Yisroel Goldstein

American Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi, founder of Chabad of Poway, wounded in the 2019 Poway synagogue shooting and imprisoned in 2022 for a multi-million-dollar fraud scheme

Yisroel Goldstein
Born	1961 or 1962 (aged 58 in July 2020)
Nationality	American
Occupation	Rabbi; director of Chabad of Poway (until 2019)
Known for	Founding Chabad of Poway; surviving the Poway synagogue shooting; conviction for conspiracy to defraud the United States and commit wire fraud

Yisroel Goldstein is an American Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi who founded and ran Chabad of Poway, a synagogue in Poway, near San Diego, California. He was wounded in the Poway synagogue shooting of 27 April 2019, and in the following months he became a public figure, appearing at the White House with Donald Trump on 2 May 2019. He was by then under federal investigation. In July 2020 he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and to commit wire fraud. He admitted taking at least $6.2 million in sham donations to his charities, returning up to 90 per cent of each gift to the donor in secret while the donor claimed the full amount as a tax deduction. On 4 January 2022 he was sentenced to 14 months in custody and ordered to pay $2,834,608 in restitution.

Chabad of Poway

Goldstein founded Chabad of Poway, which opened in 1986. According to prosecutors, he set up several nonprofit organisations over the following years. They included the Friendship Circle of San Diego, a charity supporting people with special needs and their families. Prosecutors said that some of these bodies provided genuine services, but that "others were non-functioning shell entities". The FBI and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said the schemes exploited "the non-profit statuses of the Chabad of Poway and the Friendship Circle of San Diego".

The synagogue's address is 16934 Chabad Way, Poway.

The 2019 shooting

On 27 April 2019, the last day of Passover, John T. Earnest entered Chabad of Poway with an assault rifle and opened fire. He killed Lori Gilbert-Kaye and injured three others, including an eight-year-old girl. Earnest fled after congregants rushed at him, then called 911 to confess. Goldstein was among the injured and lost his right index finger.

Earnest pleaded guilty in the state case, and on 30 September 2021 Judge Peter Deddeh sentenced him to life without parole plus 121 years to life. The plea spared him a possible death sentence. He also pleaded guilty to a 113-count federal indictment. It included 54 counts under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, 55 under the Church Arson Prevention Act and four firearms offences. The federal case also covered his attempt on 24 March 2019 to burn down the Dar-ul-Arqam mosque in Escondido. On 28 December 2021 he was sentenced in federal court to life plus 30 years.

Political profile

On 2 May 2019, five days after the shooting, Donald Trump invited Goldstein to speak at the National Day of Prayer service in the White House Rose Garden. Goldstein described the attack and Lori Gilbert-Kaye's work for the Friendship Circle. He called for a moment of silence in public schools, and of Trump he said: "you are a mensch par excellence".

The Los Angeles Times reported that over the following months Goldstein spoke at the United Nations and at gatherings in Brazil and Poland. In July 2019 Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, made an unscheduled stop at the synagogue and were photographed there with him. When Trump visited San Diego in September 2019, Goldstein was one of the few people chosen to greet him on the tarmac as he left Air Force One. Times of San Diego published a photograph of Goldstein with Trump from that visit. All of these appearances came after the October 2018 search of his home and synagogue, described below.

Criminal case

Investigation

The Los Angeles Times reported that the investigation began about four years before Goldstein's plea and that a federal agent worked undercover. According to the Department of Justice, it had run for more than two years before the shooting. In August 2018 Goldstein offered to launder cash for an undercover agent. The FBI and IRS served a search warrant in October 2018, the Los Angeles Times giving the date as 17 October, and Goldstein began cooperating with investigators soon afterwards. According to the Department of Justice, on 20 October 2018 he warned one co-defendant, Yousef Shemirani, that another person might be "wearing a wire". At sentencing, Judge Cynthia Bashant found that he had obstructed the investigation by warning others.

Plea

The case was brought by information as United States v. Goldstein, 3:20-cr-01916, in the US District Court for the Southern District of California. Goldstein waived indictment and pleaded guilty to the single count before Magistrate Judge Karen S. Crawford on 14 July 2020. District Judge Cynthia Bashant accepted the plea on 30 July 2020, and preliminary and amended orders of criminal forfeiture followed in August and November 2020. Under the plea agreement he agreed to forfeit $1 million and pay restitution of $2.5 million.

Conduct admitted in the plea

The following was set out by the Department of Justice as admitted in Goldstein's plea agreement, and described by prosecutors in sentencing.

• Sham donations ("90/10"). From 2010 or earlier until 2018, donors gave money to Chabad of Poway and Goldstein's other entities, and Goldstein secretly returned up to 90 per cent of it. He kept about 10 per cent, and the donors claimed the whole sum as a charitable deduction. The sentencing release put the sham contributions at $6.2 million or more. Goldstein kept over $500,000, and the loss to the IRS exceeded $1.5 million. The 2020 release said at least 20 taxpayers took part.
• Gold. In late 2017 Goldstein bought about $1 million in gold to disguise more than $1.1 million in donations from one participant. The Los Angeles Times reported that he bought about 246 one-ounce gold bars and 246 each of two kinds of one-ounce gold coin, delivered them to the donor and kept $160,000.
• Corporate matching funds. Employees of companies with donation-matching programmes made sham gifts and then asked their employers to match them. The 2020 release said Fortune 500 companies lost at least $134,000. The 2022 release said that three Fortune 500 companies lost at least $144,000, and that at least six employees and two associates took part.
• Concealed income. Goldstein helped conceal more than $700,000 of income, keeping over $70,000. The 2020 release described the beneficiary only as "an individual". The 2022 release named him as Goldstein's brother, Mendel Goldstein. A separate case against a defendant named Mendel Goldstein (3:20-cr-02772) was filed in the same court on 14 September 2020. Judgment was entered on 18 March 2022: eight months in custody, three years' supervised release, a $5,500 fine and restitution of $164,475.82.
• Government grants and foundations. With Alexander Avergoon, Goldstein defrauded FEMA, the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services and private foundations. He submitted false grant claims backed by fake invoices for work that was never done. The loss was put at $875,000 or more in 2020 and at $860,000 or more in 2022.
• Other conduct. Goldstein falsely certified community-service hours for people ordered by San Diego County courts to perform them. With Avergoon, he also took part in loan fraud.

