Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Irving Moskowitz, Controversial Pro-Settler Philanthropist, Dies at 88

Dr. Irving Moskowitz, an American Jewish philanthropist who stirred controversy by donating millions of dollars to Jewish settlement efforts in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, has died at 88.

Arutz Sheva, a right-wing Israeli news site that he helped establish, his death Thursday.

The Moskowitz Foundation he founded in 1968 along with his wife, Cherna, was a major supporter of El’ad and Ateret Cohanim, two organizations involved in moving Jews to live in predominantly Arab neighborhoods of eastern Jerusalem. It also was a major donor to the One Israel Fund, which according to a filing on the foundation’s 2014 tax form “supports the welfare and safety of the men, women and children of Judea and Samaria.” Judea and Samaria are the biblical names for the West Bank.

In 2008, the Moskowitzes established the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism, whose winners included Moshe Levinger, an early settler in Hebron after the 1967 Six-Day War who later was jailed in Israel for violence against Arabs; Noam Arnon, another prominent settler in Hebron; and Yehuda Glick, an activist pushing for greater Jewish access to the Temple Mount who recently became a Knesset member.

Moskowitz will be buried in Jerusalem, according to a Facebook post by Dov Hikind, a New York state assemblyman from Brooklyn and a right-wing Israel advocate.

Moskowitz was born in New York City in 1928, the ninth child of Jewish immigrants from Poland. He grew up in Milwaukee, where he earned his medical degree, later moving to California, where he created a business building hospitals and ran a legal gambling business. He moved later to Miami Beach.

According to a 1997 profile in Time magazine, Moskowitz lost 120 relatives in the Holocaust.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

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. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.