The money trickles in, $1 at a time, at a smoky bingo hall in Los Angeles County's tiniest city, the inaptly named Hawaiian Gardens.
It winds up, by the millions, in one of the world's most sensitive hot spots--the disputed territories within Israel--supporting organizations dedicated to keeping the biblical lands under Jewish control.
In the middle is Dr. Irving I. Moskowitz. The soft-spoken 67-year-old physician made his fortune building hospitals around Southern California, then discovered the new source of riches--the strip mall bingo hall--that helped him become a major player in tinderbox politics halfway around the world.
His Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation has dispersed more than $18 million in bingo profits to various causes in the 1990s, $6 million last year alone.
Some of the money supports charities in Hawaiian Gardens that distribute everything from free groceries to smoke alarms. But records show that far more of the millions goes to groups backing the agenda of the Israeli right wing: by buying up property in contested areas such as Jerusalem and campaigning to defeat peace plans under which Israel would surrender land to its Arab neighbors.
The fate of Israel is an emotional subject for many American Jews. But activists on both sides of the fierce peace debate in Israel say no one pours as much money into the cause as Moskowitz.
An Orthodox Jew who lost 120 relatives in the Holocaust, he has condemned the peace accords between Israel and its Arab neighbors as a "slide toward concessions, surrender and Israeli suicide." So he shrugs and says he is merely doing the "natural thing for a Jew," trying to "save our nation."
His grandfatherly demeanor belies a tough, competitive nature that has enabled him to master one contentious world after another: hospital economics, small-town California politics and the secretive land deals of the Middle East.
He also has found himself embroiled in controversy both in the California city where he accumulates the bingo dollars and in the nation that is his passion.
Some in Hawaiian Gardens now question how the doctor who once delivered their babies--but moved to Florida 16 years ago--has continued to use his influence in the community.
