When Victims Rule (pdf)

WALL STREET, JEWISH / ISRAELI ETHICS, AND THE WORLD OF FUND RAISING
with all the negative publicity some might see Jews in America broadly “as exploiters
of the economy, parasites, profiteers.” [EHRLICH, p. 342] Judith Ehrlich
and Barry Rehfeld note that
“[Pointing] to the dangers to Jews from the prominence of Jewish
names in current scandals and the imagery that emerged from the visibility,
Rabbi Gordis urged that ‘as a people we must look more deeply into
the recesses of our traditions, our experiences, our values.’” [EHRLICH,
p. 345]
The “crisis in Jewish ethics” in America, epitomized in the Wall Street scandals,
was of course nothing new to the 1980s. Well-publicized scandals involving
prominent and powerful Jews surface fairly regularly. Gerald Krefetz, for
instance, noted a particularly nasty Jewish-based scandal in the 1970s:
“Bathed in the merciless lights of Congressional hearings, the witnesses
exposed to a national audience the morbid, pathetic, and sordid conditions
of senior citizens in nursing and old-age homes. It was as if they
had found that a Jew was in charge of a concentration camp. The whole
proceedings were a shanda (shame) of the first order, [with] illegal practices
of a rabbi and other prominent Jews on a captive population unable
to protect itself … [Rabbi Bernard] Bergman was more than a
symbolic figure of evil in the nursing home industry – he was the industry
… [KREFETZ, p. 128] … It became clear that Bergman had almost
oligopolic powers, with interests in close to a hundred different homes
across the nation. It also became clear that perhaps more than any other
industry or service area, Jews dominated the field, that many of the operators
were Jewish, including Bergman, Eugene Hollander, and Albert
Schwartzberg … Insensitivity, greed, and human degradation were the
hallmark of a majority of the private facilities. And that the chief perpetrator
of this terminal inhumanity should be an orthodox rabbi and a
prominent Zionist was a mind-boggling reversal of values …
[KREFETZ, p. 129]…. One illustration is perhaps typical of Bergman’s
operations, his persistence, his political connections, and his unabashed
use of his ‘Jewishness’ that he paraded as if he were its victim …
[KREFETZ, p. 131] … The hypocritical Bergman was using the lethal
and explosive charge of anti-Semitism as a foil for his commercial maneuvers.”
[KREFETZ, p. 132]
Bergman was prominent a number of Jewish Orthodox institutions. “Reputed
to be worth $100 million,” notes Alan Dershowitz, “he had held the presidency
of numerous Jewish philanthropic, religious, and educational institutions.”
[DERSHOWITZ, 1987, p. 126] He was “one of the richest and most powerful orthodox
Jews in the world,” notes Robert Friedman, “with close ties to Israel’s National
Religious Party. He made a fortune from a national conglomerate of
Medicaid nursing homes, where infirm patients were left unattended to soak in
their own urine … No doubt Bergman learned his business ethics from his parents
who were not only bootleggers, but also were convicted in 1941 of smuggling
eight kilos of heroin from France in the bindings of Hebrew prayer books.”
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