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An Austin Powers of Our Own
Yigal Schleifer, New York
 COURTESY GREENWALD |
"The problem with writing a profile about me is where do you begin?" Ronnie Greenwald says with a smile.
On the one hand, there's Greenwald the international commodities trader, who has done business with some of the more notorious regimes on the planet and who worked closely with the fugitive financier Marc Rich.
Then there's Greenwald the globe-trotting humanitarian, who was one of the major forces behind the 1985 release of Natan Sharansky and other refuseniks, and who today is working on obtaining freedom for Lori Berenson, a young Jewish New Yorker imprisoned in Peru on terrorism charges. And capping the incongruity, there's Greenwald, the modern Orthodox rabbi from the Upstate New York town of Monsey, who for the last 40 years has been running a summer camp for Orthodox girls in the Catskills.
Forget Austin Powers, Greenwald, a schlumpy 66-year-old with a small yarmulke covering his fly-away gray hair, may be the original international man of mystery - and one of the most fascinating Jewish community leaders you've never heard of.
"I do walk a tightrope to a certain extent," says Greenwald, slowly and with a strong New York accent. "It's two different lives. It's almost two different worlds."
Greenwald's story starts on New York's Lower East Side, where he was born to a family struggling to make ends meet. He went to yeshivah in Cleveland and was ordained as a rabbi, although he never took a pulpit. Instead, he came back to New York and opened a business school, among other ventures. In 1972, Greenwald, beginning to get involved in Republican politics, worked as a liaison to the Orthodox Jewish community for the Nixon campaign and for the congressional campaign of Benjamin Gilman in upstate New York's Rockland County, site of the heavily Orthodox town of Monsey, where Greenwald was living. He brought Gilman a large number of traditionally Democratic Jewish votes, most likely propelling the GOP congressman into the office he still holds today. The relationship was mutually beneficial: Greenwald had entr�e to the halls of power in Washington. And it was the Gilman connection that set Greenwald off on a new career - rescuing Jews imprisoned around the world.
IT ALL STARTED WITH A 1978 call from another colorful character, former Knesset member and convicted swindler Shmuel Flatto-Sharon, who wanted to know if Greenwald could put his Washington connections to work on getting Sharansky released from his Soviet prison. Flatto-Sharon had made a connection with Wolfgang Vogel, an East German lawyer who had arranged prisoner swaps between the East and the West, and wanted to know if Greenwald could get the Americans involved.
"When I was sitting in yeshivah in Cleveland, I remember reading the Gemara about pidyon shvuyim (the rescue of prisoners) and that you can sell a Torah scroll to release someone," says Greenwald, whose rumpled manner and style of dress makes one think more of an eccentric uncle than a global swashbuckler. "I remember saying to myself, 'This is a mitzvah we never get a chance to do.' Little did I know that 20 years later I would be getting that call."
Soon Greenwald was traveling to East Berlin to meet Vogel and discuss a deal. Accompanying Greenwald was yet another extravagant character, Flatto-Sharon's parliamentary secretary Shabtai Kalmanovich, a Russian immigrant who made his name as a high-flying wheeler and dealer in Israel and who was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to nine years for spying on Israel for the Russians.
A deal for Sharansky was not possible at that time, but what did come out of the effort was another swap, involving the release of Miron Marcus, an Israeli pilot who was being held by Mozambique after landing there by mistake, a Russian spy being held in the United States, and a young American graduate student who was a prisoner in East Germany.
Marcus's release was like something out of a Le Carr� novel, with Greenwald and Gilman traveling by light plane to a remote crossing between Mozambique and Swaziland where the Israeli pilot was to be set free. Giving the story a particularly Jewish twist was the fact that the release was happening on the first day of Passover, prompting Greenwald to seek rabbinic permission to travel on the holiday. As Greenwald stood at the border crossing, a group of soldiers brought the blindfolded Marcus across to freedom. "I said to Miron, 'Do you know what today is?'" Greenwald recalls. "I don't know the day, I don't know the week, I don't know the month," answered Marcus, who had been imprisoned for almost two years. "Today is Passover, time of our liberation," Greenwald told him.
