Roy Moore's wife reveals their 'Jewish attorney' and he's a Christian
Wishnatsky, in an interview with AL.com, said he graduated from the law school at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., in 2012, was admitted to the Virginia Bar Association in October and interviewed with Moore after he was re-elected as chief justice in November 2012. Moore hired Wishnatsky and two other Liberty University School of Law graduates as full-time clerks in 2012, the first State Supreme Court clerks in the school's history, according to a
Liberty University press release.
Wishnatsky worked as a staff attorney at the Alabama Supreme Court from January 2013 until Moore was removed from office in 2016. Then he went to work as a staff attorney for the Foundation for Moral Law, which was founded by Roy Moore and where Kayla Moore works as president.
"I just moved down the street," Wishnatsky said.
Wishnatsky, 73, said that he was born July 13, 1944, grew up in Asbury Park, N.J., attended Hebrew school at a Conservative synagogue and went through a bar mitzvah, but he considered his family secular, ethnic Jews, who were not very religious.
"My background is 100 percent Jewish," he said. "My grandparents immigrated from Eastern Europe, and came through Ellis Island. My parents were born in Brooklyn during World War I. There were no manifestations of faith; we were Jewish, that's why we went to synagogue and not a church. It was just an ethnic characteristic."
But Wishnatsky said he accepted Christ in his thirties. "I had an experience of the reality of God at 33," Wishnatsky said. "I knew God was real but I wasn't sure who he was."
He became a Mormon first, then later became an evangelical Protestant Christian.
"I'm a Messianic Jew," Wishnatsky said. "That's the term they use for a Jewish person who has accepted Christ."
As part of his early spiritual search, Wishnatsky wrote a letter to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, and they sent missionaries to visit him at his home in New Jersey. "I was trying to figure out what the truth actually was," he said. "It was the first church I ever attended."
He attended a branch of the Latter-day Saints Church in New Jersey, and after a year was allowed to take part in an endowment ceremony at a Mormon Temple in Washington, D.C.
The ceremony's masonic ritual overtones turned him against Mormonism, he said. "It was so bizarre," Wishnatsky said. "That made me realize it was a fraud."
He spent time researching Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter-day Saints. "I published a book, 'Mormonism: a latter-day Deception,'" he said.
Wishnatsky graduated from Phillips Academy Andover in 1962, then got a bachelor's degree in government from Harvard University in 1966, did a fellowship at the London School of Economics, and got a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard in 1975.
After he rejected the Latter-day Saints, Wishnatsky didn't give up on church. "I had experienced something false; that doesn't mean the truth doesn't exist," he said.
He began attending an evangelical church in Hoboken, N.J., he said.
"I found the presence of the Lord was still with me," he said.
Wishnatsky now attends Centerpoint Fellowship Church in Prattville, he said.
His career included stints as a college instructor, a stockbroker and a Wall Street analyst.
"I taught at UCLA for two years, American foreign policy in the political science department," he said. "I had two one-year contracts. It wasn't renewed. I had to look for a job outside academia for the first time in my life. I ended up being a stockbroker for three years in Los Angeles. I came back to Asbury Park, N.J., and worked on Wall Street for about 10 years with a consulting firm that worked with banks and brokerage houses, big financial institutions, when they had transaction and processing problems."
He lost that job while spending time in jail for his abortion protests, he said.
He has been an active anti-abortion activist since the 1980s, when he joined the Lambs of God rescue movement. He was arrested in front of abortion clinics in New York, North Carolina and North Dakota.
The Lambs of God would do sit-ins in front of clinics, blocking entrances.
"We thought we were saving lives by blocking clinic entrances," Wishnatsky said. "We were peaceful, willing to be arrested to save babies."
He spent a total of 18 months in jails and prison after his arrests. After his last conviction, a Class A misdemeanor for violating an injunction that barred protests within 100 feet of the clinic in Fargo, he was sentenced to 10 months at the North Dakota State Penitentiary, he said.
When he got out of prison in 1992, pro-life activists gave him a job and a place to live. He stayed in Fargo for another 18 years, working as a pro-life paralegal, at a Christian maternity home and as a credit counselor.
In 2007, Wishnatsky and others started a petition to prevent the removal of a Ten Commandments monument on Fargo city property.
For the pro-Ten Commandments monument movement in Fargo, Roy Moore was a hero. Moore became a national celebrity in evangelical circles in 1994 when the ACLU sued him, trying to get the Etowah County judge to stop praying in court and to take down his hand-made Ten Commandments plaque.
"I first met him 1996," Wishnatsky said. "He came to Fargo to speak at a banquet for a Christian maternity home. He was becoming known around the country at that time for his stance on the Ten Commandments display in his courtroom. I drove him to the airport."
Wishnatsky said he next spoke to Moore interviewing for the job with the Alabama Supreme Court.
At the Foundation for Moral Law, Wishnatsky primarily writes amicus, or friend-of-the-court, briefs in cases related to culture war issues such as abortion, religious freedom, gay marriage and transgenders.
"I love it," Wishnatsky said. "It's a extension of my faith."
He remains an admirer of Roy Moore and believes his bid for the U.S. Senate was politically sabotaged by opponents who made allegations of improper sexual conduct against him.
"The character assassination orchestrated against him was critical," Wishnatsky said.
He said he doesn't believe the accusations were credible. "No, I don't," he said. "They're implausible to me because of my experience with Judge Moore," he said. "The allegations themselves are implausible. Why would he date (teen girls)? If you graduated from West Point, spent five years in the Army, served in Vietnam, graduated from law school, became a lawyer, were appointed district attorney, then your next step would be to take your clothes off with a 14-year-old? Does that make any sense? No, it doesn't."
As for questions about whether an ethnic Jew who converts to Christianity is a Jew or a Christian, Wishnatsky replies:
"You're both," he said. "You're a Jewish person that's accepted Christ. Jesus was a Jew. Most Jews are not religious. That's how I grew up. There are the Orthodox who are very serious about Judaism. It's about whether you think God is real, and whether you're accountable to him. It's whether you take God seriously. It took me quite a few years to take God seriously."
The man many people thought Kayla was referring to as the "Jewish attorney," Jaffe, a member of a Birmingham synagogue, has been a longtime friend and supporter of U.S. Sen. Doug Jones, the Democrat who defeated Moore.
Wishnatsky has harshly criticized Jones. He wrote an opinion essay for the
Alabama Political Reporter on Dec. 1 attacking Jones for his "wholehearted embrace of the abortion holocaust," saying that "Jones's candidacy is a stark reminder of how ungodly the Democratic Party has become."
oh how convenient of him...
