Canary Mission — an Israel-based doxxing operation linked to Israeli intelligence — has profiled nearly 5,000 Americans. DHS used its data to arrest and deport students. The operation was partly bankrolled by a family that sits on the University of Pennsylvania’s Board of Trustees.
In 2023, the Natan and Lidia Peisach Family Foundation gave $100,000 to Canary Mission, an Israel-based website that publishes dossiers on American college students and professors it labels anti-Israel or antisemitic. The foundation’s treasurer, Jaime Peisach, is a 1988 Wharton graduate. His wife, Cheryl Peisach, is one of 44 members of Penn’s Board of Trustees.
In the same year, the Peisach foundation gave $200,000 to Penn and $180,000 to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces — the U.S. nonprofit supporting the Israeli military whose operations Penn students were protesting.
Canary Mission has a full “campaign” page targeting Penn, accusing the university of being “a bastion of SUPPORT for Hamas.” The site profiles more than 15 Penn faculty members and over two dozen students — some for nothing more than signing a pro-Palestinian open letter. The campaign page publishes the email and phone number of Penn’s interim president, urging readers to contact him.
The Peisach family donated to Penn and to the blacklist targeting Penn’s students at the same time. Penn has declined to comment. The Peisach family has not responded to requests for comment from any outlet.
This is the Pennsylvania entry point to a much larger story. Canary Mission is not a grassroots anti-hate project. Investigative reporting from Drop Site News, The Forward, Haaretz, The Intercept, The Nation, Jewish Currents, Al Jazeera, CNN, and federal court testimony have collectively exposed it as a professionalized, Israeli-government-linked surveillance operation directed at Americans exercising their First Amendment rights. The U.S. government used its output to arrest and deport people. A federal judge called it an “unconstitutional conspiracy.” Seventy organizations have demanded the DOJ open a Foreign Agents Registration Act investigation. The first-ever class action lawsuit against the operation was filed in March 2026.
Here is everything that’s been exposed — and everyone involved.
The Peisach family’s conflict of interest
The Peisach family, based in South Florida, built its wealth through textile and cut flowers companies. Its ties to Penn run deep. Cheryl Peisach is Co-President of Penn’s Class of 1987 and co-chairs the programming committee for the Trustees’ Council of Penn Women, where she’s been involved for eight years. One of her sons graduated from Penn. Another was enrolled at the time of The Intercept’s April 2025 report. The family gave more than $1 million to the university over the preceding five years. In 2022, a family member contributed $1 million to establish a center connecting student entrepreneurs with alumni.
The foundation’s officers: Alberto Peisach (president, CEO of Category Five Ventures, with board seats at Category Five Real Estate, Mutuo Capital International, Alta Peak Roofing, Focus BPO, Elan Energy, and FactorTek), Jaime Peisach (treasurer), and Monica Peisach Sasson (vice president, founder of Jewish Fertility Foundation Miami, board member of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, and advisory board member at Penn’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy).
Before October 7, 2023, when Penn scholars organized the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, Canary Mission published a page titled “Penn Sponsoring Israel Hate Fest.” Multiple Peisach family members — Natan, Jaime, and at least seven others — signed a letter demanding then-President Liz Magill cancel it. Magill resisted. She resigned months later after a separate donor threatened to pull a $100 million gift to Wharton.
Penn political science professor Anne Norton told The Intercept: “I’d ask if someone is doing harm to the university fundraising, to the work of the faculty, to the students — for such a person to do this is reprehensible.”
Penn’s response to student activism has been aggressive. In May 2024, police in riot gear arrested 33 people during a pre-dawn encampment sweep; at least two protesters were hospitalized and the Faculty Senate chair resigned in protest. In October 2024, 13 officers in tactical gear — assault rifles, riot helmets, battering ram — raided an off-campus student residence at 6 a.m. over a month-old vandalism investigation. No charges were filed. Canary Mission has also profiled Temple University students, a Drexel graduate, and people who protested inside the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg.
The Peisachs weren’t the only recent funders. The Ann and Robert Fromer Charitable Foundation (also South Florida) gave $20,000 to Canary Mission in 2023 through the Central Fund of Israel. Robert Fromer sits on the board of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, one of the most influential pro-Israel think tanks in Washington, and is a donor to AIPAC’s United Democracy Project super PAC.
What Canary Mission is
Canary Mission publishes dossiers — photos, full names, employers, LinkedIn pages, social media posts, institutional affiliations — of people it accuses of antisemitism or anti-Israel activity on North American college campuses. The profiles read like intelligence files and become the top Google result for the target’s name. The site lists no staff, no address, no leadership. It has no registered nonprofit status in the United States. It has built a database of nearly 5,000 Americans.
Reuters reported that students and scholars targeted by Canary Mission have received messages calling for their expulsion, deportation, rapes, and killings. The site’s “Ex-Canary” delisting process requires targets to write an apology essay for publication. The contact page for delisting reads: “Down for maintenance.”
