechianu, because this is the first time The New York Times has written an article without saying a negative thing in it,” said Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky in his introductory remarks to Leviev’s speech at the Chabad banquet.
The banquet was the final event of a four-day long international Chabad conference that brought together lay leaders and shluchim (emissaries) who work in places as far-flung as Laos, Congo and Armenia.
Earlier in the weekend, attendees discussed new Chabad initiatives, which include not only the movement’s foray into online education but also a program that will give students the tools to decipher the Talmud. Leviev is president and chief donor of the Chabad-led Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS, the most powerful Jewish organization in Russia.
“It was most gratifying to finally have the opportunity to publicly recognize Mr. Leviev for catalyzing Jewish renaissance in the former Soviet Union, as well as for his trailblazing work in other parts of the world,” Kotlarsky said in an e-mail to the Forward. “The philanthropic philosophy that he lives by, which he presented at the banquet, was deeply inspirational to both rabbi and layman alike.”
While a few Hasidic men attended the store opening several days later, the crowd was dominated by celebrities like Isabella Rossellini and Susan Sarandon. In a nod to both sets of guests, the organizers served nonkosher hors d’oeuvres but warned the Jewish attendees.
In one effort to synthesize his two worlds, Leviev employed a running metaphor during his speech at the Chabad banquet. “Every Jew is a diamond,” he said.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Chabad Gathering: No Jew Left Behind
Rebbe’s emissaries come back from 72 countries and 47 states.
by Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
There is an old joke that Orthodox Jews tell: “What is the closest religion to Judaism?” Chabad-Lubavitch is the punchline. Everyone “gets it.” Everyone thinks they know about Chabad’s messianism, that a few Chabadniks believe that the rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994, is still alive.In fairness, the rebbe’s messianism or divinity is not advocated in any of Chabad’s official literature; it’s even reprimanded. But fairness has nothing to do with it.This past weekend, just about all the shluchim, nearly 3,000 of the rebbe’s emissaries to 72 countries and 47 states, along with 1,900 of their philanthropic backers, returned to New York for their annual convention. The rebbe was spoken of in past tense, the messiah in future tense.David Berger, chair of Jewish studies at Yeshiva University, recently wrote in the YU newspaper that because of its messianic pretensions, Chabad is “an existential threat to the Jewish religion.” He says Chabadniks ought to be treated with the same halachic mistrust that “Modern Orthodox Jews [have for] traditional Conservative Jews.”But Conservative Jews also are dismissive of Chabad. Andy Silow-Carroll, editor of the New Jersey Jewish News, reported that earlier this year, at the Jewish Theological Seminary, “someone mentioned ‘Chabad,’ and the roomful of rabbis and professors broke out into knowing titters. Dr. Alan Cooper, the JTS provost, rode the titters into a wave of laughter when he repeated the old line: ‘Chabad is the religion closest to Judaism.’”This year’s conference was held in Crown Heights, with the plenary banquet in Pier 94, a vast, several blocks-long former docking hanger on the Hudson River. One shaliach, Rabbi Shlomo Matusof, 91, flew in from Morocco. In 1950, Matusof, a war refugee and former prisoner in Stalin’s gulag, was about to board a ship to join his rebbe in Crown Heights but the rebbe asked him to go to Morocco instead. In the wake of Israel’s independence two years before, Jews in the Arab world were about to experience an upheaval. Matusof built 70 Moroccan Jewish institutions in the last 57 years. He stayed, even when most Moroccan Jews left, tending to the few who didn’t.As God would have it, Rabbi Matusof passed away Saturday night, in the Crown Heights he once thought would be home.Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the rebbe’s emissary to the Bronx, said that Sunday morning they announced Rabbi Matusof’s funeral would be at 11 a.m. After all these years, New York would be his resting place, at the Old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, a few yards from his rebbe. Instead of a small funeral in Morocco, the old shaliach “had more than 2,500 shluchim at his funeral,” said Rabbi Shemtov.At Pier 94, Rabbi Shemtov remembered, “In 1985-86, 12 of us American boys were sent by the rebbe to be with Rabbi Matusof in Morocco. The dedication that we saw for Yiddishkeit, the love for Jews — now almost everyone of us is out somewhere in the world for Chabad. I like to think that we picked up some of his dedication.”Odd juxtapositions are the charm of these affairs. From the Bronx it was a few tables to Beijing, where Rabbi Shimon Freundlich, who was sent in 2001, is posted.Everyone knows Jews love Chinese food, often unkosher, and Rabbi Freundlich is the closest thing to those Jews, but with a twist. After opening a shul and a Jewish school, he opened a 75-seat Chinese restaurant in China — kosher, of course. They deliver anywhere in Beijing.No group ever displayed more antagonism to Chabad than Satmar. Yet Rabbi Freundlich was joined at the banquet by 20 Satmar chasidim grateful to have a chasidic port of call in China. To YU’s Berger, Chabad is “an existential threat to Judaism,” but when the uber-halachic Satmar businessmen come to Beijing, they happily daven and eat with Rabbi Freundlich. Satmars even contributed more than $150,000 to Freundlich’s new Beijing mikveh. The banquet is a place to renew old friendships. “We met last year,” says Congo’s Rabbi Shlomo Bentolila to a familiar face, “and here we are!”On holidays, the Congo Chabad sends circuit rabbis to Jews in Kenya, Nigeria, Lagos, Namibia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Angola, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. “There is no Jew in Africa who is out of reach,” said the shaliach. “We intend to offer something to every Jewish child, expatriate, or businessman, every Jew we can find.”In Kinshasa, “We have a shul, 40-50 people on a Shabbos. We have a kosher bakery, and 25 kids in our afternoon school.” From the podium, Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky called the “roll call” of every country and state, beginning with Chabad of Cyberspace, the chabad.org Web site with links to numerous topics and 900 individualized sites for every Chabad in the world.Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, who 50 years ago first joined the rebbe’s secretariat and remains as the pivotal administrator of Chabad International, recalled that in 1984, when these gatherings started, there were only 60 shluchim, and only from the United States. It was always like a family reunion for the rebbe, said Rabbi Krinsky. After the roll call the room erupted into dancing, though there must be a better word to describe the prancing, leaping, pounding and stomping that had thousands of glasses on every table bouncing, rippling the wines, rippling the waters. Lev Leviev, the mega-philanthropist, was dancing with chasidim, hands on shoulders.Leviev had earlier addressed the gathering in Hebrew, recalling how the rebbe advised him in business, and praising shluchim who operate “behind enemy lines.” Nothing he said was as powerful as the joy in his dancing feet and smiling face.Hey, over there, were Tuvia Teldon and Anschel Pearl, shluchim on Long Island. And over there, hey, it’s Menachem Hartman, the 26-year-old shliach to Vietnam.On Shabbat in Ho Chi Minh City (old Saigon), Rabbi Hartman may be “the closest thing to Judaism,” or maybe there is no truer Judaism than his, in which no Jew is left behind. Surely, those who mock Chabad could get in on the action and find a young rabbi to devote the rest of his life to, say, the Beth Conservative Temple of Hanoi, or the Young Israel of Phnom Penh. While everyone’s joking, Chabad has also opened a Chabad House in Laos.Is there a future for Jews in Ho Chi Minh City?“For sure,” said Rabbi Hartman, beaming. “B’ezrat Hashem, we’ll be opening a kindergarten. Vietnam is the next tiger in Asia!”I was going to ask him what he thought about the jokes people tell about Chabad but I didn’t have the heart. Maybe on a sweltering Vietnamese night he might get to feeling lonely, and when that night comes I didn’t want him to know that Jews in New York were cracking jokes at his expense.This young shaliach would soon be on a plane, heading off to where most of us would never dare. He was the rebbe’s representative. He was pure, the closest thing to Heaven.
by Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
There is an old joke that Orthodox Jews tell: “What is the closest religion to Judaism?” Chabad-Lubavitch is the punchline. Everyone “gets it.” Everyone thinks they know about Chabad’s messianism, that a few Chabadniks believe that the rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994, is still alive.In fairness, the rebbe’s messianism or divinity is not advocated in any of Chabad’s official literature; it’s even reprimanded. But fairness has nothing to do with it.This past weekend, just about all the shluchim, nearly 3,000 of the rebbe’s emissaries to 72 countries and 47 states, along with 1,900 of their philanthropic backers, returned to New York for their annual convention. The rebbe was spoken of in past tense, the messiah in future tense.David Berger, chair of Jewish studies at Yeshiva University, recently wrote in the YU newspaper that because of its messianic pretensions, Chabad is “an existential threat to the Jewish religion.” He says Chabadniks ought to be treated with the same halachic mistrust that “Modern Orthodox Jews [have for] traditional Conservative Jews.”But Conservative Jews also are dismissive of Chabad. Andy Silow-Carroll, editor of the New Jersey Jewish News, reported that earlier this year, at the Jewish Theological Seminary, “someone mentioned ‘Chabad,’ and the roomful of rabbis and professors broke out into knowing titters. Dr. Alan Cooper, the JTS provost, rode the titters into a wave of laughter when he repeated the old line: ‘Chabad is the religion closest to Judaism.’”This year’s conference was held in Crown Heights, with the plenary banquet in Pier 94, a vast, several blocks-long former docking hanger on the Hudson River. One shaliach, Rabbi Shlomo Matusof, 91, flew in from Morocco. In 1950, Matusof, a war refugee and former prisoner in Stalin’s gulag, was about to board a ship to join his rebbe in Crown Heights but the rebbe asked him to go to Morocco instead. In the wake of Israel’s independence two years before, Jews in the Arab world were about to experience an upheaval. Matusof built 70 Moroccan Jewish institutions in the last 57 years. He stayed, even when most Moroccan Jews left, tending to the few who didn’t.As God would have it, Rabbi Matusof passed away Saturday night, in the Crown Heights he once thought would be home.Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the rebbe’s emissary to the Bronx, said that Sunday morning they announced Rabbi Matusof’s funeral would be at 11 a.m. After all these years, New York would be his resting place, at the Old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, a few yards from his rebbe. Instead of a small funeral in Morocco, the old shaliach “had more than 2,500 shluchim at his funeral,” said Rabbi Shemtov.At Pier 94, Rabbi Shemtov remembered, “In 1985-86, 12 of us American boys were sent by the rebbe to be with Rabbi Matusof in Morocco. The dedication that we saw for Yiddishkeit, the love for Jews — now almost everyone of us is out somewhere in the world for Chabad. I like to think that we picked up some of his dedication.”Odd juxtapositions are the charm of these affairs. From the Bronx it was a few tables to Beijing, where Rabbi Shimon Freundlich, who was sent in 2001, is posted.Everyone knows Jews love Chinese food, often unkosher, and Rabbi Freundlich is the closest thing to those Jews, but with a twist. After opening a shul and a Jewish school, he opened a 75-seat Chinese restaurant in China — kosher, of course. They deliver anywhere in Beijing.No group ever displayed more antagonism to Chabad than Satmar. Yet Rabbi Freundlich was joined at the banquet by 20 Satmar chasidim grateful to have a chasidic port of call in China. To YU’s Berger, Chabad is “an existential threat to Judaism,” but when the uber-halachic Satmar businessmen come to Beijing, they happily daven and eat with Rabbi Freundlich. Satmars even contributed more than $150,000 to Freundlich’s new Beijing mikveh. The banquet is a place to renew old friendships. “We met last year,” says Congo’s Rabbi Shlomo Bentolila to a familiar face, “and here we are!”On holidays, the Congo Chabad sends circuit rabbis to Jews in Kenya, Nigeria, Lagos, Namibia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Angola, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. “There is no Jew in Africa who is out of reach,” said the shaliach. “We intend to offer something to every Jewish child, expatriate, or businessman, every Jew we can find.”In Kinshasa, “We have a shul, 40-50 people on a Shabbos. We have a kosher bakery, and 25 kids in our afternoon school.” From the podium, Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky called the “roll call” of every country and state, beginning with Chabad of Cyberspace, the chabad.org Web site with links to numerous topics and 900 individualized sites for every Chabad in the world.Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, who 50 years ago first joined the rebbe’s secretariat and remains as the pivotal administrator of Chabad International, recalled that in 1984, when these gatherings started, there were only 60 shluchim, and only from the United States. It was always like a family reunion for the rebbe, said Rabbi Krinsky. After the roll call the room erupted into dancing, though there must be a better word to describe the prancing, leaping, pounding and stomping that had thousands of glasses on every table bouncing, rippling the wines, rippling the waters. Lev Leviev, the mega-philanthropist, was dancing with chasidim, hands on shoulders.Leviev had earlier addressed the gathering in Hebrew, recalling how the rebbe advised him in business, and praising shluchim who operate “behind enemy lines.” Nothing he said was as powerful as the joy in his dancing feet and smiling face.Hey, over there, were Tuvia Teldon and Anschel Pearl, shluchim on Long Island. And over there, hey, it’s Menachem Hartman, the 26-year-old shliach to Vietnam.On Shabbat in Ho Chi Minh City (old Saigon), Rabbi Hartman may be “the closest thing to Judaism,” or maybe there is no truer Judaism than his, in which no Jew is left behind. Surely, those who mock Chabad could get in on the action and find a young rabbi to devote the rest of his life to, say, the Beth Conservative Temple of Hanoi, or the Young Israel of Phnom Penh. While everyone’s joking, Chabad has also opened a Chabad House in Laos.Is there a future for Jews in Ho Chi Minh City?“For sure,” said Rabbi Hartman, beaming. “B’ezrat Hashem, we’ll be opening a kindergarten. Vietnam is the next tiger in Asia!”I was going to ask him what he thought about the jokes people tell about Chabad but I didn’t have the heart. Maybe on a sweltering Vietnamese night he might get to feeling lonely, and when that night comes I didn’t want him to know that Jews in New York were cracking jokes at his expense.This young shaliach would soon be on a plane, heading off to where most of us would never dare. He was the rebbe’s representative. He was pure, the closest thing to Heaven.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Chabad kinus concludes
Billionaire philanthropist Lev Leviev addressed the International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Shluchim.
