R1m Yach family foundation donation to Gift of the Givers creates rift in SA's Jewish community

Key topics:R1m donation to Gift of the Givers sparks Jewish community riftAllegations of terror links fuel debate over Sooliman’s charityCritics question timing, transparency, and anti-Israel rhetoric.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Marika Sboros*.Dr Imtiaz Sooliman must wake each morning feeling like all his birthdays have come at once.Sooliman, a medical doctor and founder-CEO of the global Gift of the Givers Foundation, recently received a R1-million donation from a little-known South African Jewish family charity, the Mauerberger Foundation Fund (MFF).It’s pocket change for the family, but the donation has deeply divided South Africa’s Jewish community.The MFF is headed by University of Cape Town (UCT) Council member Dianna Yach, granddaughter of industrialist Morris Mauerberger. He founded the fund in 1936 as part of his philanthropic programme to support educational and community projects in South Africa and abroad.An early initiative was a clinic for Cape Flats workers who struggled to access state hospitals due to poverty and transport barriers.One wonders what he would make of the donation today. There’s no doubting what Sooliman makes of it. He’s no slouch at leveraging its inbuilt PR advantages.He quickly posted photos on his charity’s Facebook and Instagram pages. One image shows him grinning broadly as he accepts the donation from Yach; another captures them chatting in the intimate surrounds of the lounge in her Cape Town home.Sooliman posted a statement by Khalid Sayed, African National Congress (ANC) Leader of the Opposition in the Western Cape Legislature, “saluting South African Jews like the MFF for their solidarity with Palestine”.In other words, anti-Zionist Jews, the small but noisy minority who help the global anti-Israel lobby to make Zionism a swear word and Zionist a code word for Jews.The donation dangles a halo over Sooliman’s head that may mitigate reputational damage from ongoing claims that his charity is a conduit for funnelling funds to terror groups. Not just Iran-backed proxy Hamas in Gaza. Not only after Hamas perpetrated one of the deadliest most brutal terror attacks in history on mostly civilians in southern Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023.Gift of the Givers is alleged to have funnelled funds reaching Hezbollah and other Iran-backed proxies waging war against Israel on multiple fronts.Evidence is largely circumstantial, significant in volume and buttressed by Sooliman’s own words captured on video and in media reports. Legal experts note that circumstantial evidence, when presented properly and in sufficient quantity, easily secures conviction.Sooliman continues vigorously to deny all claims yet won’t do the minimum required to put the claims to rest forever.He won’t disclose all funders – except in this case. He won’t reveal how much money his charity receives annually and say where it all goes. And he does not publish audited annual financial statements, as other international charities in South Africa routinely do.Most Jews I canvassed, or who contacted me about the donation called it “disgusting”, “disgraceful”, a “betrayal.” Most insisted on anonymity. That’s not surprising given the hostile local environment towards Jews, ironically more so since the October 7 massacre.The Western Cape and UCT campus are hostility hothouses. It’s a top-down phenomenon, with the ANC national government and DIRCO (Department of International Relations and Cooperation) leading the charge.One critic who was prepared to speak openly is UCT emeritus professor of historical studies Milton Shain. He is author of Fascists, Fantasists and Fabricators: Antisemitism in South Africa from 1948 to the Present (Jacana Media, 2023), the final volume in his trilogy on South African antisemitism.Via email, he said: “One hesitates to criticise anyone giving support for the needy.” The suffering in Gaza makes it “obvious that support is needed”.He acknowledged Gift of the Givers as running a successful global disaster-relief operation but said that Yach “must surely know of Sooliman’s controversial statements about Israel”.