One more unexpected twist to a story that made headlines last month:
The wife of former U.S. Senate Republican nominee Roy Moore has revealed the identity of the Moores’ “Jewish attorney” she mentioned in a Dec. 11 speech.
It’s not the person everyone speculated that it was, Kayla Moore said. Several publications, including the Jewish publication Forward and the Washington Examiner, have claimed that the attorney she was referring to was Richard Jaffe, a Jewish attorney who represented Roy and Kayla’s son, Caleb Moore, in a case several years ago.
Jaffe, in an interview with AL.com, had said he wasn’t sure he was the attorney she was referring to, and that he had never handled cases for Roy Moore, only his son. Jaffe said he was offended by Kayla Moore’s reference to a Jewish attorney.
Kayla Moore today explained why she made that reference.
“We read where we were against Jews – even calling us Nazis,” she wrote in an email to AL.com. “We have a Jewish lawyer working for us in our firm – Martin Wishnatsky. Judge hired him while Chief Justice, then I hired him at the Foundation.”
But there’s more:
Wishnatsky, 73, said that he was born July 13, 1944, grew up in Asbury Park, N.J., attended Hebrew school at a Conservative synagogue and went through a bar mitzvah, but he considered his family secular, ethnic Jews, who were not very religious.
“My background is 100 percent Jewish,” he said. “My grandparents immigrated from Eastern Europe, and came through Ellis Island. My parents were born in Brooklyn during World War I. There were no manifestations of faith; we were Jewish, that’s why we went to synagogue and not a church. It was just an ethnic characteristic.”
But Wishnatsky said he accepted Christ in his thirties. “I had an experience of the reality of God at 33,” Wishnatsky said. “I knew God was real but I wasn’t sure who he was.”
He became a Mormon first, then later became an evangelical Protestant Christian.
He’s also ardently pro-life:
Wishnatsky worked as a college instructor and stockbroker before moving to North Dakota in the early 1990s and becoming a full-time anti-abortion activist. He was twice convicted of misdemeanors for his activities, including once for refusing to stay 100 feet from an abortion clinic, and spent a total of 18 months in jail.
In a Washington Post interview in 1993, Wishnatsky compared abortion to the Holocaust. “How many Jews were killed just for who they were?” he asked. “And how many babies have been killed for what they are?”
Check out a radio interview with him below.