Speaking in Hebrew before some 4,500 Chabad rabbis and their supporters in New York Sunday evening, Leviev, a Chabad benefactor, celebrated the shluchim, or emissaries, who he said work "behind enemy lines" building Jewish communities in the farthest reaches of the globe. The six-day conference concluded Monday. The annual gathering brought together nearly 3,000 Chabad emissaries from 72 countries for a series of workshops and seminars, where they shared their collective knowledge and experience and offered mutual encouragement to emissaries who often work in isolated communities with little or no Jewish infrastructure.
The international roll call, a high-point of the Sunday evening banquet, highlighted the extent of the organization's reach. Rabbis stood as the names of the countries where they operate were announced, a globe-spanning catalog from New Zealand to the Congo to Alaska. Good wishes were offered to rabbis opening new Chabad outposts this year in South Korea, northern Cyprus, Serbia and the Dominican Republic. Inspired by the teachings of the late rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Chabad emissaries have made lifetime commitments to open Chabad centers in areas where often they are the only established Jewish presence for hundreds of miles. In recent years they have made increasing inroads onto American college campuses and are the leading force for the revitalization of Jewish life in the former Soviet Union.
Speaking in Hebrew before some 4,500 Chabad rabbis and their supporters in New York Sunday evening, Leviev, a Chabad benefactor, celebrated the shluchim, or emissaries, who he said work "behind enemy lines" building Jewish communities in the farthest reaches of the globe. The six-day conference concluded Monday. The annual gathering brought together nearly 3,000 Chabad emissaries from 72 countries for a series of workshops and seminars, where they shared their collective knowledge and experience and offered mutual encouragement to emissaries who often work in isolated communities with little or no Jewish infrastructure.
The international roll call, a high-point of the Sunday evening banquet, highlighted the extent of the organization's reach. Rabbis stood as the names of the countries where they operate were announced, a globe-spanning catalog from New Zealand to the Congo to Alaska. Good wishes were offered to rabbis opening new Chabad outposts this year in South Korea, northern Cyprus, Serbia and the Dominican Republic. Inspired by the teachings of the late rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Chabad emissaries have made lifetime commitments to open Chabad centers in areas where often they are the only established Jewish presence for hundreds of miles. In recent years they have made increasing inroads onto American college campuses and are the leading force for the revitalization of Jewish life in the former Soviet Union.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
The Missionary Mogul
By ZEV CHAFETS
When Lev Leviev’s first son, Shalom, was born in 1978, Leviev decided to circumcise the baby himself. He was only 22 years old. He had never studied the art of circumcision and never performed one. But he had seen it done. His father, Avner, had been an underground mohel in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbek Republic, at a time when performing any Jewish ritual act could get you in trouble with the Soviet authorities. The family had been in Israel for eight years. There were plenty of trained ritual mohelim in Tel Aviv. But Leviev regarded the act of circumcising his own son as both a religious duty and the fulfillment of a family tradition.
Avner Leviev advised his son to prepare by cutting chicken legs, but young Lev felt no need to practice. “I knew what I was doing,” he told me when I spoke to him recently at his office in Yahud, a suburb of Tel Aviv. “I was a diamond cutter, after all. It’s not all that different.” He extended his hands, palms down, for my inspection and smiled. “I’ve got steady hands.”
In the years since he introduced his son into Israel’s blood covenant with the almighty, Lev Leviev has performed more than a thousand ritual circumcisions — many on the sons of employees in his ever-expanding business empire. In those years, Leviev has gone from impoverished immigrant to the man who broke the De Beers international diamond cartel. His companies build vast shopping malls, housing projects, highways and railways throughout Israel, the former Soviet Union and Western Europe. He owns everything from diamond mines in Angola to a string of 7-Elevens in Texas. Recently he has been buying up iconic American properties, including the former New York Times Building in Manhattan for a reported $525 million.
Lev Leviev is probably Israel’s richest man. Forbes ranks him 210th among the world’s wealthiest people, with an estimated personal net worth of $4.1 billion. (People close to Leviev put that figure closer to $8 billion.) However much Leviev has, he is hungry for more. His business role model is Bill Gates, whom he says he hopes to eventually join in what he calls, in Russian-accented Hebrew, “the world’s starting 10.”
Leviev admires not only Gates’s wealth but also his activist style of philanthropy. “A lot of very rich men wait too long to give their money away,” he told me. “Warren Buffett, for example. He’s in his 70s now, and he should have started earlier. But Bill Gates is a young man, and he’s already giving to help the world. That’s the right way to do it.”
Leviev, who is 51, is a legendary philanthropist, too — he refuses to say how much he gives away each year, but he did not dispute an estimate of $50 million. He does not share Gates’s universalist outlook, however. Leviev is a tribal leader, a benefactor of Jewish causes, particularly in the former Soviet Union, where he underwrites Jewish day schools, synagogues, orphanages, social centers and soup kitchens for more than 500 communities. To make this vast philanthropic enterprise run, Leviev subsidizes an army of some 10,000 Jewish functionaries from Ukraine to Azerbaijan, including 300 rabbis.
Most of the 300 rabbis are Chabadniks, adherents of the Brooklyn-based Hasidic group Chabad — fundamentalist, missionizing, worldly and centered on the personality and teachings of the late Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe. Chabad is anti-abortion, regards homosexuality as a sexual perversion and generally finds itself aligned with other fundamentalist religious groups on American domestic issues. In Israel, it has supported right-wing Greater Israel candidates. Most controversially, during Rebbe Schneerson’s lifetime, Chabad entertained the notion that he might be the messiah; a vocal group in the community still does. (This led the ultrapious Rabbi Eliezer Shach to acidly define Chabad as the sect closest to Judaism.)
Lev Leviev’s loyalty to Chabad is unquestioning. “The rebbe is my role model, and my values are his values,” he says.
Lev Leviev arrived in Israel as a teenager in 1971, at a time when Moshe Dayan, hero of the Six Day War, was the legendary embodiment of the Israeli WASP (Well-born/Ashkenazi/Secular/Paratrooper). Immigrants were classified by their potential to attain this ideal. The Leviev family — unconnected, uneducated, not even real Russians but Bukharan Jews, primitives from the steppes of Central Asia — were classified as “bad material” and dispatched by government authorities to the dusty “development town” of Kiryat Malachi.
Avner Leviev enrolled his son in a Chabad yeshiva. It was a match that didn’t take. “I’m not a born yeshiva scholar,” Leviev admits. In Tashkent he had finished 10th grade. He left the yeshiva after a few months, ending his formal education. If Leviev regrets this, he doesn’t show it. “I just wanted to make money,” he told me.
Through a family friend, Leviev found work as an apprentice diamond cutter. It was industry practice not to teach anyone all 11 steps of the diamond-cutting trade, but Leviev paid his fellow workers to show him every facet of the process. By the time he finished an undistinguished stint in the rabbinical corps of the army, he was ready to go into business for himself.
“I never doubted that I would get rich,” Leviev told me. “I knew from the time I was 6 that I was destined to be a millionaire. I’d go with my father to shops, and while he was talking business, my eyes automatically counted the merchandise.”
Leviev chose a tough industry. “The diamond business is usually a family business,” says a Tel Aviv diamond merchant. “People accumulate wealth slowly, over generations. When Leviev started out, all he had was an amazing amount of ambition and the ability to understand the stone. Understanding the stone — that was the key.”
The headquarters of Leviev’s U.S. diamond company, LLD USA, is located at the mouth of the Manhattan diamond district, on the corner of 47th Street and Fifth Avenue. To get up to his office, you need to be both photographed and fingerprinted by a very high tech security system.
People who handle gems are cautious and security-conscious, and Leviev is no exception. Perhaps for that reason, many of his closest associates are relatives or longtime friends, most of them also Bukharan Jews. Paul Raps, the general manager of LLD USA, has known Leviev since they were both young diamond merchants in Ramat Gan. “One day we were sitting there, just chatting, and suddenly Leviev said to me: ‘You know what we need? We need to get our hands on the gelem.’ Uncut diamonds. I thought he was kidding. Nobody could find uncut diamonds back then.”
