Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event in Las Vegas, Nev., on July 8, 2023.
AP Photo/John Locher
Israeli authorities are trying to retrieve a collection of antiques that have been stuck in the US.
A spokesperson for Donald Trump said Thursday that they would send the ceramic oil lamps back.
Trump slammed Jewish voters when presented with the lamps in 2021, a Republican donor told The Wall Street Journal.
Former President Donald Trump was apparently displeased with Jewish voters’ lackluster electoral support for his 2020 campaign — a grievance he expressed when presented with a collection of priceless Israeli artifacts ahead of a 2021 holiday dinner at Mar-a-Lago, a longtime Republican donor and Israel supporter told The Wall Street Journal.
Trump this week agreed to return a collection of ancient Israeli artifacts that have been “stuck” in the US for four years after the country’s antiquities authorities started publicly pushing for their retrieval.
The Journal on Thursday shed new light on the long, strange tale of a collection of ceramic oil lamps that traveled from Israel to Washington, DC, to California, and Florida over the course of four years.
The oil lamps’ US journey was spearheaded in 2019 by Saul Fox, a private equity executive and major Jewish-American donor to the Israeli Antiquities Authority, who suggested the agency allow the items to be presented to Trump at a forthcoming White House Hanukkah party to thank the then-president for his support of Israel, according to The Journal.
Israel sent the national treasures to the US on the condition that the valuable antiques be returned to their home country within weeks. The oil lamps were never publicly displayed at the White House, however, due to a State Department inspection into the items that ran long, Fox told The Journal.
When the lamps were released from State Department custody, Fox sent a courier to retrieve them and bring them back to his California home, where he locked them up and “sort of forgot about it” right as the pandemic hit and travel slowed to a stop, he told the outlet.
When Fox was next invited to a Trump party in December 2021, this time at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, he told The Journal that he made a plan with the director of Israeli antiquities to present the ceramic oil lamps to Trump two years later than originally planned.
Alone together in Trump’s office ahead of the holiday party, Fox told the Journal that he was preparing to present the antiques when the former president made a move to leave.
“I stood in his way and said, ‘Mr. President, no, no, you can’t leave, I have these words that I wrote,'” Fox told the outlet he said, starting to praise the former president for moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem.
Trump, however, responded with a passionate outcry, according to Fox, who said the former president slammed his hand on his desk.
“Well, how come I only got 25% of the Jewish vote?” Fox recalled Trump saying.
Polls offer an imperfect calculation of voting totals among certain demographics, but The Times of Israel reported in November 2020 that Trump got somewhere between 21 to 30.5% of the Jewish vote, citing two partisan polls.
The former president has previously griped about dwindling Jewish support for his cause, complaining in a 2021 conference call about Catholics and Jewish people who didn’t vote for him in the 2020 election, despite all he said he did for their communities.
A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, nor did Fox.
A representative for Trump did tell The Journal that the antique items were presented to the former president by a representative of the Israeli antiquities authority with “the full support of the organization,” adding that his office would be “expediting their return to the organization’s representative.”