Israel Paying $750,000 In Rent For Ambassador While Residence Stands Vacant
Ron Dermer Image by Getty Images
By Nathan Guttman May 12, 2017
Why is the official residence of Israel’s ambassador in Washington sitting empty for the past 4 years?
A Haaretz investigation found that the residence, in Washington’s Forest Hills neighborhood, was left untouched since the previous ambassador Michael Oren returned to Israel in 2013. His successor, Ron Dermer, who is Orthodox and who has a larger family, asked to move to house within walking distance of a synagogue. He eventually settled into a rental in Maryland’s Kenwood neighborhood and attends, at times, the Chabad synagogue in nearby Bethesda.
The official residence was in dire need of repairs and, according to a foreign ministry spokesman, was later deemed uninhabitable. But work on razing and rebuilding the house has not yet began and will only start in a few months.
Meanwhile, the state of Israel has paid an estimated $750,000 in rent for Dermer’s Kenwood residence in the four years since he was appointed ambassador.
Contact Nathan Guttman at [email protected] or on Twitter @nathanguttman
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
