Nadene Goldfoot
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George Schwartz Soros
born August 12, 1930 in Budapest, Hungary |
George Soros was born to Tividar and Erzebat Schwartz, non-practicing Jews, in Budapest, Hungary on August 12, 1930. Tivadar was an attorney by profession, but the consuming passion of his life was the promotion of Esperanto—an artificial, “universal” language created during the 1880s in hopes that people worldwide might be persuaded to drop their native tongues and speak Esperanto instead—thereby, in theory at least, minimizing their nationalist impulses while advancing intercultural harmony. In 1936, Tivadar changed his family surname to Soros—a future-tense Esperanto verb meaning “will soar.”
Soros has wryly described his home as a Jewish antisemitic home. His mother Erzsébet (also known as Elizabeth) came from a family that owned a thriving silk shop. His father Tivadar (also known as Teodoro Ŝvarc) was a lawyer and a well-known Esperanto-speaker who edited the Esperanto literary magazine Literatura Mondo and raised his son to speak the language. Tivadar had also been a prisoner of war during and after World War I until he escaped from Russia and rejoined his family in Budapest. The two married in 1924. In 1936, Soros's family changed their name from the German-Jewish Schwartz to Soros, as protective camouflage in increasingly antisemitic Hungary. Tivadar liked the new name because it is a palindrome and because of its meaning. In Hungarian, soros means "next in line," or "designated successor"; in Esperanto it means "will soar."
“I was 14 years old,” he told Steve Kroft. “It was a tremendous evil, a very personal experience of evil.”
But it was an experience for which he felt no guilt, he added, unwittingly seeding smears that would follow him for the next 20 years.
Early in the occupation, Mr Soros worked as a courier for the local Jewish council, which Nazis set up in many occupied countries - using Jews to identify and keep tabs on other Jews."
“The members of the Jewish councils faced impossible moral dilemmas,” the US Holocaust Memorial Museum wrote. "They were often unaware that the Nazis' goal was the death of all Jews, or even believed that working with the regime might benefit their communities."
One day, Mr Soros was ordered to deliver messages to several Jewish lawyers in Budapest, according to the biography, Mr Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire. The letters instructed the lawyers to report to a rabbinical school, but Mr Soros realised they would be imprisoned upon arrival. He warned them of their danger, according to the book, and quit his job with the council after carrying out the errand."
George Soros, Hon FBA is a Hungarian-American billionaire investor and philanthropist. As of May 2020, he had a net worth of $8.3 billion, having donated more than $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations. Open Society Foundations, formerly the Open Society Institute, is an international grantmaking network founded by business magnate George Soros. Open Society Foundations financially support civil society groups around the world, with a stated aim of advancing justice, education, public health and independent media. Their headquarters is in New York.
In the United States, the Open Society Foundations work with organizations and individuals who seek to address profound racial, economic, and political inequalities, while funding efforts to prepare for the policy challenges of the future.
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People hold hands as a sign of unity during a rally in front of Baltimore City Hall in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 3, 2015. © Andrew Burton/Getty
Daytime, blue sky, now...all is well as it should be |
George Soros’s giving in the United States began in the 1980s with a focus on just two issues—improving the quality of palliative care, and reforming punitive drug policies that largely targeted Black Americans. During the 1990s, our racial justice work broadened to fight bias in schools, in policing, in voting, and in the justice system, while we expanded support for those advocating for greater levels of government accountability and the protection of civil and political rights for all.
When the Nazis occupied Budapest in 1944, Tivadar decided to split up his family so as to minimize the chance that all its members would be killed together. For each of them—his wife and two sons—he purchased forged papers identifying them as Christians; paid government officials to conceal his family’s Jewish heritage from the German and Hungarian fascists; and bribed Gentile families to take them into their homes. As for George in particular, the father paid a Hungarian government official named Baumbach to claim George as his Christian godson, “Sandor Kiss,” and to let the boy live with him in Budapest.
One of Baumbach’s duties was to deliver deportation notices to Hungary’s Jews, confiscating their property and turning it over to Germany. Young George Soros sometimes accompanied the official on his rounds.14 Many years later, in December 1998, a CBS interviewer would ask Soros whether he had ever felt any guilt about his association with Baumbach during that period. Soros replied: “… I was only a spectator … I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.”15
In fact, Kaufman wrote in the biography, Mr Soros would spend years in therapy “dealing with the impact that his temporary, necessary, and pragmatic denial of Jewishness at the age of fourteen had had on the development of his personality.”