Before Leviev’s epiphany, the world’s diamond market was strictly regulated by De Beers, a company founded in the 19th century to mine its first shaft of diamond-bearing kimberlite. In 1930, De Beers established a cartel that over the next few decades came to dominate diamond mining in the Soviet Union, Africa and the rest of the world. It regulated the market through a system of “sightholders,” handpicked producers of rough diamonds and dealers of finished diamonds, who were allowed to buy quantities of unfinished diamonds at fixed prices, via De Beers.
When Leviev started out, there were about 100 sightholders around the world. They came to London several times a year and, at syndicate headquarters, were offered diamonds on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Those who left it too often were decertified, and new sightholders were selected.
Small diamond cutters and merchants like Leviev couldn’t afford to buy from sightholders. They were allowed to buy rough diamonds from “secondary dealers” who managed to get their hands on small, smuggled quantities. It was a limiting arrangement, and Leviev didn’t like limitations. He applied to become a De Beers sightholder.
“There was resistance to him at first,” recalls the Tel Aviv diamond merchant, who knew Leviev at the time. “A lot of people thought he was uncouth, not really civilized. This wasn’t anti-Semitism. Most of the people who rejected him were European Jews themselves. Leviev was an outsider, a Bukharan. But he was so industrious, so ambitious, such a good businessman, that eventually they had no choice. They had to accept him.”
Soon Leviev became a rising star in the De Beers syndicate. He brought his extended family into his business, leveraged their resources and prospered. But he chafed under the control of the syndicate.
In the late ’80s, Leviev saw an opportunity. De Beers had encountered antitrust problems in the United States. In South Africa, the apartheid government that had worked with De Beers was losing political power. At the same time, the Soviet Union, whose leaders had long had a mutually profitable partnership with De Beers, was nearing collapse.
Leviev has a complicated relationship with his former homeland. In our first meeting, when I asked him about his boyhood memories, he surprised me by saying: “Fear. I grew up in fear.”
Tashkent is a Muslim city, and although there wasn’t much overt anti-Jewish violence, there was a climate of mistrust. “Many times I was beaten up in school,” he recalls. But his biggest fear was of the Communist government.
“As a boy, they used to make us stand at attention and salute the statue of Lenin,” he told me. “I’d curse him and the other Communists under my breath. They sent my grandfather to Siberia. They wouldn’t let us keep the Sabbath — we had to go to school on Saturdays. Just being Jewish was dangerous.”
Still, he saw business potential in Russia. He spoke the language, knew the local customs. His father, sensing danger, begged Leviev not to go. So Leviev traveled to Brooklyn, to the headquarters of the Lubavitcher rebbe, for a second opinion.
It is a meeting that has become folklore, both in Chabad and in the diamond industry. Leviev tells the story with obvious relish: “I spoke to the rebbe in Hebrew. I asked him, Should I go or not? He answered me in a kind of antique Russian. He said: ‘Go. Go to Russia and do business, but don’t forget to help the Jews. Remember your family tradition.’ ”
This was more than good advice. The rebbe’s blessing gave Leviev the keys to the Chabad network in the former Soviet Union at a very dangerous time.
Officially, Leviev was invited by the Soviet minister of energy in 1989, which was exploring ways of ending the De Beers grip on the country’s diamonds. “When I got there, Gorbachev was still in power, but you could sense that things were coming apart,” Leviev says. “Everything was unsettled, and I felt the fear again.”
There were other risks, too. To do business with the Russians, Leviev had to give up his position as a De Beers sightholder. This shook the international diamond business. “It was unbelievable,” says the Tel Aviv merchant. “He was breaking the rules, going after the source. When he succeeded in Russia, and then in Angola, others saw it and were suddenly emboldened. That’s how Leviev cracked the De Beers cartel. With the instincts of a tiger and the balls of a panther.”
There’s no need to cry for De Beers, which still controls a major share of the world’s uncut diamonds. But the syndicate no longer sets the worldwide market value of diamonds or decides who can manufacture and sell them.
Neither can Leviev. But he has become the world’s largest cutter and polisher of diamonds and one of its major sources of rough diamonds — the gelem he dreamed of.
A key to his success is his vertical integration. He mines the diamonds in Angola, Namibia and Russia, cuts and polishes them, ships them and sells them, wholesale and retail. He has a string of high-end shops in Russia and a luxury boutique, Leviev, on Bond Street in London. Next month, Leviev is opening a store on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, which, as the president of Leviev Jewelry, Thierry Chaunu, told a reporter, will cater to “the young hedge-fund professional who just got his bonus.”
One of Leviev’s first moves in Russia was to set up a high-tech cutting and polishing plant. It provided jobs and, more important, showed the Russians how they could gain control of their own industry. In turn, the Russian government helped him gain a foothold in Africa. In 1997, Leviev bought into the Catoca diamond mine, Angola’s largest, in a joint venture with the Russian state diamond company, Alrosa; a Brazilian partner; and the Angola state diamond company. Leviev soon established warm ties with the Angolan president, José Eduardo Dos Santos, who speaks fluent Russian from his days as an engineering student in the U.S.S.R.
When Leviev arrived in Angola, Dos Santos was fighting a civil war against Unita rebels, who were financed by the sale of smuggled “blood diamonds.” Leviev had a suggestion: Why not create a company that would centralize control of all diamonds? The company that grew out of that idea was the Angola Selling Corporation, or Ascorp, jointly owned by the Angolan government, a Belgian partner and Leviev. While Leviev’s plan took aim at the trade in conflict diamonds, critics say that Ascorp took advantage of mounting international pressure to establish and profit from a monopoly.
Unita surrendered in 2002, after the death of its leader, Jonas Savimbi. By then, the Angolan government had effectively pushed De Beers out of the country, and Ascorp had generated great sums for the Dos Santos government (and, it is rumored, the Dos Santos family), created thousands of jobs for Angolans in newly established factories and mines and made Lev Leviev a vast fortune. None of this would have been possible without the Russian connection.
On a shelf in Leviev’s Ramat Gan office sits a framed photo of Vladimir Putin. Leviev describes him as a “true friend.” The offices of many Israeli business magnates feature photographic trophies, grab-and-grin shots with (in ascending order of importance) the prime minister of Israel, the president of the United States, Bill Clinton and A-list Hollywood stars. Leviev has a different collection. Aside from the Lubavitcher rebbe and Vladimir Putin, there are photos taken with the leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Kazakhstan, for which he serves as honorary consul in Israel. (“Yes, I saw ‘Borat’ ” Leviev told me wearily. “Yes, I thought it was funny. But silly.”) Leviev’s picture gallery reflects his status as the president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in the former Soviet Union, an organization he has led since 1998. Nobody knows exactly how many Jews live in the former Soviet Union, but estimates range from 400,000 to upward of one million. Leviev leads them with his checkbook.
“When it comes to contributing to the Jewish people, Lev Leviev is in a class by himself,” says Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident and former Israeli deputy prime minster. “I know a lot of rich people who give money. But Leviev is on a completely different level. He’s building entire communities.”
More than this, he is a power broker and intercessor on behalf of beleaguered Jews throughout the former U.S.S.R. Take, for instance, the case of the Jewish private schools in Baku, Azerbaijan. Three years ago the government, concerned about the influence of neighboring Iran and the spread of local madrassas, decided to close all the private schools in the country. This, of course, included the Jewish school in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital. The community elders petitioned the government, but to no avail.
“They even tried to get American Jewish organizations to intervene,” Leviev recalled. “But the Jewish organizations couldn’t do a thing.” He smiled thinly. He has a generally low opinion of American Jewish activists, especially his fellow billionaires.
And so Leviev decided to ride to the rescue. He flew to Baku on his private plane, parked at the airport and went straight to the synagogue.
“The Jews were all gathered there,” he recounted in what is obviously a favorite story. “I told them to wait while I talked to the president.” At the time, that was Heydar Aliyev. “There were journalists in his outer office. Everyone was excited to see me there, because they thought I had come to invest money in the country. Heydar thought so, too. He said: ‘Just tell me what you’re interested in — oil? Gas? Tourism? What can I do for you?’
“I asked him, ‘How can I invest in a country that doesn’t like Jews?’ Heydar got very upset when I said that. He began telling me how many Jewish friends he had and how much the Jews had contributed to his culture and the country and so on.
“ ‘But you’re closing down the Jewish school,’ I told him. ‘I’ve come to ask you to allow it to remain open. Right now the Jews of Baku are gathered in the synagogue, awaiting your answer.’ ”
Leviev paused at this point in the story. Dramatic tales of peril and salvation are part of the Chabad oral tradition.
“Heydar consulted his advisers,” Leviev said. “Then he returned to me and said: ‘The school can remain open. All right?’
“I told him: ‘Well, there’s another problem. The Jewish institutions here are in bad shape. Can you arrange for me to acquire a plot of land to rebuild?’
“ ‘Yes,’ said Heydar. ‘Is that all?’
“ ‘Not quite. I’d appreciate it if you would personally open the school next year. That way there will be no misunderstandings about what the government’s position is.’
“Heydar said: ‘I’ll do that. Are you satisfied now?’
“I told him: ‘Just one last thing, sir. Those journalists in your outer office? Would you mind announcing our agreement to them?’ ”
After Aliyev’s press conference, Leviev remembers returning triumphantly to the synagogue to deliver the good news. Shortly thereafter, Aliyev died and was succeeded by his son, with whom Leviev is on friendly terms.
“And did you invest after that?” I asked.
Leviev smiled. “No,” he said. “Azerbaijan has so many natural resources they don’t need my investment. But I told them that they would get a blessing from God.”
Leviev insists that he maintains a strict division between his community leadership and his business dealings. Perhaps this is so, but the republics of the former Soviet Union are not famous for their transparency. At any rate, business depends to a large extent on personal and political access. “A big part of our analytical value depends on the perception that we can get anything approved in Russia,” says Jacques Zimmerman, the vice president for communications of Africa Israel, Leviev’s international holding and investment company.
This perception has been strengthened by public displays of affection between Putin and Leviev. In 2000, the Russian president was the guest of honor at the opening of the Jewish Community Center in the Marina Roscha district of Moscow, which Leviev played a major role in building. It was a gesture widely interpreted as a sign of good will not only toward Russia’s Jews but toward Leviev himself.
Putin also took Leviev’s side in a dispute over the post of chief rabbi of Russia, backing Leviev’s candidate, Berel Lazar, over Adolf Shayevich, who held the position. The Kremlin’s endorsement of Lazar was a final confirmation that Leviev had achieved a typically audacious and improbable victory — putting the fundamentalist Chabad in effective control of the assimilated, mostly irreligious Jewish communities of the former Soviet Union.
Lazar’s selection has been quite controversial not only in Russia but also among Jewish groups in Israel and in the U.S. But Chabad is nothing if not practical, and they have taken a gradualist approach to winning over Russia’s secular Jews. Schools enroll nonreligious students and offer them a full government curriculum, along with some beginner’s Torah studies. Community centers hold coeducational social events. There are even mixed dances.
