A London Court proceeding found that Rabbi Beel Lazar – Chabad's chief rabbi of Russia – acted deceitfully to benefit his financial patron, oligarch Lev Leviev, in a $1 billion-plus battle with another billionaire, Arcadi Gaydamak, over the proceeds of Angolan diamond mines. Lazar, who is detested by everyone from members of the pro-democracy movement he helped Vladimir Putin crush to US Government officials, Israeli government officials, and a large number of non-Chabad rabbis worldwide, has a long history of deceptive, deceitful and unethical behavior. Will his latest act of bad behavior signal the beginning of the end of his unfortunate career?
Berel Lazar is, I think, a truly disgusting individual.
This is a man (and I use that term lightly) who stood at Auschwitz on the 60th anniversary of its liberation, and without the permission or foreknowledge of the world leaders – including senior Israeli government officials – and organizations representing Holocaust survivors, handed Vladimir Putin a medal honoring Mother Russia for the liberation.
Stalin – the brutal Soviet dictator who murdered millions through enforced starvation, Siberian exile, gulags and simple execution – had intentionally allowed the Germans to control Warsaw for weeks more than necessary in order to give the Nazis time to destroy the remnants of the Polish army and resistance which had launched a full scale rebellion against the Nazis as the Soviet's reached the outskirts of Warsaw. He did so knowing full well that tens of thousands of Poles would be massacred and for no other tactical reason that this: he wanted to occupy Poland and claim it for the Soviet Union. To do so, the Polish army and resistance had to be destroyed. Stalin allowed the Germans to do that for him.
Stalin's pause outside Warsaw cost American lives and Allies lives, as well.
And it also cost Jewish lives (not in Warsaw – the Jews were already liquidated there – but in the death camps).
But that wasn't troubling to Stalin, who if not for Hitler would have been the biggest mass murderer in history, and who killed a lots and lots of Jews.
After the Soviet Union fell, surviving Russian Jewish soldiers spoke about being ordered to stay just outside of death camps for a day or longer, while inside those death camps Jews were dying.
The Soviets played a key role in defeating Hitler, but only because they were forced to do so by Hitler's maniacal greed. They often get an undeserved free pass in terms of their treatment of Jews during the Holocaust for three reasons:
1) They weren't as bad as Hitler, and the atrocities the Soviets committed were rarely exposed by the media, which did not have free access to the Soviet Union to do so until after it collapsed in the late 1980s.
2) Many Jews served in the Soviet army.
3) The Soviets did liberate death camps earlier than the Americans did. But they did so primarily because those death camps were located in the east. The Soviets attacked the Nazis from the north and from the east (the Eastern Front), while the Americans and the other Allies attacked from the west, meaning they had access to fewer death camps.
The Soviet Union had originally been Hitler's ally. It's break with Nazi Germany came when Hitler had his troops turn on their Soviet allies. Until that point, Stalin had no problem teaming up with a German regime that was not only violently crushing democracy in Europe, but was also committing mass murder and ethnic cleansing.
And lest this confuse those Oholei Torah graduates trying to read this, most of those ethnics Hitler was cleansing the world of were Jews.
But there was Berel Lazar, fumbling in the bitter Polish cold, giving the man who crushed Russia's post-Soviet democracy movement a medal honoring Stalin and his army – a medal it later turned out Putin himself had minted.
This is Chabad's 'chief rabbi' of Russia.
If international Chabad was anything more than a craven, self-promotional and self-serving business headed by a technocrat who is far more concerned with fundraising and employing members of Chabad families loyal to him than he is in anything we would call ethics or morality, it would have cut itself off from Lazar in disgust.
But it did not.
Seven years later, Lazar is still there, serving as Putin's poodle, wreaking havoc on anything most Jews would call the Torah's ethics.
And that's how Lazar – almost – found himself in a London court, testifying about a contract between two billionaires, Lev Leviev and Arcadi Gaydamak, Lazar had been given by the two men for safekeeping.
The contract is allegedly worth more than $1 billion for Gaydamak if enforced. If it isn't enforced, Lazar's patron Lev Leviev gets to keep all of that money. Lazar conveniently "lost" the envelope containing the contract, and then belatedly tried to claim that the envelope held a donation agreement for Chabad. To prove this, he and Rabbi David Mondshine – another Chabad rabbi in Russia with certain ethical challenges – produced what Gaydak claims is fabricated evidence of donations by him to Chabad to fit that agreement. For his part, Leviev claimed there was no agreement between him and Gaydamak other than that donation agreement with Chabad.
Lazar refused to come to London to testify, and then refused to testify by video hookup even though others in the trial had done so.
The judge was extremely critical of Lazar's behavior and of the material he filed with the court. In his ruling he writes that the agreement between Leviev and Gaydamak did exist and that Leviev did owe Gaydamak at least $1 billion, and he chastises Lazar for his deceit.
Unfortunately, the judge also ruled that a later agreement between Leviev and Gaydamak voided the first.
Gaydamak claims that second agreement was signed under duress, while in Angola, after the head of Angola's secret police presented it to him on behalf of Leviev. As you might imagine, the potential penalties Gaydamak faced for refusal to sign outweighed the billion or so dollars he was owed.
Gaydamk is appealing the judge's ruling, primarily on that basis and on what he claims to have been Lazar's, Mondshine's and Leviev's perjury.
Yesterday, I published three letters about this fight from Gaydamak to Lazar and to the head of Lazar's Federation of Jewish Communities.
Gaydamak sent me another letter late last night, this one from his Israeli attorney to Lazar:
Download Letter to Lazar 30.07.12.pdf
No matter how this case turns out, I think history will view Lazar and Chabad very badly, further tarnishing the legacy of Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
Related Posts:
Chabad 'Chief Rabbi' Dodges Court Summons As Billions In Diamonds Go To Lev Leviev – For Now.
Exclusive Interview: Is Chabad's Chief Rabbi Of Russia Part Of A $2 Billion Swindle?
Did Chabad Oligarch Lev Leviev Steal $1 Billion With The Help Of Chabad’s ‘Chief Rabbi’ Of Russia?