A Remarkable Woman
Miriam Adelson is a remarkable woman. Born in Tel Aviv three years before the State of Israel was created, she is the daughter of Polish emigrants.
Her father, Simcha Farbsterin, a socialist, left Poland in 1931 to join a kibbutz and then went to own three movie theaters in Haifa.
Her mother, Menucha Zimelson, always carried a passport photo of her sister. The two girls, born ten months apart, grew up in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s.
At age 18, Menucha traveled alone to what would become Israel. Her sister hadn’t been allowed to accompany her; she still had one year to finish high school. After she emigrated, the Nazis murdered her family. Everyone: her parents, her sister, her brother, and the rest of the family; she was left alone in the world.
Throughout Israel, there were children like Miriam with decimated families. The young country was poor — rationing oil, rice, sugar, eggs, cheese, coffee, meat, fish, and clothes.
Practical, not dreamy, adept at math and science, she attended the Hebrew Reali School, which was committed to “creating a generation of new helpers for the redemption of our country and the liberation of our people.”
Miriam was part of a generation that was raised to be responsible for the existence and survival of the country. At 16, she and her classmates started paramilitary training at the Gadna- a program that enables Israeli students to experience the military over a short time- in preparation for her service in the Israel Defense Forces.
She studied microbiology and genetics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earning a Bachelor of Science in those disciplines.
During her two years of military service, she worked in the biological research department and earned a medical degree from Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Medical School.
She married fellow doctor Ariel Ochshorn, with whom she had two daughters, Yasmin, born in 1972. and, Sivan, in 1975.”
As a young mother, Adelson worked as an emergency department doctor at Rokach Hospital in Tel Aviv, where she became the chief internist in an emergency room.
In 1986, divorced from Ochshorn, she moved with Yasmin and Sivan to East 63rd Street in New York for a fellowship at Rockefeller University, where she studied under Dr. Mary Jeanne Kreek, a neurobiologist who helped pioneer methadone treatment and the idea that addiction is a biochemical disease. The two co-authored papers like “Natural Killer Cell Activity and lymphocyte subsets in parenteral heroin abusers and long-term methadone maintenance patients.”
In 1989, while eating lunch at a Jewish deli in Brookline, Massachusetts, she met newly divorced Sheldon Adelson, the son of a cab driver who grew up sleeping in one room with his parents and three siblings. Ten years earlier, Sheldon had started Comdex, a computer trade show he launched in 1979 that he would end selling in 1995, netting him $500 million. Sheldon was ranked eighth in Forbes’s 2011 list of the wealthiest Americans.
Sheldon had three adopted kids from a previous marriage. His two sons, Mitchell and Gary, both struggled with substance abuse.
In 2000, the Sheldons opened the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Research Clinic in Las Vegas.
Between 2011 and 2020, the Adelsons were the largest donors to the Republican Party, contributing over half a billion dollars to GOP causes and candidates. They were Donald Trump’s most prominent donors in 2016 and 2020.
In 2007, Sheldon started in Israel the free daily “Israel Hayom,” newspaper primarily to support Benjamin Netanyahu, who he considered a close friend and with whom he had many outlooks in common.
Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister from 2006 to 2009, had been Sheldon’s friend. Still, the two grew distant after Olmert tried to negotiate a two-state solution with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority.
“Once, after I was already prime minister, recalls Olmert, Sheldon asked to see me with his wife, Miri. He already had his newspaper, and it attacked me daily. Toward the end of our meeting, I asked him, ‘Aren’t you ashamed of what your paper is doing to the prime minister? ‘Sheldon answered: ‘I don’t read Hebrew.’ And Miri said, ‘I do, and I must tell you that we are very aggressive against him.’”
Olmert added that he had heard from senior American officials that Sheldon had advocated firing Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state and getting rid of him because “both were betraying Israel.”
In 2016, “The New York Times broke the story that after Trump had won the Republican primary but was left without donors to face Hillary Clinton, Sheldon offered him $20 million in exchange for moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. All in all, Adelson gave over $90 million to Trump. The embassy moved to Jerusalem.
After her husband’s death in January 2021, Miriam said she was going to pull back from politics because she found it too divisive. But then came Oct. 7. She wrote in “Israel Hayom,” the newspaper she now owns- that “suddenly she felt 16 again, raptly listening to radio reports on the Eichmann trial and taking in the graphic accounts of Nazi mass-murder.”