Such modernity comports with Leviev’s personal style, which is, in its outward aspect, Chabad-lite. He once made headlines by closing his upscale mall in Ramat Aviv — a bastion of WASP Israel — on the Sabbath, and officially his businesses are closed on Saturday. But he maintains a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for his Israeli executives, some of whom hold unofficial meetings and phone sessions on the Sabbath. Abroad, some of the businesses Leviev owns an interest in work seven days a week, and his American 7-Elevens sell nonkosher food. Leviev himself strictly observes the Sabbath, but he has been known to interrupt his weekday prayers for important phone calls.
Unlike many Chabad men, Leviev is clean-shaven, wears stylish business suits open at the collar and sometimes lounges in jeans, and his small black skullcap is barely visible. He is also something of a feminist. The women in his office, including his private secretaries, are allowed to wear slacks, a violation of strict Orthodox custom. Leviev’s two eldest daughters have been brought into the business as senior executives. Zvia, a mother of four who runs international marketing and mall businesses for her father, is frequently mentioned in the Israeli press as a potential successor. Leviev is proud to have raised his nine children in B’nai B’rack, Tel Aviv’s ultra-Orthodox suburb, but he is planning to move to an estate in Saviyon, the equivalent of going from Borough Park to Scarsdale.
Leviev’s pragmatism ends, however, at the vexing and fundamental question of who is a Jew. American Reform Judaism recognizes patrilineal descent. The State of Israel grants citizenship under the Law of Return to people with a single Jewish grandparent. But Leviev accepts only the Talmudic rule that a Jew is anyone born to a Jewish mother, or someone who has undergone an Orthodox conversion and agreed to keep all 613 Jewish laws.
There are a great many people who regard themselves as Jews but do not meet these criteria. In Israel alone, there are an estimated 300,000 among Soviet immigrants, and perhaps more than that in the former Soviet Union. “What do you do about all these people?” I asked Leviev. “Just write them off?”
Leviev’s answer: “It’s not a matter of what I do or what I want. I have no choice. The law is the law.”
A few years ago, concerned Bukharan Jewish immigrants in New York reported to Leviev that their children were being corrupted by the public schools of Queens. “The kids were going out with Pakistanis, Puerto Ricans, all sorts of people,” I was told by one of Leviev’s intimates. Leviev would have been equally horrified to learn that the Bukharan Jews of Queens were hooking up with descendants of the Mayflower.
In response, Leviev donated the money for a private school in Elmhurst. He picks up the tuition tab for the entire student body — about 800 kids at an estimated $18,000 a pop. Leviev regards this as a pilot project. His goal, I was told by his assistant, Shlomi Peles, is to make a free Orthodox Jewish education available to every Jewish child in United States.
The educational project is just one part of Leviev’s recent discovery of America. After 9/11, he and a partner bought the JP Morgan building near ground zero at a bargain price (a reported $100 million), converting it into luxury condominiums and clearing a very handsome profit. It made him a believer in New York.
“Every building is half a billion dollars,” he told me. “All you need is a global perspective. I knew New York would come back.”
Jacques Zimmerman, who handles communications for Africa Israel, told me: “Lev’s natural tendency, his home court, is Israel and Russia. But he is constantly looking to expand.”
The engine for this growth is Africa Israel. The company is publicly traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and handles Leviev’s businesses, not including privately held diamond interests. Leviev personally owns about 75 percent of Africa Israel, which was valued, in mid-July, at approximately $5 billion.
According to Zimmerman, Africa Israel has made a “strategic decision” to think big. “The work involved in large and small projects is about the same, so why not do big projects?” In Moscow, Africa Israel is currently building a million-square-foot mall as well as another 750,000-square-foot mall that is entirely underground. It is the lead partner in a consortium that is building the subway in Tel Aviv. Africa Israel is active in China, India, the Philippines and Latin America as well.
“We’re worldwide, but our emphasis is moving more and more to the United States,” Zimmerman says. “In the last six months, we’ve bought into more than a billion dollars’ worth of projects in Manhattan, and that’s going to grow.”
Africa Israel’s American holdings include not only the former New York Times Building but also a half-share of the Apthorp apartment building on the Upper West Side and the Clock Tower on Madison Avenue, 1,700 Fina gas stations around the country and development projects in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Phoenix. Recently the company announced it will be opening a giant Hard Rock amusement park in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
“All you need to do business in America is a good name, and banks will lend you all the money you need,” Leviev told me with enthusiasm.
Israel is a society in which successful people are rarely praised. But I encountered very little criticism of Leviev there, even from members of the Jewish WASP business establishment. “He’s still an outsider,” one high-powered Tel Aviv lawyer told me. “We don’t know anything about his personal life. But from what anyone can tell, he’s clean. You read about him in the business pages of the newspaper, not the gossip columns.”
One of Leviev’s greatest admirers is Eitan Raff, chairman of Israel’s Bank Leumi, from which Leviev bought Africa Israel in 1996. The sale was controversial at the time. “He was a Russian,” Raff says. “We didn’t know him or anything about him. We thought he might be some kind of oligarch. I hired two or three investigators to check him out. He came up clean.”
There were a number of foreign suitors for Africa Israel, but after fighting broke out in Jerusalem between Israeli and Palestinian gunmen, they became skittish and withdrew, leaving Leviev as the sole bidder. The asking price was $400 million, and Bank Leumi had to sell; it had been ordered by a court to divest itself of nonfinancial holdings, including Africa Israel, by a certain date. Leviev had the bank over a barrel. “What would you say to $330?” Leviev asked Raff.
“No, it’s worth four, that’s the fair price,” Raff said.
Leviev stuck out his hand, diamond-business style. “Four,” he said.
“He acted with great probity,” Raff says. “He didn’t try to take advantage or squeeze. His word is his bond,” he says. “Look, I’m a kibbutznik. Leviev and I aren’t from the same world at all. But I consider him a friend, and I think he’s an example of what the head of a public company should be.” Leviev’s biggest public-relations problem is his association with Arkady Gaydamak, a mysterious Russian-Israeli billionaire of unsavory reputation, now under indictment in France for a variety of offenses, including gunrunning and money laundering. Gaydamak, who cuts a flamboyant figure and recently established his own political party in Israel, is reputed to have made his fortune selling arms in Angola in partnership with various European, Israeli and African military and government figures.
Leviev says he was first introduced to Gaydamak by the former Mossad chief Danny Yatom. They certainly knew each other. According to the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan journalism group based in Washington, Leviev and Gaydamak jointly acquired a metallurgy plant in Kazakhstan in 1999. A year later, Gaydamak bought a 15 percent share of Africa Israel, which he later sold. Leviev swears they are no longer partners, but the relationship has stained his reputation.
Unlike Gaydamak, Leviev has thus far steered clear of Israeli politics. That doesn’t mean he lacks influence, however. He meets from time to time with the nation’s leaders, mostly to discuss the economy. He owns Israel’s Russian-language television station, which reaches about 15 percent of the population. Despite his allegiance to Chabad, Leviev is considered a moderate. “He’s not one of the crazies,” a former adviser to Ariel Sharon told me. “Certainly not a Greater Israel man.”
Leviev’s global view is Moscow-centric and more than a little Machiavellian. He says he believes, for example, that America’s difficulties in places like Iran, Syria and Venezuela come primarily from George W. Bush’s failure to come to Russia’s economic aid. “If Bush had invested $100 million to help the Russian economy early in his first term, he’d have Putin’s friendship,” he says. “Instead, Bush put the money into a war with Iraq, and he’s been paying for it all over the world ever since.”
The first time I spoke to Leviev, he denied that he had any personal political aspirations. Three days later, he wasn’t so sure. “Would I like to be prime minister?” he mused. “I might. When I turn 60.”
That’s nine years off. At Leviev’s pace, nine years is a lot of time — time enough to make his way into the Forbes “starting 10,” time to complete the Chabadization of Soviet Jewry and time, perhaps, to make a run at becoming Israel’s first Russian-Bukharan-mohel-mogul prime minister.
Zev Chafets is a frequent contributor to the magazine and the author of ‘A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists and One Man’s Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance.”
When Lev Leviev’s first son, Shalom, was born in 1978, Leviev decided to circumcise the baby himself. He was only 22 years old. He had never studied the art of circumcision and never performed one. But he had seen it done. His father, Avner, had been an underground mohel in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbek Republic, at a time when performing any Jewish ritual act could get you in trouble with the Soviet authorities. The family had been in Israel for eight years. There were plenty of trained ritual mohelim in Tel Aviv. But Leviev regarded the act of circumcising his own son as both a religious duty and the fulfillment of a family tradition.
Avner Leviev advised his son to prepare by cutting chicken legs, but young Lev felt no need to practice. “I knew what I was doing,” he told me when I spoke to him recently at his office in Yahud, a suburb of Tel Aviv. “I was a diamond cutter, after all. It’s not all that different.” He extended his hands, palms down, for my inspection and smiled. “I’ve got steady hands.”
In the years since he introduced his son into Israel’s blood covenant with the almighty, Lev Leviev has performed more than a thousand ritual circumcisions — many on the sons of employees in his ever-expanding business empire. In those years, Leviev has gone from impoverished immigrant to the man who broke the De Beers international diamond cartel. His companies build vast shopping malls, housing projects, highways and railways throughout Israel, the former Soviet Union and Western Europe. He owns everything from diamond mines in Angola to a string of 7-Elevens in Texas. Recently he has been buying up iconic American properties, including the former New York Times Building in Manhattan for a reported $525 million.
Lev Leviev is probably Israel’s richest man. Forbes ranks him 210th among the world’s wealthiest people, with an estimated personal net worth of $4.1 billion. (People close to Leviev put that figure closer to $8 billion.) However much Leviev has, he is hungry for more. His business role model is Bill Gates, whom he says he hopes to eventually join in what he calls, in Russian-accented Hebrew, “the world’s starting 10.”
Leviev admires not only Gates’s wealth but also his activist style of philanthropy. “A lot of very rich men wait too long to give their money away,” he told me. “Warren Buffett, for example. He’s in his 70s now, and he should have started earlier. But Bill Gates is a young man, and he’s already giving to help the world. That’s the right way to do it.”
Leviev, who is 51, is a legendary philanthropist, too — he refuses to say how much he gives away each year, but he did not dispute an estimate of $50 million. He does not share Gates’s universalist outlook, however. Leviev is a tribal leader, a benefactor of Jewish causes, particularly in the former Soviet Union, where he underwrites Jewish day schools, synagogues, orphanages, social centers and soup kitchens for more than 500 communities. To make this vast philanthropic enterprise run, Leviev subsidizes an army of some 10,000 Jewish functionaries from Ukraine to Azerbaijan, including 300 rabbis.
Most of the 300 rabbis are Chabadniks, adherents of the Brooklyn-based Hasidic group Chabad — fundamentalist, missionizing, worldly and centered on the personality and teachings of the late Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe. Chabad is anti-abortion, regards homosexuality as a sexual perversion and generally finds itself aligned with other fundamentalist religious groups on American domestic issues. In Israel, it has supported right-wing Greater Israel candidates. Most controversially, during Rebbe Schneerson’s lifetime, Chabad entertained the notion that he might be the messiah; a vocal group in the community still does. (This led the ultrapious Rabbi Eliezer Shach to acidly define Chabad as the sect closest to Judaism.)
