Russian Gave Jared A Bag Of Soil From Grandparents’ Hometown
Jared Kushner Image by Getty Images
By Nathan Guttman July 24, 2017
Everyone now knows Jared Kushner met with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Less known is that Kushner received a bag full of real dirt from another Russian he had met with. This dirt came from the the village of Nvgorod in Belarus, the hometown of Kushner’s grandparents.
In his written statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee questioning Trump’s son-in-law on his ties with Russia, Kushner detailed his meeting with Russian banker Sergey Gorkov and the unusual gifts he had received from him. These included a a piece of art from Nvgorod and the bag of dirt. “Any notion that I tried to conceal this meeting or that I took it thinking it was in my capacity as a businessman is false,” Kushner stated, “In fact, I gave my assistant these gifts to formally register them with the transition office.”
Rae and Joseph Kushner, Jared’s paternal grandparents, were Holocaust survivors who moved to America after the war and later settled in New Jersey. Rae Kushner escaped the ghetto in her hometown and joined the partisans fighting the Nazis in the woods. She lost her mother, sister and brother in the Holocaust.
In a tweet, journalist Julia Ioffe of the Atlantic onserved that “Gorkov’s gift to Kushner of bag of dirt from Kushner’s ancestors’ Belarussian village is a shrewd read of American Jewry fascination w/roots.”
Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com 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