She compared the Oct. 7 attack on Israel to the terrorist attacks on the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. In a speech in late 2023, she said.
“October 7 was “another kind of Holocaust. We are people who cherish hope and not hatred and will fight for what is right, even if it means fighting alone.
Hamas foreign fans do not yearn for Palestinian liberation or advancement. They yearn only to see the end of the world’s sole Jewish state. And from the heady removal of their university tenures, NGO jobs, or partisan posts, they are willing to countenance an Israeli bloodbath in achieving that goal.
These people are not our critics. They are our enemies, the ideological enablers in the West of those who would go to any length to eradicate us from the Middle East. And, as such, they should be dead to us.
Like Jewish parents symbolically sitting shiva for a relative who has brought irretrievable disgrace on the family, we need no longer engage them. Indeed, we must disavow and shame them, deny them employment and public office, and defund their colleges and political parties.
“If you condemn Hamas and then add a “but” followed by condemnation of Israel, you’re dead to us.
If you thunder at the tactics of Israel’s counter-offensive, without ever having taken an interest in far bloodier campaigns waged in your name, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Mali, you’re dead to us.
If you quibble about how many babies were beheaded or how many women were violated in the October 7 pogrom, you’re dead to us.
If you are more outraged by posters of kidnapped Israeli kids than you are about the fact that they were kidnapped in a vile crime against humanity, you’re dead to us.
If you persecute Diaspora Jews as part of your pretense of merely opposing Israeli policy, you’re dead to us.
If you insist Israel is obligated to seek accommodation with Hamas, an idea you would never have entertained for Western powers that fought the Nazis, al-Qaida, or ISIS, you’re dead to us.
If you fail to recognize that Israel could end the threats to its existence by bringing its power fully to bear and eliminating Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime but do not do so due to its concern for civilian suffering, you’re dead to us.
We Israelis, we Jews, love life. And we are done with meekly counting our dead. We have given so much to the world, so much to generations of civilization. Now, it is time for some reciprocity.
Don’t be dead to us. Be decent and fair. Be morally and intellectually clear-eyed. Be brave.
We will not forgive our enemies in Gaza or anywhere else. Nor would you.
And nor shall we forget the many who stand by us, understanding that our fight is their fight, too.”
While seeking the Republican nomination, Trump approached Miriam in November 2023 to ask for her financial support. She told Trump’s top aides, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita that she would not donate to him while Nikki Haley, his last rival and a friend of hers, remained in the race.
In May 2024, when Trump’s campaign coffers had fallen close to $40 million behind Biden’s, Miriam pledged $90 million to Trump’s campaign through the Preserve America super PAC.
According to the “New York Times,” her spokesman, Andy Abboud, denied a report that she had requested. Trump to publicly support the annexation of the West Bank by the Israeli government in exchange for her backing.
But, Shmuley Boteach, a rabbi and a longtime friend of the Adelson, said he believed Miriam supported annexation and considered so-called “land for peace” deals actually to be “land for war.”
“Do I believe that Miriam supports the creation of a Palestinian state? Not,” the Rabbi said. “Those of us who are part of her circle and share her values would oppose territorial concessions if there was any doubt whatsoever that the creation of the Palestinian state would lead to murdered Jews.”
Just a short few days ago, on November 11, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said at a Religious Zionism party meeting that during President-elect Donald Trump’s previous term, “We were just a step away from applying sovereignty over the settlements in Judea and Samaria and now the time has come to do it. 2025 is the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria. The new Nazis need to pay a price through land that will be permanently taken from them, both in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria.”
Mike Huckabee, who has been tapped to be the next U.S. ambassador to Israel, has said that “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian” and argued that all of the West Bank belonged to Israel.
There’s undoubtedly a complex array of forces pointing to a difficult path ahead for the Middle East’s policy of newly elected president Donald Trump, indeed, flexibility and pragmatism seem not to be too much on the agenda. But, it would be hard to ignore Miriam Adelson’s positions as misguided. There’s much to argue about the reality and consequences of such a position. But what is certain is that Miriam Adelson, Betzalel Smotrich, and Mike Huckabee are sincere believers in the front lines of the future of the Middle East.
Stay posted on this and other news and analysis concerning Israel by going to https://www.21stcenturyjudaism.com and then tapping to “Monthly Supporter” on the three dots on the header