Orthodox man sentenced to 16 months in prison for anti-Semitic terror campaign against Jewish entrepreneurs

An Orthodox Jewish man who told a federal judge he had struggled with his faith was sentenced Tuesday to 16 months in prison for anonymously threatening Jewish business owners with a brutal, yearslong campaign of anti-Semitic insults.

Prosecutors said Yaniv Gola, 52, of Philadelphia, terrorized his eight victims with more than 600 phone calls and text messages between August 2022 and November 2023, promising to harm, kill or rape them, their family members and their employees.

Several of them told U.S. District Judge Kai N. Scott during a hearing Tuesday that they had left their homes, sent their children to live with relatives, bought firearms or spent thousands of money on self-defense lessons as Gola’s endless barrage of threats continued.

“I’m going to kill all you Jews,” Gola told Rich Goldberg, owner of Safian & Rudolph Jewelers and president of the Philadelphia Jewelers’ Row District, during a June 2023 phone call. “You Jews are all so greedy. You should all be shoved back into the ovens.”

Goldberg stopped answering his work phone as Gola’s harassing calls continued. But then, he said Tuesday, Gola began calling his mother and sister and threatening them with rape in menacing messages in which he noted their home addresses.

“This was not just a joke,” the jewelry store owner wrote in a letter he read to the judge. “This person … created a situation where my family and staff could not even go home or to work without fear of something horrific happening.”

Goldberg and his family were far from Gola’s only victims. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeanette Kang described other victims receiving dozens of calls a day.

“B…, call the police. This is a threat,” she told Gola to another. “We’re going to bash your skull in with a baseball bat.”

In another – taken a month after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the start of the ongoing siege in Gaza – Gola referenced the conflict in his attempt to sow fear.

“You are Jewish; I am from Hamas,” he told the business owner. ‘You are animals and pigs. … If you don’t leave that place, we’re going to blow you up.”

Gola’s hate speech was not limited to his fellow Jews. In June 2023, he anonymously threatened a Muslim entrepreneur, calling him a “dothead” and threatening to “put a bullet in your head.”

But during Tuesday’s hearing, Judge Scott seemed to struggle to find an explanation for Gola’s campaign of intimidation or the intense hatred he seemed to have developed toward members of his religious community.

Gola was born in Israel and his family had moved to the United States at a young age. Although he was raised Orthodox, he later strayed from the faith only to return to it in recent years, said his attorney, David S. Bahuriak.

Gola said he had struggled with feelings of rejection from people within his religious community and that, instead of dealing with those feelings directly, he had lashed out at others anonymously.

“I let my anger, ignorance and prejudice take over,” he told the judge. “I failed to recognize the humanity in others.”

Bahuriak described his client as a “strange person” and “an example of self-loathing.” But, he added, Gola had entered therapy and since his arrest in February and his decision to plead guilty to eight counts of interstate threatening, he was determined to be on the autism spectrum.

In discussions about the damage he had inflicted, the lawyer said, it was almost as if Gola could not imagine the terror he had inflicted on his victims.

“He is a member of the same community that he was a victim of,” Bahuriak told the judge. “This is a religious community that he really wants to connect with, and he feels like they have rejected him. I recognize that there are many contradictions here, but they are rooted in a deep, deep, deep self-loathing.”

However, Scott showed little sympathy for Gola’s struggles and insisted he had to pay a price for the fear he had caused.

“No one is going to ignore their feelings for the rest of their lives,” she argued. “Who has time for that?”

She instructed Gola, while in prison, to write letters of apology to each of his victims, acknowledging the effect his campaign of terror had on them.

“I don’t understand how you couldn’t know that they would feel real terror and real fear,” Scott said before sending Gola away with orders to begin serving his sentence next month. But she added: “There needs to be a real punishment for that.”