White House senior advisors Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner receive a blessing from Israeli Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef. Image by Shloimy Cohen/Twitter

By Aiden Pink May 13, 2018

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump reportedly received a blessing in Jerusalem on Sunday from Israel’s Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef — who was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League earlier this year for comparing black people to monkeys.

Kushner and Trump, both senior advisors to President Trump, are in Israel as part of the American delegation celebrating the moving of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Jewish Insider reported that in addition to having dinner with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and attending a ceremony at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they also received a blessing from Yosef, one of the country’s two chief rabbis.

During a sermon in March on how to properly say a blessing, Yosef used the Hebrew word “kushi,” which was used in the Bible but is now considered a derogatory term for black people.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

“You can’t make the blessing on every ‘kushi’ you see — in America you see one every five minutes, so you make it only on a person with a white father and mother,” he said, according to the Times of Israel. ”How do would you know? Let’s say you know! So they had a monkey as a son, a son like this, so you say the blessing on him.”

The ADL said in a tweet at the time that the remarks were “utterly unacceptable.” Yosef’s office responded that he was merely citing the Talmud, which also has similar language about other animals like elephants.

Yosef had also attracted criticism for other comments in the past few years, such as implying in 2017 that secular women behave like animals because of their immodest dress and claiming in 2016 that according to Jewish law, non-Jews are forbidden from living in Israel.

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink

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

2X match on all Passover gifts!

$90 → $180 $180 → $360

$360 → $720

Other amount