CLEVELAND, OH -In literally every biography about Forest City Trust’s “Ratner family” and the real estate development corporation that Albert Ratner once led as Chief Executive Officer; the storyline is similar to those published in the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History and a Stan Bullard story in Crain’s Cleveland Business in 2005. Kalman Ratowczer or Charles Ratner is supposed to be the first member of the Ratner family to emigrate to the United States of America from Russia in 1906 out of 8 siblings.
Published reports claim their Russian name was Ratowzer or Ratowczer in Eastern Europe. The surname was changed to Ratner upon reaching these shores. In 1920 a Ratner family enterprise was started; and by 1925 they were building up to 1500 homes a year on Cleveland’s east side. They are supposed to be Russian Jews from Bialystok. That’s “their” published and unverified family background story.
Russian Bolsheviks led by Vladmir Lenin and group of radicals were tearing up the nation during Bloody Sunday revolutions like the one in 1905 prior to World War I in 1914; and trying to bump off Tsar Nicholas, II. They succeeded. Anywhere from 1000 to 4000 dead. No more monarchies. The territories, like those where inhabitants wanted to be called Poland, were terrorizing for independence under a Communist system with them and their co-conspirators in charge. They finally got it in 1921 as members of Josef Stalin’s Communist Soviet Union.
The “workers” led by the lawyer, Lenin, and another lawyer on the Russian-Jewish side, Marc Borisovich Ratner, were pushing the Bolshevik revolts to the monarchist government like that which exists under the King and Queen in the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Russia was ruled by Tsars from 1721 to 1906.
Ratner organized the Jewish Socialist Workers Party and got kicked out of Russia in 1905. He died in exile 1917. It’s the same year as the Russian and Catholic riots that slaughtered 300 American Christian Negro men, women and children in East Saint Louis, Illinois as they sought to spread that Communist and Democratic Socialist filth here. It’s the “socialist” bullshit U.S. Senator Bernie Gitman Sanders and his fellow Commies are selling.
The Yivo Institute for Jewish Research has this Ratner’s papers dating from 1902 to 1917. The information below is from its website; and I have no evidence of Marc Borisovich Ratner being related to the Forest City Ratner family or that he secretly emigrated to the U.S. under another name. But a “Ratner” using their real name to emigrate to the U.S. in 1906, three years after the enactment of the Anarchist Exclusion Act in 1903, would have found the doors to this country closed based on Yivo’s description of troublemaking and unassimilable Bolshevik Marc Borisovich Ratner.
Lawyer, socialist leader in Russia. One of the founders of SERP (Sotsialisticheskaya Yevreyskaya Rabochaya Partiia – Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party) which was based on a synthesis of nationalist and socialist ideas. Appeared as counsel for the defense in political trials and as civil prosecutor in the trials against pogrom instigators. Ratner initiated the campaign for recognition of a Jewish section of the Socialist International. Born in Kiev. In 1905 was compelled to leave Russia because of his activities. Lived in Switzerland, Austria (Vienna) and Rumania (Iasi).
Lizzy Ratner’s story was published in The Nation magazine she writes for as a senior editor on February 20, 2017. Its headline reads, “Nobody Wanted to Take Us In: The Story of Jared Kushner’s Family, and Mine.”
Lizzy Ratner identifies Harry Ratner or Ozcar Ratowzer aka Osher as her grandfather. Bruce Ratner is Harry’s son and Lizzy’s father. Bruce Ratner was leading the company as CEO in 2012 when a $200,000 Forest city bribe was delivered to ex-New York councilwoman Sandy Annabi that included an offer to hire a cousin if she changed her vote on a $600 million development project. Annabi was prosecuted and imprisoned. Nothing for Ratner.
According to family accounts, Harry Ratner was supposed to have been 19 or 20 at the time he boarded the Acuitania in Southhampton, England on October 23, 1920 for a 7-day boat ride to the U.S. and Ellis Island in New York. The deceitful illegal Russian and Bolshevik immigrant’s granddaughter acknowledges in her gap-filled story that the age of 16 listed for her grandfather on the ship’s manifest is a lie.
What her story implies through careful omission or lazy editorial research is that the family of illegal Russian “Jewish” immigrants were aided by a corrupt U.S. consul “in” Germany in 1920 who saw through their deception; and initially refused to accept their fake credentials for admission into the nation. But because her grandfather’s oldest brother, Bolshevik sympathizer Kalman or fake named “Charles” was a Freemason, and so was the American consul in Germany in 1920, everything was “we’re all in the same club” cool. Even that story has its curious deceptions and reeks of the suggestion officials connected to the U.S. immigration process may have accepted a bribe.
There was no U.S. Consul “in” Germany between 1917 and 1921 during Ohio native President Woodrow Wilson’s term in office because we were at war with Germany during World War 1. The war began on July 28, 1914 and ended November 11, 1918.
