Ronald Greenwald

Ronald Greenwald (January 8, 1934 – January 20, 2016) was an American Orthodox Jewish rabbi, who was a businessman and an educator.

Born in New York City, he made a career of spy trading, international hostage mediation, and other forms of high-stakes, high-intrigue diplomacy.

He served as presidential liaison of President Richard Nixon to the Jewish community during the Nixon administration.

He served as a community activist, chaired various civic boards, directed a high school and a summer camp, and was the chairman of Magenu.

Ronald Greenwald was born to European Jewish immigrant parents and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan before his family relocated to Brownsville (in Brooklyn).

He studied at Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland after high school.

After getting married, he settled in Boro Park in Brooklyn.

In the early years of his marriage, he worked as a teacher of both Judaic and secular studies in Brooklyn yeshivas.

Rabbi Greenwald became active in politics in 1962 (at the age of 28) lobbying on behalf of Torah Umesorah to promote the creation and success of Jewish day schools in the United States.

At the request of Jewish activist George Klein, Rabbi Greenwald became involved in the gubernatorial campaign of Nelson A. Rockefeller and helped Rockefeller win an unprecedented share of the Jewish vote for a Republican at the time.

In perhaps his highest profile case, Rabbi Greenwald worked closely with Representative Benjamin Gilman (R-NY) and East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel to secure the release of Soviet dissident and Refusenik Natan Sharansky from Soviet prison in the late 1970s.

He made more than 25 trips across the "Iron Curtain" to East Germany as part of that effort.

The Rockland Journal News reported that Rabbi Greenwald was the "man behind the talks" that freed Sharansky.

After this success, the Rockefeller campaign recommended Greenwald to the campaign of Richard M. Nixon and the Nixon re-election campaign appointed Greenwald to work for the President's 1972 re-election in the Jewish community.

In winning 35% of the Jewish vote in 1972, Nixon, like Rockefeller, did far better among Jewish voters than would be expected from a Republican in that era.

During the Nixon administration, Rabbi Greenwald served as liaison between the administration and the Jewish community in a variety of ways.

He obtained a $1 million grant to open a legal aid office in Brooklyn to assist the needy in the community of Williamsburg among other accomplishments.

During the Watergate scandal, Rabbi Greenwald contacted various Democratic Jewish members of Congress, including Elizabeth Holtzman, Bella Abzug and Arlen Specter to try to convince them that impeaching the President would weaken the United States and, by extension, hurt Israel, which, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War needed the support of a strong United States.

Although his entreaties did not work, as President Nixon was eventually forced to resign rather than face impeachment, he did earn a Presidential letter of thanks (see the letter at the bottom of this article).

In conjunction with Representative Gilman, Rabbi Greenwald negotiated the rescue a 24-year-old Israeli citizen named Miron Markus in 1978 who was living in Zimbabwe.

Markus was captured when an airplane piloted by his brother-in-law, Jackie Bloch, was forced to land in Mozambique, where Mr. Bloch was killed and Markus taken hostage.

Rabbi Greenwald, Congressman Gilman and others arranged for a complex swap that involved four countries Mozambique, Israel, the UnS and East Germany, convicted East German spy Robert Thompson and U.S. student Alan van Norman.

Granados was kidnapped by leftist guerillas in November, 1979 while at a soccer game in Guatemala City.

Rabbi Greenwald, working again with Representative Gilman, helped broker the exchange of Mr. Granados in exchange for a ransom payment of $4,000,000.

Vladimir Raiz, a Soviet molecular biologist, had been denied permission to leave the former Soviet Union for 18 years before Greenwald entered the picture.

However, in 1987 Kalmanovitch was arrested in Tel Aviv and charged with being a KGB spy and sentenced to nine years in prison in 1987 for spying for the Soviet Union.

He was released from prison after five years and returned to Russia.

According to Steve Lieberman in the Rockland Journal News, Greenwald secretly met with Raiz in Lithuania in 1989.

Following negotiations with Soviet authorities, Raiz and his family were permitted to emigrate in 1990.

Greenwald was involved in the transfer of Shabattai Kalmanovich from the USSR to Israel.

In 1994, political activist and New York native Lori Berenson was arrested, tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for treason by a Peruvian military tribunal.

She was accused of belonging to a Marxist rebel group and plotting to overthrow the Peruvian government.

With the support of President Bill Clinton in 2000, Greenwald led a delegation of American negotiators to Peru to press the Peruvian government to free Berenson or, at least, to grant her a new trial in a civilian court.

The effort succeeded and Berenson was afforded a new trial in civilian court.

At her subsequent trial, Berenson was convicted again and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.

Greenwald was involved in many of the attempts to gain clemency for Jonathan Pollard by convincing the then serving President of the United States to pardon Pollard or to commute his sentence.

Because of the shady circumstances surrounding her trial and her harsh sentence, Amnesty International, in 2003, referred to Berenson as a "political prisoner."

On November 2, 2009, Kalamovitch was assassinated in Moscow.

He died in his sleep while on vacation in Florida, on January 20, 2016.

Greenwald was involved in scores of release efforts for various prisoners from around the world.