Lev Leviev’s loyalty to Chabad is unquestioning. “The rebbe is my role model, and my values are his values,” he says.
Lev Leviev arrived in Israel as a teenager in 1971, at a time when Moshe Dayan, hero of the Six Day War, was the legendary embodiment of the Israeli WASP (Well-born/Ashkenazi/Secular/Paratrooper). Immigrants were classified by their potential to attain this ideal. The Leviev family — unconnected, uneducated, not even real Russians but Bukharan Jews, primitives from the steppes of Central Asia — were classified as “bad material” and dispatched by government authorities to the dusty “development town” of Kiryat Malachi.
Avner Leviev enrolled his son in a Chabad yeshiva. It was a match that didn’t take. “I’m not a born yeshiva scholar,” Leviev admits. In Tashkent he had finished 10th grade. He left the yeshiva after a few months, ending his formal education. If Leviev regrets this, he doesn’t show it. “I just wanted to make money,” he told me.
Through a family friend, Leviev found work as an apprentice diamond cutter. It was industry practice not to teach anyone all 11 steps of the diamond-cutting trade, but Leviev paid his fellow workers to show him every facet of the process. By the time he finished an undistinguished stint in the rabbinical corps of the army, he was ready to go into business for himself.
“I never doubted that I would get rich,” Leviev told me. “I knew from the time I was 6 that I was destined to be a millionaire. I’d go with my father to shops, and while he was talking business, my eyes automatically counted the merchandise.”
Leviev chose a tough industry. “The diamond business is usually a family business,” says a Tel Aviv diamond merchant. “People accumulate wealth slowly, over generations. When Leviev started out, all he had was an amazing amount of ambition and the ability to understand the stone. Understanding the stone — that was the key.”
The headquarters of Leviev’s U.S. diamond company, LLD USA, is located at the mouth of the Manhattan diamond district, on the corner of 47th Street and Fifth Avenue. To get up to his office, you need to be both photographed and fingerprinted by a very high tech security system.
People who handle gems are cautious and security-conscious, and Leviev is no exception. Perhaps for that reason, many of his closest associates are relatives or longtime friends, most of them also Bukharan Jews. Paul Raps, the general manager of LLD USA, has known Leviev since they were both young diamond merchants in Ramat Gan. “One day we were sitting there, just chatting, and suddenly Leviev said to me: ‘You know what we need? We need to get our hands on the gelem.’ Uncut diamonds. I thought he was kidding. Nobody could find uncut diamonds back then.”
Before Leviev’s epiphany, the world’s diamond market was strictly regulated by De Beers, a company founded in the 19th century to mine its first shaft of diamond-bearing kimberlite. In 1930, De Beers established a cartel that over the next few decades came to dominate diamond mining in the Soviet Union, Africa and the rest of the world. It regulated the market through a system of “sightholders,” handpicked producers of rough diamonds and dealers of finished diamonds, who were allowed to buy quantities of unfinished diamonds at fixed prices, via De Beers.
When Leviev started out, there were about 100 sightholders around the world. They came to London several times a year and, at syndicate headquarters, were offered diamonds on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Those who left it too often were decertified, and new sightholders were selected.
Small diamond cutters and merchants like Leviev couldn’t afford to buy from sightholders. They were allowed to buy rough diamonds from “secondary dealers” who managed to get their hands on small, smuggled quantities. It was a limiting arrangement, and Leviev didn’t like limitations. He applied to become a De Beers sightholder.
“There was resistance to him at first,” recalls the Tel Aviv diamond merchant, who knew Leviev at the time. “A lot of people thought he was uncouth, not really civilized. This wasn’t anti-Semitism. Most of the people who rejected him were European Jews themselves. Leviev was an outsider, a Bukharan. But he was so industrious, so ambitious, such a good businessman, that eventually they had no choice. They had to accept him.”
Soon Leviev became a rising star in the De Beers syndicate. He brought his extended family into his business, leveraged their resources and prospered. But he chafed under the control of the syndicate.
In the late ’80s, Leviev saw an opportunity. De Beers had encountered antitrust problems in the United States. In South Africa, the apartheid government that had worked with De Beers was losing political power. At the same time, the Soviet Union, whose leaders had long had a mutually profitable partnership with De Beers, was nearing collapse.
Leviev has a complicated relationship with his former homeland. In our first meeting, when I asked him about his boyhood memories, he surprised me by saying: “Fear. I grew up in fear.”
Tashkent is a Muslim city, and although there wasn’t much overt anti-Jewish violence, there was a climate of mistrust. “Many times I was beaten up in school,” he recalls. But his biggest fear was of the Communist government.
“As a boy, they used to make us stand at attention and salute the statue of Lenin,” he told me. “I’d curse him and the other Communists under my breath. They sent my grandfather to Siberia. They wouldn’t let us keep the Sabbath — we had to go to school on Saturdays. Just being Jewish was dangerous.”
Still, he saw business potential in Russia. He spoke the language, knew the local customs. His father, sensing danger, begged Leviev not to go. So Leviev traveled to Brooklyn, to the headquarters of the Lubavitcher rebbe, for a second opinion.
It is a meeting that has become folklore, both in Chabad and in the diamond industry. Leviev tells the story with obvious relish: “I spoke to the rebbe in Hebrew. I asked him, Should I go or not? He answered me in a kind of antique Russian. He said: ‘Go. Go to Russia and do business, but don’t forget to help the Jews. Remember your family tradition.’ ”
This was more than good advice. The rebbe’s blessing gave Leviev the keys to the Chabad network in the former Soviet Union at a very dangerous time.
Officially, Leviev was invited by the Soviet minister of energy in 1989, which was exploring ways of ending the De Beers grip on the country’s diamonds. “When I got there, Gorbachev was still in power, but you could sense that things were coming apart,” Leviev says. “Everything was unsettled, and I felt the fear again.”
There were other risks, too. To do business with the Russians, Leviev had to give up his position as a De Beers sightholder. This shook the international diamond business. “It was unbelievable,” says the Tel Aviv merchant. “He was breaking the rules, going after the source. When he succeeded in Russia, and then in Angola, others saw it and were suddenly emboldened. That’s how Leviev cracked the De Beers cartel. With the instincts of a tiger and the balls of a panther.”
There’s no need to cry for De Beers, which still controls a major share of the world’s uncut diamonds. But the syndicate no longer sets the worldwide market value of diamonds or decides who can manufacture and sell them.
Neither can Leviev. But he has become the world’s largest cutter and polisher of diamonds and one of its major sources of rough diamonds — the gelem he dreamed of.
A key to his success is his vertical integration. He mines the diamonds in Angola, Namibia and Russia, cuts and polishes them, ships them and sells them, wholesale and retail. He has a string of high-end shops in Russia and a luxury boutique, Leviev, on Bond Street in London. Next month, Leviev is opening a store on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, which, as the president of Leviev Jewelry, Thierry Chaunu, told a reporter, will cater to “the young hedge-fund professional who just got his bonus.”
One of Leviev’s first moves in Russia was to set up a high-tech cutting and polishing plant. It provided jobs and, more important, showed the Russians how they could gain control of their own industry. In turn, the Russian government helped him gain a foothold in Africa. In 1997, Leviev bought into the Catoca diamond mine, Angola’s largest, in a joint venture with the Russian state diamond company, Alrosa; a Brazilian partner; and the Angola state diamond company. Leviev soon established warm ties with the Angolan president, José Eduardo Dos Santos, who speaks fluent Russian from his days as an engineering student in the U.S.S.R.
When Leviev arrived in Angola, Dos Santos was fighting a civil war against Unita rebels, who were financed by the sale of smuggled “blood diamonds.” Leviev had a suggestion: Why not create a company that would centralize control of all diamonds? The company that grew out of that idea was the Angola Selling Corporation, or Ascorp, jointly owned by the Angolan government, a Belgian partner and Leviev. While Leviev’s plan took aim at the trade in conflict diamonds, critics say that Ascorp took advantage of mounting international pressure to establish and profit from a monopoly.
Unita surrendered in 2002, after the death of its leader, Jonas Savimbi. By then, the Angolan government had effectively pushed De Beers out of the country, and Ascorp had generated great sums for the Dos Santos government (and, it is rumored, the Dos Santos family), created thousands of jobs for Angolans in newly established factories and mines and made Lev Leviev a vast fortune. None of this would have been possible without the Russian connection.
On a shelf in Leviev’s Ramat Gan office sits a framed photo of Vladimir Putin. Leviev describes him as a “true friend.” The offices of many Israeli business magnates feature photographic trophies, grab-and-grin shots with (in ascending order of importance) the prime minister of Israel, the president of the United States, Bill Clinton and A-list Hollywood stars. Leviev has a different collection. Aside from the Lubavitcher rebbe and Vladimir Putin, there are photos taken with the leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Kazakhstan, for which he serves as honorary consul in Israel. (“Yes, I saw ‘Borat’ ” Leviev told me wearily. “Yes, I thought it was funny. But silly.”) Leviev’s picture gallery reflects his status as the president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in the former Soviet Union, an organization he has led since 1998. Nobody knows exactly how many Jews live in the former Soviet Union, but estimates range from 400,000 to upward of one million. Leviev leads them with his checkbook.
“When it comes to contributing to the Jewish people, Lev Leviev is in a class by himself,” says Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident and former Israeli deputy prime minster. “I know a lot of rich people who give money. But Leviev is on a completely different level. He’s building entire communities.”
More than this, he is a power broker and intercessor on behalf of beleaguered Jews throughout the former U.S.S.R. Take, for instance, the case of the Jewish private schools in Baku, Azerbaijan. Three years ago the government, concerned about the influence of neighboring Iran and the spread of local madrassas, decided to close all the private schools in the country. This, of course, included the Jewish school in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital. The community elders petitioned the government, but to no avail.
“They even tried to get American Jewish organizations to intervene,” Leviev recalled. “But the Jewish organizations couldn’t do a thing.” He smiled thinly. He has a generally low opinion of American Jewish activists, especially his fellow billionaires.
And so Leviev decided to ride to the rescue. He flew to Baku on his private plane, parked at the airport and went straight to the synagogue.
“The Jews were all gathered there,” he recounted in what is obviously a favorite story. “I told them to wait while I talked to the president.” At the time, that was Heydar Aliyev. “There were journalists in his outer office. Everyone was excited to see me there, because they thought I had come to invest money in the country. Heydar thought so, too. He said: ‘Just tell me what you’re interested in — oil? Gas? Tourism? What can I do for you?’
“I asked him, ‘How can I invest in a country that doesn’t like Jews?’ Heydar got very upset when I said that. He began telling me how many Jewish friends he had and how much the Jews had contributed to his culture and the country and so on.
“ ‘But you’re closing down the Jewish school,’ I told him. ‘I’ve come to ask you to allow it to remain open. Right now the Jews of Baku are gathered in the synagogue, awaiting your answer.’ ”
Leviev paused at this point in the story. Dramatic tales of peril and salvation are part of the Chabad oral tradition.