Who runs it
Jonathan “Jack” Ian Bash — a British-born Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem — is identified across multiple investigations and financial records as the operator of Canary Mission. Bash signed the incorporation documents for Megamot Shalom (“Peace Trends”), an Israeli nonprofit registered in late 2015 that functions as Canary Mission’s legal front. Megamot Shalom’s registered address is a padlocked, derelict building in Beit Shemesh, Israel. Bash previously co-founded HonestReporting and ran VideoActivism, a pro-Israel campus media training group.
Kim Bash, Jonathan’s wife, originally from South Africa, was involved with Aish HaTorah in New York before moving to Israel. Drop Site News found she is socially connected to the owner of J.Mark Interiors in Cedarhurst, Long Island — the shop that shares its address with the Central Fund of Israel, the New York nonprofit that pipelines U.S. donations to Canary Mission.
Megamot Shalom’s board includes Rabbi Ben Packer, an American-born Jerusalem resident who operates a hostel in the Old City that sends lodgers to volunteer at illegal West Bank settlements. Packer distributes the literature of Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose party was banned in Israel for racism in 1988. Packer has said he is a friend of Trump adviser Stephen Miller.
The CAIR-Chicago class action lawsuit filed March 16, 2026 names the following Megamot Shalom officers as defendants: Jonathan Bash, Mr. Aguilar, Mr. Goff-Geffen, Mr. Amton, Ms. Shenkar, and Mr. Frobek. The lawsuit alleges each “personally participated in and directed the doxing campaign.”
Who writes the profiles
Drop Site News identified five Americans who relocated to Israel and appeared as Megamot Shalom’s highest-paid employees in Israeli government filings between 2016 and 2024:
Elihu David Stone — Content writer. Originally from Boston. Lawyer and life insurance broker. Relocated to Efrat, Israel in 2017. Shared Canary Mission posts on Facebook. 1992 Wexner Heritage Program fellow.
Yehuda HaKohen (born Jason Weisbrod, New York) — Content consultant. Earned roughly $57,000 in 2017. Joined the Jewish Defense League after graduating from a Manhattan prep school. Moved to Israel in 2001 and enlisted in the IDF.
Abigail Bornstein — Listed as a highest-paid employee. American who moved to Israel.
Aharon Dikel — Listed in filings. Noted on social media that he finished IDF reserve service around the time of his Megamot Shalom employment.
Alexander Malbin Duncan — Content writer, 2019–2024. Originally from Bethesda, Maryland, now in Jerusalem. Earned $95,500 in 2024. Johns Hopkins graduate.
Alex Ben Carson (filed as “Alex Carson”) — Content writer. UK-born, moved to Israel in 2008. Earned approximately $80,000 in 2022. His social media profile appeared on Canary Mission’s internal site BlackNest, directly confirming the Megamot Shalom–Canary Mission link.
Todd Rosenblatt — California native. His email was allegedly the recovery email for Canary Mission’s Facebook account in 2015. Now a consultant for Aish HaTorah. Formerly worked for Bash’s VideoActivism.
Who built the tech
Philippe Cohen — French-Israeli owner of Shefing, a software firm in a WeWork in Jerusalem. Shefing built code for both Canary Mission and the Museum of Online Antisemitism Chrome extension.
The internal operation
In January 2026, Drop Site News exposed BlackNest, an unlisted internal website where Canary Mission tracked its operations. Software engineers collected data from it over three months in 2025.
Deportations and firings tracked as “company impact” metrics. Strategic planning documents targeting 150 new profiles per week. Internal language: “Anonymity as a tool to scare the enemy” and “Bottom-up approach: Using individuals to take down orgs.” Content team split into four subteams — profiles, editorial, reports, social media — with social media assigned a KPI of five posts per day. Staff using pseudonyms like “Ned Flanders” and “Halle Comet.” An employee named “Cheri” congratulated for identifying an activist from a viral video. “Nora” congratulated for completing “the Stanford Arrest Profiles.” A branding directive to attach this tagline to all posts about NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani: “A vote for Mamdani is a vote for chaos in NYC.”
Over 30 doxxers used fake social media accounts to monitor targets. All document timestamps corresponded to Israeli time zones.
The money pipeline
U.S. donors give tax-deductible contributions to the Central Fund of Israel (CFI) in New York. CFI wires the money to Megamot Shalom in Israel. American taxpayers subsidize the operation through the charitable deduction.
CFI moved $92 million to undisclosed groups in the Middle East in a single recent year. It was founded in 1979 by the Marcus family. Board members mostly live in Israel.
Other known funders beyond the Peisach and Fromer families:
Helen Diller Family Foundation / Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco — $100,000 in 2016. Controlled by the family of billionaire Sanford Diller, who gave $6 million to a pro-Trump political committee and supported organizations the ADL flagged for anti-Muslim bigotry. Ceased funding after exposure.
Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles — $250,000 in 2016–2017 from an anonymous donor. Suspended grants after exposure.
Michael and Andrea Leven Family Foundation — $50,000 in 2018. Michael Leven was a former top official at Las Vegas Sands, the casino empire of late Trump megadonor Sheldon Adelson.