The Marcus deal gave Greenwald a taste of the international spy-swap business. More beneficially, it started what became a lasting friendship with spy trader Vogel - the man who ultimately brokered Sharansky's release.
"Greenwald became Vogel's American rabbi," says Craig Whitney, an editor at The New York Times and the author of "Spy Trader," a book that chronicles Vogel's work as a shadowy intermediary between the Soviet bloc and the West. "He was an American Vogel could talk to and he would pass messages to his connections in the State Department and Israel," Whitney adds.
By the time Sharansky was released, in 1985, Greenwald would have made some 25 trips to East Berlin over eight years, visiting Vogel in his office, where the two would speak using German and Yiddish and where Vogel's wife would cook eggs in a brand-new pot for the kashrut-keeping rabbi. "We hit it off. There's a relationship there," Greenwald, who is still in contact with Vogel, says. "Somewhere I felt that he had some sympathies for the Jews. I always felt that."
While Sharansky remained in jail in Russia, Greenwald would come to Vogel with different proposed deals for his release. One even included Nelson Mandela, still in prison in South Africa at the time, as part of a swap. The deal for Sharansky's eventual release, which involved the swapping of prisoners held in Russia, the two Germanies and the United States, was brokered by Vogel and was the result of work by a variety of people and organizations. But it was Greenwald who kept the channel to Vogel open and provided Vogel with a backdoor channel to Washington and Israel, as Whitney points out in his book. When Sharansky was finally going to be freed, Greenwald says he found out about it in a way that also seems straight out of a spy novel. In the mail, says Greenwald, was a postcard from Vogel with only the words "It's a go" written in German.
Sharansky was not the only refusenik whose case he worked on, says Greenwald. In 1990, he negotiated with the KGB for the release of the Raiz family, Lithuanian Jews who had been trying to emigrate to Israel since 1972. Greenwald not only got them out, but flew them out of Moscow on the private jet of billionaire Orthodox Canadian businessman Albert Reichman. Greenwald was also instrumental in the 1979 release of Jewish writer Jacobo Timerman, who was being held by the Argentine military dictatorship.
Today, Greenwald is working with the family of Lori Berenson, the 31-year-old Jewish woman from New York jailed in Peru for more than five years for connections with the Tupac Amaru terror group, trying to use his Washington connections and experience in making deals to get her released. Greenwald has been to Peru to visit Berenson four times and has also previously met the Peruvian minister of justice to discuss her case. "I believe they're open for a deal, but with the change of government in Peru it's a whole new ballgame," he says.
Berenson's parents approached Greenwald about two years ago, he says, and the details of the case led him to believe she was being punished for her beliefs rather than for anything she might have committed. "There's something in the Jewish soul that wants to see justice," Greenwald says he told Berenson during one jail visit.
Berenson's case, like almost every other Geenwald has worked on, involves a Jew being held prisoner. "When people call me and tell me somebody is in trouble, I usually ask, 'Are they Jewish?'" he says. "They say, 'Are you prejudiced?' I say no, I have limited time. There are a lot of others who work for other people. If God gave me the capacity as a negotiator, that strength, I'd like to use it for people others don't really care much about."
IN ADDITION TO GREENWALD'S work on behalf of prisoners - which he does, he says, for no pay - there is his parallel life as an international businessman, a pursuit that aids his humanitarian effort but sometimes stands in stark contrast to it, putting him in dealings with some particularly notorious regimes and characters.
