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 guttman@forward.com or on Twitter @nathanguttman

Nathan Guttman, staff writer, was the Forward’s Washington bureau chief. He joined the staff in 2006 after serving for five years as Washington correspondent for the Israeli dailies Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post. In Israel, he was the features editor for Ha’aretz and chief editor of Channel 1 TV evening news. He was born in Canada and grew up in Israel. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO