During a meeting with a Kremlin-linked banker last year, Jared Kushner — President Donald Trump’s Jewish son-in-law and senior adviser — received a pair of presents connected to his family background.
In a statement released by the White House ahead of Kushner’s appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday, Kushner described a Dec. 13 sit-down in New York City with Sergey Gorkov — the chairman of state-owned Vnesheconombank and an ally of Russia’s autocratic president, Vladimir Putin.
“The meeting with Mr. Gorkov lasted twenty to twenty-five minutes,” Kushner recalled. “He introduced himself and gave me two gifts — one was a piece of art from Nvgorod [an apparent misspelling by Kushner of Novogrudok], the village where my grandparents were from in Belarus, and the other was a bag of dirt from that same village.”
The 36-year-old Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, are Orthodox Jews (Trump converted to Judaism in 2009). Kushner’s paternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors who came to the US after World War II.