“Heydar consulted his advisers,” Leviev said. “Then he returned to me and said: ‘The school can remain open. All right?’
“I told him: ‘Well, there’s another problem. The Jewish institutions here are in bad shape. Can you arrange for me to acquire a plot of land to rebuild?’
“ ‘Yes,’ said Heydar. ‘Is that all?’
“ ‘Not quite. I’d appreciate it if you would personally open the school next year. That way there will be no misunderstandings about what the government’s position is.’
“Heydar said: ‘I’ll do that. Are you satisfied now?’
“I told him: ‘Just one last thing, sir. Those journalists in your outer office? Would you mind announcing our agreement to them?’ ”
After Aliyev’s press conference, Leviev remembers returning triumphantly to the synagogue to deliver the good news. Shortly thereafter, Aliyev died and was succeeded by his son, with whom Leviev is on friendly terms.
“And did you invest after that?” I asked.
Leviev smiled. “No,” he said. “Azerbaijan has so many natural resources they don’t need my investment. But I told them that they would get a blessing from God.”
Leviev insists that he maintains a strict division between his community leadership and his business dealings. Perhaps this is so, but the republics of the former Soviet Union are not famous for their transparency. At any rate, business depends to a large extent on personal and political access. “A big part of our analytical value depends on the perception that we can get anything approved in Russia,” says Jacques Zimmerman, the vice president for communications of Africa Israel, Leviev’s international holding and investment company.
This perception has been strengthened by public displays of affection between Putin and Leviev. In 2000, the Russian president was the guest of honor at the opening of the Jewish Community Center in the Marina Roscha district of Moscow, which Leviev played a major role in building. It was a gesture widely interpreted as a sign of good will not only toward Russia’s Jews but toward Leviev himself.
Putin also took Leviev’s side in a dispute over the post of chief rabbi of Russia, backing Leviev’s candidate, Berel Lazar, over Adolf Shayevich, who held the position. The Kremlin’s endorsement of Lazar was a final confirmation that Leviev had achieved a typically audacious and improbable victory — putting the fundamentalist Chabad in effective control of the assimilated, mostly irreligious Jewish communities of the former Soviet Union.
Lazar’s selection has been quite controversial not only in Russia but also among Jewish groups in Israel and in the U.S. But Chabad is nothing if not practical, and they have taken a gradualist approach to winning over Russia’s secular Jews. Schools enroll nonreligious students and offer them a full government curriculum, along with some beginner’s Torah studies. Community centers hold coeducational social events. There are even mixed dances.
Such modernity comports with Leviev’s personal style, which is, in its outward aspect, Chabad-lite. He once made headlines by closing his upscale mall in Ramat Aviv — a bastion of WASP Israel — on the Sabbath, and officially his businesses are closed on Saturday. But he maintains a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for his Israeli executives, some of whom hold unofficial meetings and phone sessions on the Sabbath. Abroad, some of the businesses Leviev owns an interest in work seven days a week, and his American 7-Elevens sell nonkosher food. Leviev himself strictly observes the Sabbath, but he has been known to interrupt his weekday prayers for important phone calls.
Unlike many Chabad men, Leviev is clean-shaven, wears stylish business suits open at the collar and sometimes lounges in jeans, and his small black skullcap is barely visible. He is also something of a feminist. The women in his office, including his private secretaries, are allowed to wear slacks, a violation of strict Orthodox custom. Leviev’s two eldest daughters have been brought into the business as senior executives. Zvia, a mother of four who runs international marketing and mall businesses for her father, is frequently mentioned in the Israeli press as a potential successor. Leviev is proud to have raised his nine children in B’nai B’rack, Tel Aviv’s ultra-Orthodox suburb, but he is planning to move to an estate in Saviyon, the equivalent of going from Borough Park to Scarsdale.
Leviev’s pragmatism ends, however, at the vexing and fundamental question of who is a Jew. American Reform Judaism recognizes patrilineal descent. The State of Israel grants citizenship under the Law of Return to people with a single Jewish grandparent. But Leviev accepts only the Talmudic rule that a Jew is anyone born to a Jewish mother, or someone who has undergone an Orthodox conversion and agreed to keep all 613 Jewish laws.
There are a great many people who regard themselves as Jews but do not meet these criteria. In Israel alone, there are an estimated 300,000 among Soviet immigrants, and perhaps more than that in the former Soviet Union. “What do you do about all these people?” I asked Leviev. “Just write them off?”
Leviev’s answer: “It’s not a matter of what I do or what I want. I have no choice. The law is the law.”
A few years ago, concerned Bukharan Jewish immigrants in New York reported to Leviev that their children were being corrupted by the public schools of Queens. “The kids were going out with Pakistanis, Puerto Ricans, all sorts of people,” I was told by one of Leviev’s intimates. Leviev would have been equally horrified to learn that the Bukharan Jews of Queens were hooking up with descendants of the Mayflower.
In response, Leviev donated the money for a private school in Elmhurst. He picks up the tuition tab for the entire student body — about 800 kids at an estimated $18,000 a pop. Leviev regards this as a pilot project. His goal, I was told by his assistant, Shlomi Peles, is to make a free Orthodox Jewish education available to every Jewish child in United States.
The educational project is just one part of Leviev’s recent discovery of America. After 9/11, he and a partner bought the JP Morgan building near ground zero at a bargain price (a reported $100 million), converting it into luxury condominiums and clearing a very handsome profit. It made him a believer in New York.
“Every building is half a billion dollars,” he told me. “All you need is a global perspective. I knew New York would come back.”
Jacques Zimmerman, who handles communications for Africa Israel, told me: “Lev’s natural tendency, his home court, is Israel and Russia. But he is constantly looking to expand.”
The engine for this growth is Africa Israel. The company is publicly traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and handles Leviev’s businesses, not including privately held diamond interests. Leviev personally owns about 75 percent of Africa Israel, which was valued, in mid-July, at approximately $5 billion.
According to Zimmerman, Africa Israel has made a “strategic decision” to think big. “The work involved in large and small projects is about the same, so why not do big projects?” In Moscow, Africa Israel is currently building a million-square-foot mall as well as another 750,000-square-foot mall that is entirely underground. It is the lead partner in a consortium that is building the subway in Tel Aviv. Africa Israel is active in China, India, the Philippines and Latin America as well.
“We’re worldwide, but our emphasis is moving more and more to the United States,” Zimmerman says. “In the last six months, we’ve bought into more than a billion dollars’ worth of projects in Manhattan, and that’s going to grow.”
Africa Israel’s American holdings include not only the former New York Times Building but also a half-share of the Apthorp apartment building on the Upper West Side and the Clock Tower on Madison Avenue, 1,700 Fina gas stations around the country and development projects in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Phoenix. Recently the company announced it will be opening a giant Hard Rock amusement park in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
“All you need to do business in America is a good name, and banks will lend you all the money you need,” Leviev told me with enthusiasm.
Israel is a society in which successful people are rarely praised. But I encountered very little criticism of Leviev there, even from members of the Jewish WASP business establishment. “He’s still an outsider,” one high-powered Tel Aviv lawyer told me. “We don’t know anything about his personal life. But from what anyone can tell, he’s clean. You read about him in the business pages of the newspaper, not the gossip columns.”
One of Leviev’s greatest admirers is Eitan Raff, chairman of Israel’s Bank Leumi, from which Leviev bought Africa Israel in 1996. The sale was controversial at the time. “He was a Russian,” Raff says. “We didn’t know him or anything about him. We thought he might be some kind of oligarch. I hired two or three investigators to check him out. He came up clean.”
There were a number of foreign suitors for Africa Israel, but after fighting broke out in Jerusalem between Israeli and Palestinian gunmen, they became skittish and withdrew, leaving Leviev as the sole bidder. The asking price was $400 million, and Bank Leumi had to sell; it had been ordered by a court to divest itself of nonfinancial holdings, including Africa Israel, by a certain date. Leviev had the bank over a barrel. “What would you say to $330?” Leviev asked Raff.
“No, it’s worth four, that’s the fair price,” Raff said.
Leviev stuck out his hand, diamond-business style. “Four,” he said.
“He acted with great probity,” Raff says. “He didn’t try to take advantage or squeeze. His word is his bond,” he says. “Look, I’m a kibbutznik. Leviev and I aren’t from the same world at all. But I consider him a friend, and I think he’s an example of what the head of a public company should be.” Leviev’s biggest public-relations problem is his association with Arkady Gaydamak, a mysterious Russian-Israeli billionaire of unsavory reputation, now under indictment in France for a variety of offenses, including gunrunning and money laundering. Gaydamak, who cuts a flamboyant figure and recently established his own political party in Israel, is reputed to have made his fortune selling arms in Angola in partnership with various European, Israeli and African military and government figures.
Leviev says he was first introduced to Gaydamak by the former Mossad chief Danny Yatom. They certainly knew each other. According to the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan journalism group based in Washington, Leviev and Gaydamak jointly acquired a metallurgy plant in Kazakhstan in 1999. A year later, Gaydamak bought a 15 percent share of Africa Israel, which he later sold. Leviev swears they are no longer partners, but the relationship has stained his reputation.
Unlike Gaydamak, Leviev has thus far steered clear of Israeli politics. That doesn’t mean he lacks influence, however. He meets from time to time with the nation’s leaders, mostly to discuss the economy. He owns Israel’s Russian-language television station, which reaches about 15 percent of the population. Despite his allegiance to Chabad, Leviev is considered a moderate. “He’s not one of the crazies,” a former adviser to Ariel Sharon told me. “Certainly not a Greater Israel man.”
Leviev’s global view is Moscow-centric and more than a little Machiavellian. He says he believes, for example, that America’s difficulties in places like Iran, Syria and Venezuela come primarily from George W. Bush’s failure to come to Russia’s economic aid. “If Bush had invested $100 million to help the Russian economy early in his first term, he’d have Putin’s friendship,” he says. “Instead, Bush put the money into a war with Iraq, and he’s been paying for it all over the world ever since.”
The first time I spoke to Leviev, he denied that he had any personal political aspirations. Three days later, he wasn’t so sure. “Would I like to be prime minister?” he mused. “I might. When I turn 60.”
That’s nine years off. At Leviev’s pace, nine years is a lot of time — time enough to make his way into the Forbes “starting 10,” time to complete the Chabadization of Soviet Jewry and time, perhaps, to make a run at becoming Israel’s first Russian-Bukharan-mohel-mogul prime minister.
Zev Chafets is a frequent contributor to the magazine and the author of ‘A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists and One Man’s Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance.”
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Chabad opens Vienna center
By Dinah A. Spritzer
VIENNA (JTA) -- As a slender violinist with flowing black hair played ``Oseh Shalom" to an audience peppered with at least a dozen long-bearded rabbis, Bukharian Jews in this capital city ushered in a new era.
Their cause for celebration: Unlike many of those from Central Asia who came to Austria more than 25 years ago, immigrants to the country now have a new center to help them find their way.
On Feb. 18, Chabad opened a $6.05 million facility in Vienna aimed at serving their needs.