On February 5, 1917, James Gerard was the U.S. Ambassador or “Commissioner” to Germany when U.S. German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmerman ordered him to return home on February 5, 1917. Wilson had cut off diplomatic relations with Germany after threats were made to sink U.S. passenger ships. Commissioner Gerard had been ordered out by the Germans a month earlier in January 1917.
Gerard was originally detained in 1917 by German officials who thought his U.S. counterpart, a German spy named Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, was being abused by U.S. officials. Bernstoff was helping U.S. Germans return to Germany with fake credentials. After confirming that Bernstoff was not being treated poorly, Gerard was allowed to leave.
The embassy remained closed for four years. In 1920 Gerard was living in New York and campaigning for President of the United States as a Democrat when the Ratner’s were trying to illegally enter our borders after fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution from Russia through Germany with fake identities.
When President Warren G. Harding, another Ohio native, restored relations with Germany in 1921, Gerard’s replacement was Ambassador Ellis Loring Dresel who was appointed in October of that year. His credentials were presented to German officials on December 10, 1921; and his term ended on April 18, 1922. Dresel had also served in Berlin with Gerard during his tenure as Wilson’s appointee in 1917 when Wilson closed the U.S. Embasssy in Berlin.
The idea of Kalman aka Charles Ratner, a Russian Jew, being a Freemason is also curious given the connection to conspiracy allegations that Freemason’s are controlled by Jewish Zionists who seek to dominate the world. B’nai B’rith was started as a Jewish arm of freemasonry by German Jews in New York in 1843. Russian Jews were welcomed, then, but the number of Yiddish speakers in this nation was still imperceptibly tiny.
Lizzy Ratner’s story about her grandfather’s passage to the U.S. doesn’t explain how he got from Germany to Southhampton in the United Kingdom where he boarded the Aqcuitania; and through U.S. Ambassador (Commissioner) John William Davis there to enter our borders in October 1920. President Wilson’s appointee was born in West Virginia and there was nothing liberal about him.
Davis (my Mother’s surname) supported lynching laws, state’s rights and argued against Brown v. Topeka Kansas Board of Education in 1954. He believed in segregation and appears to have offered lip service condemnation of the treatment of German Jews by Adolf Hitler’s emerging National Socialist Workers Party or Nazi’s. None of that encouraged the U.S. to be sympathetic towards the violent Russian Jewish immigrants who had engaged in years of Red Summer terrors in more than 40 cities across the U.S. in 1919.
Lizzy Ratner conveniently and understandably omits the reason America’s doors were closed to her and Jared’s Russian ancestors. The story she wrote portrays her Red Army, Bolshevik-loving grand’s as “victims” of oppression here and in the Russia she called Poland during the Russian Revolution or civil war in 1917. There was no Poland until 1921 and the nation’s admittance into the Soviet Union. It’s another fact she ignores. These historic facts makes Lizzy Ratner’s claim her Russian ancestors, Jews or not, were given easy entrance to the U.S. by any Wilson appointee seem incredible.
President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 had ordered U.S. Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer, and soon to be FBI Director John Edgar Hoover, to round up approximately 4500 Russian Jews and other Eastern European “Bolshevik-minded” anarchists. 249 violently disruptive and anarchist Russian Jews, specifically, were “get the fuck out” deported to Russia aboard the USS on December 21, 1919. It was called the “Soviet Ark.”
America didn’t hate Jews at the time her ancestors arrived here. Like every other nation immigrants are expected to assimilate into the culture and leave the shit they left where they left it. We hated, and still hate, Communists. Communists had engaged in violent ethnic and religious-cleansing revolutions throughout Eastern Europe and had started to spread that “pure white and anti-Christian bullshit here through Russian Samuel Gomper’s American Federation of Labor starting in 1881.
Violent Russians like those with Gompers had engaged in violent and deadly “labor strikes” against factories whose American owners had naturally started hiring freed American Negroes who’d once been enslaved; and had intended for our ancestors to manage and work in as they’d done for free. Gompers’ unions had the mindset of not letting “niggers” touch the tools enslaved American Negroes had helped invent and used to build the nation.
After years of disruptively-violent and bloody labor strikes against American Negroes and White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) Christians, like the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886, President Wilson McKinley responded to the words of American Negro Mr. Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise address in 1896 and asked Congress to “cast the nation’s buckets down” with the people who’d built the nation without a single strike. Mr. Washington’s words that our ancestors would deliver the riches to them in the factories they’d let us run sat well with McKinley when Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1899 .
No Chinese for the next 40 years. No more than 2789 Eastern Europeans from all over Eastern Europe a year; and that figure was reinforced in 1929 when Congress backed up the 1921 Emergency Immigration Act . No more than 71 Russians a year could enter this country whether they were Jews or not. Immigration was capped at no more than three percent. Period. No other people but Christians were going to be (and will ever be) dominant in the anti-Communist U.S.