The IRS said that Goldstein had worked with "at least ten other co-conspirators".

Sentence

On 4 January 2022 Judge Bashant sentenced Goldstein, then aged 60, to 14 months in custody and ordered restitution of $2,834,608. He was told to surrender by noon on 23 February 2022. Prosecutors had asked for a reduced sentence because of his cooperation and because he had been a victim of the shooting. Both they and the defence recommended home confinement, with prosecutors proposing eight months' home detention and four years' probation. The judge rejected this recommendation. She told him: "You dragged down so many congregants…" Goldstein told the court: "I stand here today, my head bowed in shame, remorse and disappointment". His lawyers asked that he be held at FCI Otisville. He was represented by Jeremy Delicino and Benjamin Coleman.

Co-defendants and related cases

Five associates pleaded guilty alongside Goldstein on 13 and 14 July 2020. The table below sets out the case numbers and charges as the Department of Justice gave them.

Defendant	Case	Charge	Conduct (Department of Justice, 2020)
Alexander Avergoon	19CR2955-BAS	Wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, money laundering	Recruited nine taxpayers for the donation scheme (more than $275,000); ran the shell company "Imagination Construction Company" used for the grant fraud; ran separate real-estate Ponzi schemes of about $12 million. He was arrested in Latvia and extradited in November 2019.
Bruce Baker	20CR1912-BAS	Conspiracy (18 U.S.C. § 371)	Took part from the 1980s. He "donated" at least $2.6 million and got $2.4 million back, causing an IRS loss of about $644,000. The money returned to him included more than $420,000 in his son's dental-school fees. He was also involved in a separate $1.2 million appraisal fraud over an "ancient Iranian Torah" with the director of another San Diego charity, who was not named.
Bijan Moossazadeh	20CR1893-BAS	Filing a false tax return	About $290,000 in sham donations; text messages used "challah" and "the baker" as code words.
Yousef Shemirani	20CR1895-BAS	Filing a false tax return	About $137,650 in sham donations.
Boris Shkoller	20CR1913-BAS	Filing a false tax return	$122,000 in sham donations; restitution $53,772.

Avergoon was sentenced on 3 January 2022 to more than five years in prison.

On 26 January 2022 Yehuda Hadjadj, director of Chabad at the University of California, San Diego, pleaded guilty to conspiring with Goldstein to defraud Qualcomm's corporate matching programme. From August 2010 or earlier until late 2017, Hadjadj had at least three donors make sham gifts to the Friendship Circle, which Goldstein ran at the time, and he returned all or most of the money to them in cash. Chabad at UCSD was not eligible for Qualcomm's matching funds, so the donors claimed the match for the Friendship Circle. Goldstein passed about two-thirds of the matched funds back to Hadjadj and kept one-third. Chabad at UCSD obtained about $40,000 in this way. The Department of Justice said that Hadjadj was the tenth person to plead guilty as a result of the investigation, and that two others had entered deferred prosecution agreements. On 10 June 2022 Judge Bashant sentenced Hadjadj to three years' probation. Prosecutors had written that he "did not personally benefit from the scheme".

Civil litigation

The following were allegations in a civil suit. No court finding has been sourced.

In early April 2021 Israel Dahan, the father of Noya Dahan, the girl wounded in the shooting, sued Chabad of Poway in San Diego Superior Court together with three of his children. The other defendants were Chabad of California, Rabbi Simcha Backman and Earnest. The suit alleged that the synagogue's security was inadequate, and that it had been awarded federal security-grant funds before the attack but had not spent them. A lawyer for Chabad of California said the organisation "feels terrible" for the victims but had "no control" over the local synagogue's security.

Chabad's response

On 14 July 2020 Chabad of Poway said that, after an internal review, "the rabbi was removed from all of his duties". It said his relationship with the synagogue had been terminated, and that he had been "dismissed by Chabad-Lubavitch Headquarters as a representative of the movement". Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters in New York called the plea "shocking and troubling" and said it had moved to relieve him of his duties when it learned of the investigation the previous year. It added: "Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein's actions broke the law, breached the trust vested by the United States in its stewards of charitable organizations, and violated everything that Judaism and our movement stand for." JTA reported that Goldstein "retired from the Chabad synagogue in November" 2019.

In September 2022 the regional director of Chabad of San Diego, Rabbi Yonah Fradkin, said that the movement had asked Goldstein's son, Rabbi Mendel Goldstein, to resign in August. Fradkin said Yisroel Goldstein's crimes "happened in an environment where one person had complete control. He then passed sole control to his son." He also said the son had rebuffed repeated requests to cooperate. Fradkin appointed Rabbi Yehudah Trestman to lead Chabad in the North County Inland area. Chabad also dismissed Hadjadj at UCSD.

See also

• Chabad and fraud
• Chabad House
• Chabad/Lubavitch non profits in the US
• Chabad-Lubavitch movement