``The House of the Future," as the center has been dubbed, is expected to cater mainly to Bukharian Jews from Central Asia with whom Chabad is already deeply involved.
``The main purpose of the center is to provide help with integration," said Rabbi Jacob Biderman, chairman of the extensive Chabad organization in Austria. ``Yes, this is initiated by Chabad and there will be a chance for Jewish classes, but job skills, language skills and adult education are the focus."
The five-story building, which features a polished, 19th century facade, is across the street from the Lauder Chabad School for kindergarten through 12th grade.
It represents a natural extension of ties with Chabad for a large portion of the community, and also the general vitality of the Bukharians, who have managed to retain their traditions and a high level of observance as immigrants.
Shlomo Ustoniazov, a businessman in his 50s and artist from Uzbekistan who has lived in Vienna for several decades, said the center ``is an expression of unity of the Bukharian community."
``We are developing, we have our own identity, but we are also part of the Kultusgemeinde," he said, referring in German to the Jewish Community of Vienna, an umbrella organization.
Estimates put the Bukharian population at 3,000 to 4,000 of the approximate 10,000 Jews in Vienna.
The center will offer activities for seniors, job training, women's programs and a youth club. It also will be available to other immigrant groups such as Turks, according to Biderman.
Many Jews who came to Vienna from the former Soviet Union in the late 1970s and early 1980s on their way to Israel said they felt unwelcome in Austria. Bukharians in particular, with their large families and mostly lacking higher education, seemed backward to the integrated Ashkenazim.
Tamar Yusupov, a Bukharian Jew who hosted the center's opening ceremony and an active member of Chabad, said she didn't want future immigrants to feel the way she did when she arrived, ``not speaking the language, not having any friends, not having a home."
Bukharians over the decades have become successful businesspeople. Although they have become more integrated within the Jewish community and Vienna at large, many continue to feel comfortable with Chabad's Chasidic approach to Judaism.
Integration has slowed, and Biderman said that some 20 to 60 new families from the former Soviet Union each year seek out education for their children at the Lauder Chabad School. He estimated that of the school's some 410 students, 60 percent are Bukharian.
Many Bukharians say Chabad was the first to recognize that preserving their mostly Sephardi identity, and not looking askance at traditions such as marriage in the late teens, was vital to having them feel comfortable in their new home.
``It is true that when they first began arriving, the Jewish community of Vienna did not understand their need for separate traditions, but that is all in the past," Austria's chief rabbi, Paul Chaim Eisenberg, said in an interview last December.
Chabad has been particularly successful at attracting financing for its projects in Vienna that cater to Jews from the former Soviet Union. ``The House of the Future," for instance, received city and state funding.
The center features a Hebrew inscription, Beit haLevy Chabad, in honor of a key donor for the project, Lev Leviev, who was on hand for the opening ceremonies. Leviev, a Bukharian billionaire from Uzbekistan now living in Israel, is a major funder of Chabad in Austria and the former Soviet Union.
He was among 300 people at the center's opening, along with city and state officials. The crowd was mostly Bukharian, but there were also large numbers of Georgian and Caucasus Jews.
Oleg Sivan, 31, from the Republic of Dagestan, said, ``It is great what Chabad does; it brings us all together. There are some minor differences between us, but that is normal."
Not everyone was happy with the new center.
The president of the Vienna Jewish community, Ariel Muzicant, said at the center's opening that it would duplicate existing community programs, detract from an existing Sephardi center that receives community funding and siphon potential government money from the community.
His criticism reflects a history of tense competition between the community and Chabad, although they have cooperated often as well.
``It's the same story over and over with Chabad," he said. ``They sell it to the Austrian government officials as an open center for integration to get funding, but it's all about Chabad."
Biderman strongly denied the accusations, saying he had worked with all elements of the Jewish community to gain support and approval for the project.
``The people on our board are also on the board of the Sephardi center, so there is no competition," he said, adding that the center was open to all immigrants.
Ustoniazov, one of the board members to whom Biderman referred, said the suggestion of competition was outrageous.
``It is absurd to even think that we would duplicate activities or do anything to split the community," he said.
The Sephardi center, which opened in 1989, also was a Chabad-led effort but under the auspices of the Jewish Community of Vienna. The center, in the historically Jewish Second District, caters to the Georgian and Bukharian Jewish congregations. It has two synagogues and facilities for gatherings and study.
More recently the Bukharians have split into three congregations -- one oriented toward Chabad and two non-Chabad.
Two organizations represent the Bukharians: the Bukharian World Congress, with links to Chabad, and the non-Chabad Association of Bukharian Jews in Austria. Biderman said they were working together to set aside their differences and form one group.
Signaling that unity approach, the head of the Association of Bukharians Jews in Austria, Uri Gilkarov, attended the center's opening, and Biderman said he was seeking his input on programming.
Natalia Usopov, 29, and Marina Aminov, 31, who were celebrating the opening of ``The House of the Future," seemed to embody the mood among some of the Bukharian guests.
Aminov, an Uzbek native asked about the differences between the Bukharian groups, said: ``That's for the husbands to worry about. We just say 'Shalom.' ''
Posted: 2/20/2007
VIENNA (JTA) -- As a slender violinist with flowing black hair played ``Oseh Shalom" to an audience peppered with at least a dozen long-bearded rabbis, Bukharian Jews in this capital city ushered in a new era.
Their cause for celebration: Unlike many of those from Central Asia who came to Austria more than 25 years ago, immigrants to the country now have a new center to help them find their way.
On Feb. 18, Chabad opened a $6.05 million facility in Vienna aimed at serving their needs.
``The House of the Future," as the center has been dubbed, is expected to cater mainly to Bukharian Jews from Central Asia with whom Chabad is already deeply involved.
``The main purpose of the center is to provide help with integration," said Rabbi Jacob Biderman, chairman of the extensive Chabad organization in Austria. ``Yes, this is initiated by Chabad and there will be a chance for Jewish classes, but job skills, language skills and adult education are the focus."
The five-story building, which features a polished, 19th century facade, is across the street from the Lauder Chabad School for kindergarten through 12th grade.
It represents a natural extension of ties with Chabad for a large portion of the community, and also the general vitality of the Bukharians, who have managed to retain their traditions and a high level of observance as immigrants.
Shlomo Ustoniazov, a businessman in his 50s and artist from Uzbekistan who has lived in Vienna for several decades, said the center ``is an expression of unity of the Bukharian community."
``We are developing, we have our own identity, but we are also part of the Kultusgemeinde," he said, referring in German to the Jewish Community of Vienna, an umbrella organization.
Estimates put the Bukharian population at 3,000 to 4,000 of the approximate 10,000 Jews in Vienna.
The center will offer activities for seniors, job training, women's programs and a youth club. It also will be available to other immigrant groups such as Turks, according to Biderman.
Many Jews who came to Vienna from the former Soviet Union in the late 1970s and early 1980s on their way to Israel said they felt unwelcome in Austria. Bukharians in particular, with their large families and mostly lacking higher education, seemed backward to the integrated Ashkenazim.
Tamar Yusupov, a Bukharian Jew who hosted the center's opening ceremony and an active member of Chabad, said she didn't want future immigrants to feel the way she did when she arrived, ``not speaking the language, not having any friends, not having a home."
Bukharians over the decades have become successful businesspeople. Although they have become more integrated within the Jewish community and Vienna at large, many continue to feel comfortable with Chabad's Chasidic approach to Judaism.
Integration has slowed, and Biderman said that some 20 to 60 new families from the former Soviet Union each year seek out education for their children at the Lauder Chabad School. He estimated that of the school's some 410 students, 60 percent are Bukharian.
Many Bukharians say Chabad was the first to recognize that preserving their mostly Sephardi identity, and not looking askance at traditions such as marriage in the late teens, was vital to having them feel comfortable in their new home.
``It is true that when they first began arriving, the Jewish community of Vienna did not understand their need for separate traditions, but that is all in the past," Austria's chief rabbi, Paul Chaim Eisenberg, said in an interview last December.
Chabad has been particularly successful at attracting financing for its projects in Vienna that cater to Jews from the former Soviet Union. ``The House of the Future," for instance, received city and state funding.
The center features a Hebrew inscription, Beit haLevy Chabad, in honor of a key donor for the project, Lev Leviev, who was on hand for the opening ceremonies. Leviev, a Bukharian billionaire from Uzbekistan now living in Israel, is a major funder of Chabad in Austria and the former Soviet Union.
He was among 300 people at the center's opening, along with city and state officials. The crowd was mostly Bukharian, but there were also large numbers of Georgian and Caucasus Jews.
Oleg Sivan, 31, from the Republic of Dagestan, said, ``It is great what Chabad does; it brings us all together. There are some minor differences between us, but that is normal."
Not everyone was happy with the new center.
The president of the Vienna Jewish community, Ariel Muzicant, said at the center's opening that it would duplicate existing community programs, detract from an existing Sephardi center that receives community funding and siphon potential government money from the community.
His criticism reflects a history of tense competition between the community and Chabad, although they have cooperated often as well.
``It's the same story over and over with Chabad," he said. ``They sell it to the Austrian government officials as an open center for integration to get funding, but it's all about Chabad."
Biderman strongly denied the accusations, saying he had worked with all elements of the Jewish community to gain support and approval for the project.
``The people on our board are also on the board of the Sephardi center, so there is no competition," he said, adding that the center was open to all immigrants.
Ustoniazov, one of the board members to whom Biderman referred, said the suggestion of competition was outrageous.
``It is absurd to even think that we would duplicate activities or do anything to split the community," he said.
The Sephardi center, which opened in 1989, also was a Chabad-led effort but under the auspices of the Jewish Community of Vienna. The center, in the historically Jewish Second District, caters to the Georgian and Bukharian Jewish congregations. It has two synagogues and facilities for gatherings and study.
More recently the Bukharians have split into three congregations -- one oriented toward Chabad and two non-Chabad.
Two organizations represent the Bukharians: the Bukharian World Congress, with links to Chabad, and the non-Chabad Association of Bukharian Jews in Austria. Biderman said they were working together to set aside their differences and form one group.
Signaling that unity approach, the head of the Association of Bukharians Jews in Austria, Uri Gilkarov, attended the center's opening, and Biderman said he was seeking his input on programming.
Natalia Usopov, 29, and Marina Aminov, 31, who were celebrating the opening of ``The House of the Future," seemed to embody the mood among some of the Bukharian guests.
Aminov, an Uzbek native asked about the differences between the Bukharian groups, said: ``That's for the husbands to worry about. We just say 'Shalom.' ''
Posted: 2/20/2007
Monday, February 05, 2007
Israeli added to Forbes billionaires list
Magazine publishes its 2005 list of billionaires; Israel represented by 11 entries, including newly listed businessman Yitzhak Tshuva
Eitan Amit
The 2005 Forbes magazine list of billionaires includes, among its 793 members, 11 Israelis, Israel’s leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Sunday.
Every person on the list has an estimated worth of at least USD 1 billion.
Israeli businessman Yitzhak Tshuva made the list for the first time. His success is described at Forbes as a "Cinderella story", and he is placed in the 382nd place, with a fortune of USD 2 billion.