In the late 1970s, for example, Greenwald, who was doing some commodities trading in Africa, began working as the American representative for Bophu-tatswana, one of the four "independent" black homelands created by the South African apartheid government. Greenwald, in fact, became the country's ambassador to the United States for a period, trying to use his connections to gain the Bantustan, basically a South African puppet regime, acceptance at the United Nations. Greenwald at the time also introduced Shabtai Kalmanovich to Bophutatswana's president, who then hired him as the country's representative to Israel.
After Sharanksy's release, Greenwald also started doing business with East Germany and the Soviet Union, trading their copper, aluminum and oil on the international commodities market. "People have to understand that in the commodities business you do business with everyone," Greenwald says in his own defense. "I only wouldn't do business with the anti-Israel ones, like Libya or Syria."
More ominously, in the late 80s, Greenwald was accused in a 1990 investigative piece in the Village Voice of having ties with Evsei Agron, a Russian Jewish mobster who had come to New York and set himself up in Brooklyn. A few years before that, Greenwald was questioned by the FBI in connection with a Russian mob scheme that defrauded Merrill Lynch out of some $3 million, although he was never charged with any crime.
Greenwald admits meeting Agron by chance during a visit to Germany and that the mobster, who was shot to death in 1985 in Brooklyn, used to visit his Manhattan office. But he denies ever being involved in anything illegal. "People want to know why I have so many nefarious friends, but I have thousands of friends," says Greenwald. "So a dozen of them have nefarious connections. I travel in a lot of circles." But, he adds, "I don't do illegal stuff. It may be secret, but not illegal."
More recently, Greenwald was questioned as part of the FBI's investigation into the efforts to get a presidential pardon for Marc Rich. Greenwald went to yeshivah with Rich's partner Pincus Green, and in the late 1980s - while Green and Rich were living on the lam in Switzerland - he started trading commodities with Rich. He estimates that at one point some 80 percent of his business was with the fugitive.
"We had a relationship," Greenwald says about Rich, who fled the United States after facing charges of tax evasion to the tune of $48 million, and of illegally trading with Iran. "In fact, when he got into trouble, I tried to help him too. I remember going to [Rudolph] Giuliani [who at the time was the U.S. attorney prosecuting the case] and telling him... maybe there's a way you can accept these folks back without any serious repercussions. I offered a deal, but [the Feds] didn't buy it."
NOW THAT IT'S SUMMERTIME, Greenwald, who stopped actively trading commodities a few years ago, is back to what he says is his primary passion, running the non-profit Camp Sternberg for Orthodox girls, with which he has been involved every summer since 1962. On a clear summer day, the far from flashy wheeler-dealer, who drives a 1996 Cadillac and lives in a large but modest home in Monsey, is tooling around the camp in a small all-terrain vehicle that looks like a souped-up golf cart. He stops by one cabin of young girls dressed in long sleeves and long denim skirts. They smile and, at his cue, start singing a camp song. Greenwald, the father of six and grandfather of 39, is delighted. "This is what it's all about. Giving them this chance," he says with a big smile.
The sprawling camp, its rustic cabins and tents serving as home to nearly 2,000 girls each summer, is an expression of his passion for working with youth, he says. For years, Greenwald has been active on childrens' issues in the Orthodox community, particularly with troubled youth. He recently helped open a home in Monsey for girls who are having trouble at home or in school, and he opens up Camp Sternberg to girls with emotional and developmental problems. "Working with children is what I really love to do," Greenwald says. "I'm trying to slow down now and do more of that."
Back at his camp director's office, partly decorated with colorful posters hand-drawn by campers, the other worlds he inhabits are not far away. A large box holds file folders containing notes from his various global escapades, which an assistant has been trying to sort out. There are also photographs: Greenwald with Sharansky, with Wolfgang Vogel, with Henry Kissinger. Among the pictures is a rather incongruous black-and-white photo taken in the late 1970s, showing Greenwald standing side-by-side with Jane Fonda, both of them smiling widely. "That was in Africa," he says with a laugh. "But it's another story."
(July 30, 2001)
Jewish World
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