Soros today recalls the German occupation of Hungary as “probably the happiest year of my life.” “For me,” he elaborates, “it was a very positive experience. It’s a strange thing because you see incredible suffering around you and the fact you are in considerable danger yourself. But you’re fourteen years old and you don’t believe that it can actually touch you. You have a belief in yourself. You have a belief in your father. It’s a very happy-making, exhilarating experience.”16
In 1947 the Soros family relocated from Hungary to England, where George attended the London School of Economics (LSE). There, he was exposed to the works of the Viennese-born philosopher Karl Popper, who taught at LSE and whom Soros would later call his “spiritual mentor.”17 Though Soros never studied directly under Popper, he read the latter’s works and submitted some essays to him for review and comment. Most notably, Popper’s 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies introduced Soros to the concept of an “open society,” a theme that would play a central role in Soros’s thought and activities for the rest of his life.18 Resource: https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/george-soros/
"When asked about what he thought about Israel, in The New Yorker, Soros replied: "I don't deny the Jews to a right to a national existence – but I don't want anything to do with it." According to hacked emails released in 2016, Soros's Open Society Foundation has a self-described objective of "challenging Israel's racist and anti-democratic policies" in international forums, in part by questioning Israel's reputation as a democracy. He has funded NGOs which have been actively critical of Israeli policies including groups that campaign for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.
Speaking before a 2003 conference of the Jewish Funders Network, Soros said that the administrations of George W. Bush in the U.S. and Ariel Sharon in Israel, and even the unintended consequences of some of his own actions, were partially contributing to a new European antisemitism. Soros, citing accusations that he was one of the "Jewish financiers" who, in antisemitic terms, "ruled the world by proxy", suggested that if we change the direction of those policies, then anti-Semitism also will diminish. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League later said that Soros's comments held a simplistic view, were counterproductive, biased and a bigoted perception of what's out there, and "blamed the victim" when holding Jews responsible for antisemitism.
Jewish philanthropist Michael Steinhardt, who arranged for Soros's appearance at the conference, clarified, "George Soros does not think Jews should be hated any more than they deserve to be." Soros has also said that Jews can overcome antisemitism by "giv[ing] up on the tribalness".In a subsequent article for The New York Review of Books, Soros emphasized that I do not subscribe to the myths propagated by enemies of Israel and I am not blaming Jews for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism predates the birth of Israel. Neither Israel's policies nor the critics of those policies should be held responsible for anti-Semitism. At the same time, I do believe that attitudes toward Israel are influenced by Israel's policies, and attitudes toward the Jewish community are influenced by the pro-Israel lobby's success in suppressing divergent views.
In 2017, Israeli businessman Beny Steinmetz filed a $10 million lawsuit against Soros, alleging that Soros had influenced the government of Guinea to freeze Steinmetz's company BSG Resources out of iron ore mining contracts in the African country due to "long-standing animus toward the state of Israel". Steinmetz claims that Soros engaged in a "smear" campaign against him and his companies and blames Soros for scrutiny of him by American, Israeli, Swiss, and Guinean authorities. Soros called Steinmetz's suit "frivolous and entirely false" and said that it was "a desperate PR stunt meant to deflect attention from BSGR's mounting legal problems across multiple jurisdictions".
During an award ceremony for Imre Kertész, Soros said that the victims of violence and abuse were becoming "perpetrators of violence", suggesting that this model explained Israel's behavior towards the Palestinians, which led to walkouts and Soros being booed.
In July 2017, a Hungarian billboard campaign backed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which was considered to be anti-semitic by the country's Jewish groups, vilified Soros as an enemy of the state, using the slogan "Let's not allow Soros to have the last laugh". The campaign was estimated to have cost 5.7bn forints (then US$21 million). According to the Israeli ambassador the campaign "evokes sad memories but also sows hatred and fear", a reference to Hungary's role in the deportation of 500,000 Jews during the Holocaust. Lydia Gall of Human Rights Watch asserted that it was reminiscent of Nazi posters during the Second World War featuring "'the laughing Jew'". Orbán and his government's representative said they had a "zero tolerance" of antisemitism, explaining the posters were aiming to persuade voters Soros was a "national security risk".
Hours later, in an apparent attempt to ally Israel with Hungary, Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a "clarification", denouncing Soros, stating that he "continuously undermines Israel's democratically elected governments by funding organizations that defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself".
Soros' son Alexander said in an interview that his father cares about Israel, and that he "would like to see Israel in Yitzhak Rabin's image. His views are more or less the common views in Meretz and in the Labor Party." According to Alexander, Soros supports a two-state solution. The younger Soros recounts that after his bar mitzvah in 1998, his father told him: "If you're serious about being Jewish, you might want to consider immigrating to Israel."
My opinion is that if Soros had ever studied our history like he has the financing in the world, he would have very different opinions about his Jewish background. It's out of his own family's anti-Semitic attitude that has shaped his mind about his own people, that and falling into the quagmire of believing the German propaganda around him in his early years about Jews. Our worst enemies are often a few of our own gullible people, and he's such an example, for he has been often said to be one of the financiers of J Street, the group against AIPAC, finding fault and siding with those who are against Israel and oftentimes, Orthodox Jewry.