America hardened itself even more against Russian immigration when one from Cleveland named Leon Cszolgosz met with Russian Emma Goldman (ethnic cleansing Margaret Sanger’s mentor) in 1901 and assassinated President McKinley in Buffalo. Congress enacted the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act; and later the 1917 Espionage Act because Russian Jews and other Eastern European immigrants were disrupting President Wilson’s armed forces recruitment efforts during World War 1. They were operating under the guise of “free speech” to protect and promote their interests “back home” and abroad.
The Espionage Act of 1917 made it a jailable federal felony for anyone other than an authorized U.S. government official to communicate directly with the officials of foreign governments about anything. The Espionage Act was recently used to prosecute ex-General Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort. The Ratners, Mark Zuckerberg and even Jared Kushner’s Russian father appear to have been immune from prosecution for violating it over more recent years despite their known foreign interactions. Soviet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joked how he’d known “Jared since he was a little boy” from staying at the Kushner home in New Jersey.
40 cities were targeted this way during a Bolshevik uprising in 1919 known as the Red Summer. Russian Jews and Eastern Europeans had identified nearly 300 political and business figures for assassination.
In response to their refusal to assimilate in the U.S., instead of violently trying to take it over, President Wilson in 1919 assigned U.S. Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer and FBI Director John Edgar Hoover to round up approximately 4500 Russian Jewish and Eastern European immigrants they called “anarchists.” 249 Russian Jews were deported aboard the USS Buford after their Red Summer of 1919, and murderous attacks on American Negroes in cities like East Saint Louis, Illinois, St. Louis, Tulsa, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Boston and more. They’d worn out their welcome and Americans wanted them controlled and gone.
All this Russian Jewish history was left out of Lizzy Ratner’s story as she portrayed her ancestors as victims instead of perpetrators of disruptive violence against the nation’s existing Christian citizens. And it’s this history which makes it implausible that President Wilson’s ambassadors a year later would be sympathetic and ignore his and Congress’ desire to keep them out. Especially Russian Jewish Bolshevik “sympathizers” with fake names, ages and credentials. Russian Jews were a significant presence in both the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of Russia; and deeply involved in the mass exterminations during World War 1.
The admission that her grandfather’s brother was a Red Army backing Bolshevik to the U.S. is another word for “Communist.” A loyal to America U.S.immigration official would have known it was a reason to decline him as an immigrant after leaving a nation where all its citizens had no choice but to fight and kill. The Ratner’s entering the U.S. as adults, or even teenagers, would have been caught up in Russia’s February and October Bolshevik Revolutions in 1917 before their alleged “all in the family” arrival here in and around 1920..
After forcing Nicholas II out as tsar, the Mencheviks who didn’t want their government disrupted turned on the Bolsheviks and caused many to flee for fear of the “killing kind” of retaliation for the violence they’d spread; and the mass grave-style killings they’d done. The 7 male and one female “Ratner siblings” were old enough to have participated on one side or the other as either Russian or territorial fighters.
The idea that an entire family of 7 Ratner siblings with fake names and forged documents would be given access to the U.S. all at one time in 1920 by any consul is not supported by any federal record I was able to locate on Ellis Island passenger lists and records; and the National Archives.
Not even the fake “Ratner” names appear on immigration records
The Statute of Liberty & Ellis Island Foundation started under the late President Ronald Reagan, and chaired by ex-Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca, compiled over 65 million records of immigrants who entered this nation’s shores between 1820 and 1957. The Christian Church of the Latter Day Saints, Mormons, assisted in the records complilation.
Upon a closer examination of the dates and names both here in the U.S. and in Bialystoker, Poland, which at the time was Russia, is they don’t add up. Big money is rarely questioned.
There are 15 Charles Ratner’s and only two who were admitted entrance into the U.S. between 1900 and 1920. One in 1909 and another in 1918. Both show Philadelphia as their last address and places of birth. There is no Charles Ratner, Charles Ratowzer, Charles Ratowcer or Kalman Ratowzer from Bialystok, Poland. More to the point, there was no Poland until 1921 when the country became a member of Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union after World War 1. Poland for 400 years prior had been Russia.
A Charles Ratner arrived in the U.S in 1909; but the Ellis records don’t show one for 1906. Records show the 1909 Charles Ratner arrived aboard the Lusitania on September 2 from LIverpool, England and claimed to be a U.S. citizen whose father was born in Philadelphia. A search for the last name “Ratowzer” produces only three results.
The 1918 Charles Ratner arrived here from Liverpool aboard the Oduna ocean liner The Lusitania was sank by the German navy during World War 1 on May 7, 1915. There were 1900 crewmen and passengers aboard the British sailing vessel that carried munitions for Great Britain’s war with Germany. 1100 were killed including 120 “Americans.”
