Orthodox Jewish man sentenced to 16 months in prison for antisemitic terror campaign targeting Jewish business owners

An Orthodox Jewish man who told a federal judge he had struggled with his faith was sentenced to 16 months in federal prison Tuesday for anonymously threatening Jewish business owners with a relentless, yearlong campaign of antisemitic slurs.

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 in which he vowed to injure, 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 abandoned their homes, sent their kids to stay with relatives, purchased firearms, or spent thousands on self-defense classes as Gola’s unending 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 call. “You Jews are all so greedy. You should all be shoved back into ovens.”

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

“This was not just some prank,” the jewelry store owner wrote in a letter he read to the judge. “This individual … created a situation where my family and staff couldn’t even go home or to work without fear of something horrific.”

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

“B—, call the police. This is a threat,” she recounted Gola telling another. “We’re going to cave in your skull with a baseball bat.”

In another — made one month after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the start of the ongoing siege in Gaza — Gola referenced the conflict in his attempt to instill fear.

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

Gola’s hate speech wasn’t just limited to his fellow Jews. In one June 2023 call, he anonymously threatened a Muslim business owner, calling him a “dot head” and threatening to “put a bullet in your head.”

But throughout Tuesday’s proceedings, Scott, the judge, appeared to struggle to find any explanation for Gola’s intimidation campaign or the intense hatred he had seem to have developed toward members of his religious community.

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

Gola said he had struggled with feelings of rejection from those within his religious community and, rather than deal directly with those feelings, he had anonymously lashed out at others.

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

Bahuriak described his client as an “odd person” and “a case study in self-loathing.” But, he added, Gola had entered therapy and been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum since his February arrest and decision to plead guilty to eight counts of making interstate threats.

In discussions about the harm he had inflicted, the defense lawyer said, it was almost as if Gola was unable to conceive of the terror he had instilled in his victims.

“He’s a member of the very same community he victimized,” Bahuriak told the judge. “This is a religious community he deeply wants to connect to, and he feels they’ve rejected him. I recognize there are many contradictions here, but they’re rooted in deep, deep, deep self-loathing.”

Scott, however, expressed little sympathy for Gola’s struggles and insisted he must pay a price for the fear he’d caused.

“Nobody’s going to step around his feelings for the rest of his life,” she balked. “Who has time for that?”

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

“I don’t know how you could not 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 has to be real punishment for that.”