Tshuva (58) was born in Libya and came to Israel when he was six months old. He made his fortune in real estate, and lately made headlines for purchasing the Plaza hotel in New York for USD 675 million. In 1998 he made his big jump after a hostile takeover on Delek, the Israeli fuel corporation
Leading the list of Israeli billionaires is Sheri Arison who owns, among other things, Bank Hapoalim and is placed on the 109th place with a fortune of 5.2 USD billion.
Bill Gates tops list
Other Israelis on the list are Arnon Milchan, a movie producer who tripled his fortune in the past year (2.9 USD billion) and made the 240th place, Lev Leviev, who owns 80 percent of Africa-Israel company (2.6 USD billion) is in the 278th place, and closing the Israeli list is Morris Kahn, founder of Amdocs, who with USD 1 billion is placed in the 746th place.
The wealthiest Jew on the list is Roman Abramovitch, the 39 year-old oil tycoon and the owner of the popular English soccer team Chelsea. With a fortune of USD 18.2 billion he is placed at the 11th place.
The youngest billionaire on the list is the 22 year-old Hind Hariri, the daughter of late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who with a fortune of USD 1.4 billion is placed in the 562nd place.
Again, the top of list is crowned by Bill Gates (Microsoft) for the 12th time with USD 50 billion, followed by investor Warren Buffet (USD 42 billion) and the Mexican communication tycoon, Carlos Salim, third on the list with USD 30 billion.
Eitan Amit
The 2005 Forbes magazine list of billionaires includes, among its 793 members, 11 Israelis, Israel’s leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Sunday.
Every person on the list has an estimated worth of at least USD 1 billion.
Israeli businessman Yitzhak Tshuva made the list for the first time. His success is described at Forbes as a "Cinderella story", and he is placed in the 382nd place, with a fortune of USD 2 billion.
Tshuva (58) was born in Libya and came to Israel when he was six months old. He made his fortune in real estate, and lately made headlines for purchasing the Plaza hotel in New York for USD 675 million. In 1998 he made his big jump after a hostile takeover on Delek, the Israeli fuel corporation
Leading the list of Israeli billionaires is Sheri Arison who owns, among other things, Bank Hapoalim and is placed on the 109th place with a fortune of 5.2 USD billion.
Bill Gates tops list
Other Israelis on the list are Arnon Milchan, a movie producer who tripled his fortune in the past year (2.9 USD billion) and made the 240th place, Lev Leviev, who owns 80 percent of Africa-Israel company (2.6 USD billion) is in the 278th place, and closing the Israeli list is Morris Kahn, founder of Amdocs, who with USD 1 billion is placed in the 746th place.
The wealthiest Jew on the list is Roman Abramovitch, the 39 year-old oil tycoon and the owner of the popular English soccer team Chelsea. With a fortune of USD 18.2 billion he is placed at the 11th place.
The youngest billionaire on the list is the 22 year-old Hind Hariri, the daughter of late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who with a fortune of USD 1.4 billion is placed in the 562nd place.
Again, the top of list is crowned by Bill Gates (Microsoft) for the 12th time with USD 50 billion, followed by investor Warren Buffet (USD 42 billion) and the Mexican communication tycoon, Carlos Salim, third on the list with USD 30 billion.
Missionaries at our schools
Millionaire Leviev and his Lubavitch beliefs should be kept out of classroom
Shulamit Aloni
Mr. Lev Leviev is a great patriot and a very precious man. He is precious not only because he has lots of money, but also because he's filled with religious zeal just like all Lubavitchers, and just like them he is eager to draw more people to this type of religious Judaism and plant it in their tender hearts, in order to "enhance their Jewish identity."
In his view, Jewish identity is of course religious Judaism. Or in other words, he's a missionary boasting a high budget that enables him to capture the hearts of the children, and first and foremost the mayors, who are always willing to cooperate on any matter associated with money.
Catholic Jesuits used to say: Give us your children until the age of ten and take them back later. After being brainwashed at young age, any amateur psychologist knows that there is no way back. Therefore, the effort to "enhance the Jewish identity" among young school children (it's a wonder kindergartens have not yet been invaded) is an operation, in Jewish terms, of "soul stealing", clear and simple.
Fearing God, loving God, thanking God: No scientific thought, no curiosity, nothing about the value of the human being and human equality – and many more"NO's," as is common in Chabad-Lubavitch schools. All this wisdom is provided to children not by teachers, but rather, young women sent on behalf of Mr. Leviev, Lubavitch- or Shas-style.
I very much respect the members of Chabad and Shas, because I believe each person is entitled to his or her own belief. But the national school system has a different system and objective than those of Chabad-Lubavitch, and we are allowed to demand that Mr. Leviev and his ilk respect our own beliefs, and also respect the parents of children who study in the national school system.
After all, if the parents wanted to turn their children into Lubavitchers, they would send them to another school system.
I fail to grasp the irresponsibility and odd haste displayed by mayors, who allowed missionary penetration of schools only because this creates the impression they are concerned about education and the addition of study hours.
If Mr. Leviev indeed wishes to contribute to school children, he better ensure that new classrooms are added and that warm meals are provided where they're needed. In particular, if knowledge of Judaism is important to him, he should grant scholarships to students wishing to concentrate on bible or Jewish though studies at the university or teachers' college.
At teachers' seminars in university, people learn Jewish thought, and this isn't done through missionary activity at elementary schools in a bid to steal souls for the sake of religious belief, instilling fear of God, and inspiring children to love for every Jew (even if he is a scoundrel,) which means arrogance and haughtiness and a broad platform for cultivating hatred for others. We already have legitimate racist parties around here. Is this desired?
Teachers' Union's silence
Jewish identity in the sovereign State of Israel means good citizenship, taking responsibility for one's society, human solidarity, recognition of human rights, and the development of curiosity and criticism, a well as an urge to investigate, ask questions, and gain knowledge in science and the arts. Jewish identity also means cooperating with other peoples in the country, region, and the entire world.
What Leviev is doing in the former USSR isn't similar to the situation in Israel where we are the sovereigns, in control, and have our own government, Education Ministry, Foreign Ministry, and military, and where we are responsible for every citizen residing here – that is, responsible for their rights and freedoms, without having to check their mother's of father's genes, and without peeking into their pots and pans or scrutinizing what they eat during holidays.
Jewish identity
More than I'm upset at Leviev, who after all believes in his mission, I'm angry at local council heads and school principals who took the easy road and were happy to get close to this very precious man, perhaps in the hopes they will elicit more donations from him for municipal matters.
In fact, more than anything I'm surprised by the conduct of the Teacher's Union, which is currently battling for raising the status of the teacher at school and among the public – they are silent when missionaries lacking pedagogical education and proper general education are brought in; missionaries who lack the knowledge that allows a teacher to provide students, beyond a stimulating lesson, information about nature, stories and tales, and newspaper articles, while birnging up issues of government, war, and peace.
In elementary school, everything hinges on everything, and the talented teacher knows how to combine all this information and enrich students. So where's the Teacher's Union, and of course, where is the Education Ministry and education minister?
There is no obligation to adopt any belch or hiccup coming from a millionaire only because he is nice, very wealthy, and a very precious Jew, in more than one way.
Shulamit Aloni
Mr. Lev Leviev is a great patriot and a very precious man. He is precious not only because he has lots of money, but also because he's filled with religious zeal just like all Lubavitchers, and just like them he is eager to draw more people to this type of religious Judaism and plant it in their tender hearts, in order to "enhance their Jewish identity."
In his view, Jewish identity is of course religious Judaism. Or in other words, he's a missionary boasting a high budget that enables him to capture the hearts of the children, and first and foremost the mayors, who are always willing to cooperate on any matter associated with money.
Catholic Jesuits used to say: Give us your children until the age of ten and take them back later. After being brainwashed at young age, any amateur psychologist knows that there is no way back. Therefore, the effort to "enhance the Jewish identity" among young school children (it's a wonder kindergartens have not yet been invaded) is an operation, in Jewish terms, of "soul stealing", clear and simple.
Fearing God, loving God, thanking God: No scientific thought, no curiosity, nothing about the value of the human being and human equality – and many more"NO's," as is common in Chabad-Lubavitch schools. All this wisdom is provided to children not by teachers, but rather, young women sent on behalf of Mr. Leviev, Lubavitch- or Shas-style.
I very much respect the members of Chabad and Shas, because I believe each person is entitled to his or her own belief. But the national school system has a different system and objective than those of Chabad-Lubavitch, and we are allowed to demand that Mr. Leviev and his ilk respect our own beliefs, and also respect the parents of children who study in the national school system.
After all, if the parents wanted to turn their children into Lubavitchers, they would send them to another school system.
I fail to grasp the irresponsibility and odd haste displayed by mayors, who allowed missionary penetration of schools only because this creates the impression they are concerned about education and the addition of study hours.
If Mr. Leviev indeed wishes to contribute to school children, he better ensure that new classrooms are added and that warm meals are provided where they're needed. In particular, if knowledge of Judaism is important to him, he should grant scholarships to students wishing to concentrate on bible or Jewish though studies at the university or teachers' college.
At teachers' seminars in university, people learn Jewish thought, and this isn't done through missionary activity at elementary schools in a bid to steal souls for the sake of religious belief, instilling fear of God, and inspiring children to love for every Jew (even if he is a scoundrel,) which means arrogance and haughtiness and a broad platform for cultivating hatred for others. We already have legitimate racist parties around here. Is this desired?
Teachers' Union's silence
Jewish identity in the sovereign State of Israel means good citizenship, taking responsibility for one's society, human solidarity, recognition of human rights, and the development of curiosity and criticism, a well as an urge to investigate, ask questions, and gain knowledge in science and the arts. Jewish identity also means cooperating with other peoples in the country, region, and the entire world.
What Leviev is doing in the former USSR isn't similar to the situation in Israel where we are the sovereigns, in control, and have our own government, Education Ministry, Foreign Ministry, and military, and where we are responsible for every citizen residing here – that is, responsible for their rights and freedoms, without having to check their mother's of father's genes, and without peeking into their pots and pans or scrutinizing what they eat during holidays.
Jewish identity
More than I'm upset at Leviev, who after all believes in his mission, I'm angry at local council heads and school principals who took the easy road and were happy to get close to this very precious man, perhaps in the hopes they will elicit more donations from him for municipal matters.
In fact, more than anything I'm surprised by the conduct of the Teacher's Union, which is currently battling for raising the status of the teacher at school and among the public – they are silent when missionaries lacking pedagogical education and proper general education are brought in; missionaries who lack the knowledge that allows a teacher to provide students, beyond a stimulating lesson, information about nature, stories and tales, and newspaper articles, while birnging up issues of government, war, and peace.
In elementary school, everything hinges on everything, and the talented teacher knows how to combine all this information and enrich students. So where's the Teacher's Union, and of course, where is the Education Ministry and education minister?
There is no obligation to adopt any belch or hiccup coming from a millionaire only because he is nice, very wealthy, and a very precious Jew, in more than one way.
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