“One needs to question (her) judgement,” he said.Earlier this year, in a Jewish Report article, Shain was asked for his opinion on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s inclusion of Sooliman in the so-called National Dialogue project..Read more:.Marika Sboros: A very dark side to Sooliman’s Gift of the Givers.He said of Sooliman: “His is a divisive voice, unsuited to a talk-shop billed as inclusive”. He posed the question: “Why choose a figure who has uttered statements on Israel that have often descended into classic Jew-hatred? Surely Sooliman is unwelcome as co-chair in a multicultural society that celebrates diversity?”Other criticism has focused on the donation’s timing – just days before New Year and Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.Its public nature is under scrutiny for breaching the highest level of the Jewish tradition of tzedakah. The word translates more accurately as “righteousness” or “justice” than “charity.” It exhorts Jews to give anonymously. Anonymity ranks first in an eight-level hierarchy of giving and is critical in determining the act’s worth.The donation also missed a golden opportunity as the two-year anniversary of the October 7 slaughter rolls around. There’s no reference to suffering Israelis or 48 hostages still lingering in Hamas captivity in Gaza under conditions best described as hellish. More than half are reliably reported to be dead.But the main driver of division is likely that most Jews can’t fathom why a prominent, philanthropic, Jewish family would donate to a charity run by one of South Africa’s most outspoken, implacable and virulent opponents of Israel and Jews who support it.Examples of Sooliman’s conduct unbecoming as a humanitarian are too numerous to list them all here. He regularly predicts Israel’s demise. He makes no secret of his hatred of Zionists and belief that Israel is committing genocide – and apartheid and deliberate starvation, ad nauseam – in Gaza.Accusing Zionists or any Jews of genocide is one of the most inflammatory charges imaginable.The term “genocide” was coined in response to the Nazi extermination of six million Jews. It makes such accusations a cruel inversion of history. It weaponises the trauma of the Holocaust against its victims.Scholars, such as Deborah Lipstadt and David Hirsh, argue that such rhetoric is not legitimate critique. They say genocide is a modern blood libel that effectively delegitimises Jewish suffering and fuels antisemitic conspiracy theories.It erases the chasm of distinction between civilian casualties and intentional extermination. It distorts legal definitions and shifts blame from terrorist groups, such as Hamas, whose charter is explicitly genocidal against Jews.As Hirsh notes, this moral inversion turns Jews into perpetrators of the very crimes committed against them.In today’s climate, these claims don’t just target Israeli policy. They endanger Jewish communities globally by normalising hostility and undermining their right to speak out against existential threats.Against this backdrop, I hoped to raise questions with Yach about the MFF’s donation. She is, as her UCT website biography notes, “passionately committed to equality, diversity, and human rights”. After graduating from UCT with a BA and LLB, she was admitted to the SA high court as an advocate. Thereafter, she obtained an LLM from the University of London and lectured in law at its Queen Mary College.I emailed her for comment on the donation and an unrelated issue involving a lawsuit by Prof Adam Mendelsohn, UCT director of the Kaplan Centre for Jewish studies, against the university’s anti-Israel “Gaza resolutions” calling for academic boycotts.Yach replied with a brief MFF statement on the donation, saying that she would not comment further and had handed my email to her lawyers.The statement says, inter alia, that MFF directors “stand with Gift of the Givers in solidarity given their love for humanity and selfless work to address the urgent and pressing food and healthcare needs of the people of Gaza”.The donation is “an initial grant to support the supply of essential medicines for children in Gaza, delivered within six months of fund receipt”.The “ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza” has resulted in shortage of paediatric medicines, “with many health facilities destroyed and children facing preventable illness and mortality due to lack of access to vital treatment”.The directors see Gift of the Givers as “uniquely positioned to address this urgent healthcare challenge, with an established track record of delivering lifesaving support to vulnerable communities across Africa and the Middle East since 1992”.Yach’s brother, Dr Derek Yach, a US-based physician and epidemiologist, and fellow MFF director, was more engaging.He says the donation aligns fully “with MFF’s 70-year engagement with Israeli, Jewish and other commitments”. Its intent is “to provide humanitarian support to people in need, as (MFF) is doing with separate grants to Israeli mental health programmes”.Pressed on why Gift of the Givers was chosen, he says MFF directors considered its status as an approved non-profit organisation registered in the US; that it works with several faith-based charities (mainly Catholic); and has a “proven track record of getting medicines to those in need”.The donation is heavy with