Adam Milstein — Identified in Al Jazeera’s undercover investigation as a major funder. Convicted tax felon. Denied funding the group. Al Jazeera’s hidden camera captured a fundraising director for the Israel Project saying: “It’s him… Adam Milstein’s the guy who funds it.”
Israeli intelligence ties
Documented through Israeli government filings, Haaretz reporting, and hidden-camera footage.
Ministry of Strategic Affairs: In 2018, Haaretz obtained official documents proving the Ministry used Canary Mission profiles to bar Americans from entering Israel. When Lara Alqasem, a 22-year-old Palestinian American student with a valid visa, landed at Ben Gurion Airport, the Ministry sent over a document classified as “Sensitive” containing her Canary Mission profile. She was detained over two weeks; her offense was serving as an SJP chapter president at the University of Florida. Katherine Franke, a Columbia Law School professor, was shown her Canary Mission profile at Tel Aviv’s airport, held 14 hours, deported, and permanently banned.
Shin Bet: Haaretz reported in 2023 that Israel’s domestic intelligence service uses Canary Mission profiles. Activist Andrew Kadi told The Forward a border agent directly cited his Canary Mission profile while interrogating him as he tried to enter Israel to visit his mother.
Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC): The Forward described ICC as running “a large-scale political intelligence operation” with “a D.C. war room with walls covered in computer screens” and paid student fellows gathering intelligence on classmates. Al Jazeera’s undercover investigation captured ICC’s executive director on hidden camera calling Canary Mission “highly, highly effective” and admitting ICC shares its “operations and intelligence brief” with the Ministry of Strategic Affairs.
Shurat HaDin: Several Megamot Shalom content writers are connected to this Israeli legal nonprofit, widely reported as receiving direction from Israeli intelligence.
Investigative journalist James Bamford wrote for The Nation that Canary Mission “acts as a key intelligence asset for the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, a highly secretive intelligence organization that is largely focused on the United States, and the Shin Bet security service.”
How DHS weaponized it
In March 2025, senior DHS officials created a “tiger team” — analysts pulled off counterterrorism, global trade, and cybercrime work to write reports on student protesters.
Peter Hatch, assistant director for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, testified under oath in July 2025 that the tiger team received over 5,000 names to investigate. He confirmed “most” came from Canary Mission. The team produced 100 to 200 reports for the State Department. Hatch testified they used the list “without a firm understanding of the methodology through which individuals came to be included.”
Over 75 people were identified for immigration enforcement based on Canary Mission dossiers. Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student, was arrested at his apartment — his Canary Mission profile was central to the case. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts PhD student whose only known activism was co-writing one op-ed, was arrested on her way to an Iftar dinner. Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown graduate student with no criminal record, was arrested because his father-in-law appeared in a Canary Mission profile.
In January 2026, a federal judge ruled the conduct revealed an “unconstitutional conspiracy” to violate the First Amendment.
The lawsuits and the FARA demand
On February 2, 2026, 70 organizations — Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Unitarian, civil rights, academic, legal, peace, and human rights groups — filed a formal request with the DOJ demanding a FARA investigation. The DOJ’s FARA Unit confirmed it will take the complaint under “advisement.” Canary Mission has never registered as a foreign agent.
On March 16, 2026, CAIR-Chicago filed the first-ever class action lawsuit against Canary Mission and StopAntisemitism (founded by Liora Rez) in Cook County. Named defendants include Megamot Shalom, Central Fund of Israel, and the Megamot officers. The six plaintiffs:
Yousuf Ahmad — IT professional. Dr. Sam Sheikali — Emergency physician who volunteered in Gaza; the American Board of Emergency Medicine threatened to revoke his certification over posts the board called “extremely anti-Zionist.” Mohamed Shedou — Former UIUC student organizer. Dr. Chandra Hassan — Emergency physician, volunteered in Gaza and Lebanon. Laila Ali — Chicago artist and activist, fired after coordinated calls and emails flooded her employer. Laura Goldstein — English lecturer at Loyola, Jewish-American, SJP faculty advisor; received threatening emails and a letter delivered to her campus mailbox.
Hearing date: May 18, 2026. The lawsuit seeks damages, injunctive relief, and removal of all Illinois residents’ dossiers.
What this means for NEPA
No students at East Stroudsburg University, the University of Scranton, Wilkes, Marywood, or King’s College currently appear on Canary Mission. But students from Monroe, Wayne, Pike, Carbon, Lackawanna, and Luzerne counties attend Penn, Temple, and Drexel — all schools where Canary Mission has profiled people. Anyone from the Poconos who attended one rally, signed one letter, or posted one Instagram story about Gaza could end up in a database built by anonymous Israeli operatives, funded by American tax-deductible donations, and fed to DHS for deportation targeting.
No member of Congress has held a hearing. No subpoena has been issued. No one in Washington has demanded answers about why a foreign government is running a surveillance operation against American college students — or why the United States government became its enforcement arm.