What does appear in the Ellis records are multiple listings for several people named “Ratner” who may or may not connect them to the Cleveland and Forest City Enterprises, now Forest City Trust, Ratner family. Instead of changing their last name from Ratowzer to Ratner after they arrived on these shores, as published reports have claimed; the Ratner’s in the Ellis records arrived here with the name. There are three different spellings for the name Ratowzer, Ratowczer and Ratowcer that produces no Ellis Island search results in 1920.
Between 1915 and 1925, Ellis Island records identify 70 “Ratner’s” entering the U.S. from different parts of the world. 60 Ratners arrived from Russia. The earliest in 1882. 26 Ratner’s arrived here from Poland.
A search for Bialystok in Russia or Poland under any name on the Ellis website produces no results. There appears to be no one who arrived here claiming they were specifically from Bialystok at any time between 1820 and 1957.
The earliest “Max Ratner” out of the 11 in the Ellis records arrived here from Minsk, Russia in 1905. The next in 1930. If this Ratner is the Cleveland Ratner, the Ellis records appear to refute the “family story” that Charles arrived first in 1906 and Max arrived years later with the other family members around 1920. There is no Max Ratowzer from Bialystok or Russia in any Ellis record.
Three Leonard Ratner’s arrived in the U.S. between 1952 and 1956. The earliest Harry Ratner’s immigration records show 1927 as a date far beyond their 1920 Forest City founding.
The only document connecting Harry Ratner or Ratowczer to the 1920 date the family claims as his time of entrance was filed with the Clerk of the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court on a form called a “Declaration of Intention.” That’s the only “official” record that confirms Lizzy Ratner’s story about her grandfather. There’s a “period in time” problem with this record that could make it a fraud.
According to the U.S. National Archives, “declarations of intent” were handled by any court in the U.S. before 1906. So an alien could file it locally with a municipal or county court. The document expired in seven years and did not make an alien a citizen. It simply declared their intent to “become” citizens.
Beginning on September 27, 1906 the “declaration of intent” filings had to be through the federal courts. So the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas document Harry Ratner signed there on May 12, 1926 does not “appear” to have followed the lawful process.
In what apppears to be Bruce’s father, and Lizzy’s grandfather’s, petition for citizenship with the U.S. District Court in Northern Ohio and signed by Clerk of the Court A.J. Denzler on June 17, 1931 is information that makes every other document he submitted a fraudulent lie.
In that document the man who had claimed to be Harry Ratowcer admitted his real name was Aron Ratny. He wasn’t born in Bialystok but in Zelen, Poland on October 12, 1899. There was no Poland in 1899. This Harry Ratner’s age following the “family story would have made him 21 in 1920 and not 16 as Lizzy claimed was his age on the Acquitania’s passenger list. An Ellis Island search for the name “Ratny” produces three results. None that begin with the first name Aron.
This Harry Ratner lived at 4518 Franklin Boulevard in Cleveland, claimed to be a boiler maker and identified his race as “Hebrew.” Hebrew is a religion.
He claimed to have declared his intention to become a U.S. Citizen with the U.S. District Court in New York on September 27, 1928. Instead of immigrating from South Hampton, England aboard the Aquitania in October 23, 1920; he claimed to have entered the U.S. on September 28, 1913 aboard the SS Czar from Libau, Latvia.
Fellow Cleveland Russians John Craciun and Pavel Sops signed affidavits of witnesses claiming they had known Harry Ratner since 1926. The federal clerk signing the document on June 17, 1931 was another Russian named F.J. Denzler. Denzler served between 1930 and 1936.
One record appears to back Lizzy Ratner’s highly-questionable and inconsistent tale of at least how her grandfather, Harry “possibly” Aron arrived in the USA with the help of his older brother, “Kalman.” She admits his documents and names were fake.
The bottom line is the Ratner’s do not appear to be who they are from Albert’s “old country” perspective; and America doesn’t know what Bolshevik-backing Kalman, Harry or the others did in Russia before they appear to have fled here en masse by any means necessary during that nation’s bloody, religious and ethnic cleansing revolutions.
Mass graves exist in the various parts of Russia or Poland the Ratner’s claim as their ethnicity. Identities of the dead in those graves all over Eastern Europe were stolen. So was their “loot the looters” wealth.
The Ratner’s meteoric rise to wealth and power in Cleveland seems disproportionate to the story of their humble beginnings. Perhaps the secret to who they really are lies in an “old country” mass grave. Perhaps they were just lucky. Were the first Ratner’s fleeing oppression, escaping from crimes or sent here to infiltrate, disrupt and takeover?
There’s more to this family than meets the eye. The truth behind Harry’s granddaughter’s “story” is it’s full of inconsistencies and intended deceptions with co-conspirators.