ironies..Read more:.Marika Sboros: A rational counter to Jew-hating dominance in South Africa’s public discourse on Israel and Hamas.Chief among them: the MFF is donating funds for medicines for Gazan children with no guarantee that these won’t end up, by default or design, in the hands of Hamas – the group that bears most responsibility for creating the shortage of medicines.Hamas is Gaza’s elected government with a well-documented habit of embedding in hospitals, hijacking aid trucks and shooting to death hungry Gazans trying to access aid.Sooliman claims to “hate Hamas” and that Hamas hates him. Media reports tell a different story.They show Sooliman speaking at public protests under banners proclaiming, “We Are All Hamas”, chanting antisemitic tropes, and aligning with extremist Islamist, jihadist supporters of Hamas.Even if Hamas were not Sooliman’s favoured dinner-party guests, he’d need Superman’s X-ray vision to detect active Hamas terrorists on the ground from civilians in Gaza.John Spencer, US Army veteran and Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point Military Academy, has described how Hamas routinely exploits humanitarian norms by embedding military assets beneath homes, hospitals and schools.It conducts “unprecedented urban warfare” built around a vast tunnel network that “weaponises civilian terrain” as a deliberate cynical strategy, Spencer says.It turns Gaza into “the most difficult battlefield on Earth”.Hamas actively courts a high civilian death counts to win the PR war and gain world sympathy against Israel that it cannot beat militarily, he says.The MFF donation raises other questions, of Jews turning on Jews, and why some stay silent in the face of growing threats to their existence from Islamist jihadist extremism.David Benatar, emeritus professor of philosophy at UCT, has written extensively on the university’s fall from grace. He says academics fear risking “the ire of UCT’s activist ideologues who believe that, of all the armies in the world, the only one to single out for boycott is Israel’s”.British US-based journalist Eve Barlow puts it down to “groupthink” and “adoption of submissive behaviours by Westerners who have already capitulated to Hamas and are mirroring the behaviour of Gazans”.In tweets on X (formerly Twitter), she sees this as “normalising the erasure of Jews from public life” by those who understand the “power, money and social mobility that comes from promoting the Hamas cause”.They do so by “flying Palestinian flags from buildings, wearing red-hand pins down red carpets, signing petitions to boycott Israeli and Jewish businesses”.This leads Jews on a path to “denouncing their own identity, nation and people”, essentially “willing their own deaths by sporting antizionism”.Some Jews in South Africa are far down that path, as protests on UCT campus, including by South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP), clearly demonstrate.SAJPF leader Jo Bluen uses red triangles in social media posts celebrating the deaths of IDF soldiers in Gaza. The Nazis used red triangles to distinguish Jews and other groups in concentration camps during the Holocaust.Bluen latest performative antic, channelling Greta Thunberg, is equally bizarre. It’s a "Proposal for a Hunger Strike" under the banner of "UCT Alumni for Palestine".South African-Israeli writer Joshua Shewitz calls them a “small, unrecognised, shady group of ex-UCT students with blood on their hands, Gazan blood”.He sees something “grotesquely ironic about privileged activists in South Africa staging a hunger strike in solidarity with Hamas-run Gaza, while sitting comfortably in suburban cafés, planning their next ‘resistance’ tweet over a latte”.I could not agree more.In the wake of the October 7 massacre, I wrote a piece headlined: Worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust not enough for some.I pointed out that October 7 was a genuinely genocidal attack on the day not only against Jews, but also Muslims, Buddhists, Bedouins and Druze who dared to consort with Jews and who happened to stumble across the terrorists’ savage path on the day.I quoted US Jewish neuroscientist philosopher Sam Harris saying that October 7 proves that we "are all living in Israel. Some of us just haven't realised it yet."The MFF donation unwittingly contributes to that awareness lack.If the latest US-led peace plan to end the war between Israel and Hamas works soon, the MFF contribution may not bear that fruit..*Marika Sboros is a freelance journalist and best-selling author with decades of service at leading South African titles. She was the BizNews Health editor in our early years.

R1m Yach family foundation donation to Gift of the Givers creates rift in SA's Jewish community

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