William “Bill” Harvey, the Executive Vice President of Construction at El Ad Group, a subsidiary of the Tshuva Group, is being sued in Manhattan Supreme Court for allegedly harassing his Jewish employees about the Holocaust, suggesting the concentration camps weren’t “that big a deal,” the NY Post reported Monday (Exec at Israeli-owned company said holocaust ‘wasn’t as bad as people said’: lawsuit).
According to the plaintiff, Alison Greene, 47, a resident of the Upper West Side, Harvey told her and another company executive on Oct. 9, 2017 “his friend’s wife is a ‘fake Jew,’ because none of her family members died in the Holocaust.”
When Greene told Harvey that his comments were offensive to her because she is Jewish, he allegedly continued saying that “the Holocaust wasn’t as bad as people said it was.’”
According to the court filing, Harvey continued with similar obscenities for another half an hour, and laughed “at Ms. Greene’s obvious distress.”
The El-Ad Group, owned by Israeli billionaire Yitzhak Tshuva, is an Israel-based American real estate development company. The group controls many subsidiaries including Elad Properties, which is based in New York City, Elad Florida and El-Ad Canada, which is based in Toronto, Ontario. Collectively, the El-Ad Group owns many landmarks across North America, including the historic Plaza Hotel, The Grand Madison and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower in New York City.
According to the NY Pot, Greene reported the incident to the El-Ad Group’s attorney, who allegedly warned her not to repeat her story, because should Harvey lose his job it would hurt her future with the company. The attorney allegedly recommended that Greene confront Harvey, but the latter “refused to apologize” according to the court filing and started a campaign of retaliation. Over the following two years, Harvey “continued to strip Ms. Greene of responsibilities … and belittle and demean her in front of colleagues and clients,” according to the court filing.
Greene was fired last January ver what the company said were financial difficulties, and she insists was retaliation. She is suing for unspecified damages.
Greene’s attorney, Zoe Salzman, issued a statement saying, “No company should tolerate anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in New York City in 2020, least of all a company with El Ad’s Israeli roots.”
Neither the El-Ad Group nor William Harvey have responded to inquiries from the NY Post.