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| Europe 1200 |
Jews in Hungary go back to the 2nd century CE with graves dating from then. Jewish communities were known to be in Hungary in the 9th century. By the 13th century, the decrees of the Catholic Lateran Council segregating the Jews from their neighbors were pit into effect and the wearing of a distinctive bade was started. During the reign of Bela IV from 1235 to 1270, many Jews settled in Hungary as his property. They enjoyed good relations with their neighbors, and were often minters of coins, some of which bore Hebrew inscriptions. Despite pressure from the Pope, the position of the Jews remained good until 1349 when they were expelled for the first time. A 2nd expulsion took place in 1360. Many Jews immigrated from the neighboring countries when the edict was revoked in 1364. A year later the office of "judge of the Jews" was established to collect taxes from the Jewish population and protect their interests, the last judge was appointed in 1440.
The 15th and 16th centuries were marked by recurrent charges of Ritual Murder and the cancellation of debts owned to Jews. For nearly a century and a half until 1686, the Jews of Buda and southern Hungary enjoyed a large measure of civic equality and religious liberty under the occupying Ottoman Empire regime, although subject to heavy taxes as 2nd rate citizens or dhimmis. The restoration of Hungarian sovereignty brought in its wake, expulsions and exclusion of Jews from agriculture and the professions. At the same time, some nobles protected the Jews whose number were augmented by refugees from Vienna in 1670.
The arrival of Jews from Moravia and Poland in the first half of the 18th century further increased the Jewish population. The Polish immigrants brought the study of the Talmud to Hungry, establishing important centers of learning.
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| Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina was the only female ruler of the Habsburg dominions and the last of the House of Habsburg. She was the sovereign of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Transylvania, Mantua, Milan, Lodomeria and Galicia, the Austrian Netherlands, and Parma. |
During Maria Theresa's reign, various new methods were devised for exacting money from the Jews.
The rule of Joseph II from 1780 to 1790 brought the right to establish schools, lease lands, engage in all trades and professions, and live in the royal cities. The Jewish badge was abolished, and the Jews had to adopt German surnames. All this was nullified at Joseph's death. Joseph was one of fifteen children born to Leopold II and Maria Louisa of Spain. He was born in Florence, where his father was ruling as Grand Duke of Tuscany. In 1796, he was made Palatine of Hungary (nádor in Hungarian). This old title was, in effect, a deputy of the king, when he was absent from the country.
Then they had a struggle for past rights that everyone else had and had to deal with increased Magyarization of the Jewish community. Wholehearted support for the 1848 revolution brought severe reprisals by the Austrians. In 1867 the Jews were finally granted full civic and political rights. Afterward, Hungarian Jewry became divided in its religious life into 2 opposing camps of orthodox and liberal Jews.
The rise of anti-Semitism was going on in the 19th century which mirrored the rapid integration of the Jews into the country's life. This culminated in the Tiszaeszar Ritual Murder libel. The Tiszaeszlár Affair was a blood libel which led to a trial that set off anti-semitic agitation in Austria-Hungary in 1882 and 1883. After the disappearance of a local girl, Eszter Solymosi, Jews were accused of ritually murdering and beheading her. After her body was found some time later in a river, she having apparently drowned, it was claimed that the body was not that of Eszter, but had been dressed in her clothes. A lengthy trial followed, eventually resulting in the acquittal of all the accused.
Jews were in the middle of the cultural life of Hungary before WWI. They participated in the Communist Revolution of 1919 and suffered more after the collapse of the Bela Kun regime, and discrimination of many kinds was instituted against them.
After the advent of Nazism in Germany, the scope of anti-Jewish measures enacted b the government increased. These also applied to the 300,000 Jews in territories which the Hungarians annexed from Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania during WWII.
In 1944, the Nazis overran Hungary, imposed ghettos, concentration camps, and deportations to extermination centers. Of Hungary's 725,000 Jews, about 400,000 were killed. After the liberation, all pre-war organizations were re-established.
The communists in 1948 gained power led to the nationalization of Jewish institutions, and religious organizations wee centralized under one authority. Some 20,000 Jews left the country after the 1956 revolution. 80,000 Jews were registered in the country in 1990.
Discover the networks is an online database of th
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, also known as Mohammad Reza Shah, was the last Shah of Iran from 16 September 1941 until his overthrow in the Iranian Revolution on 11 February 1979. Due to his status as the last Shah of Iran, he is often known as simply the Shah. He had been a friend of Israel as had King Cyrus in 538 BCE of Persia. 
