JONAH

Jewish Institute for Global Awareness (JIFGA), known before 2015 as Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH), was a Jewish non-profit organization which offered conversion therapy to persons who sought sexual orientation change. JONAH described itself as "dedicated to educating the world-wide Jewish community about the social, cultural and emotional factors which lead to same-sex attractions". JONAH's leaders disagree with the consensus of mainstream science and the world's major mental health organizations who say that non-heterosexual sexual orientation is not a disorder. In 2015, a landmark trial found that JONAH's claims to be able to change sexual orientation constituted consumer fraud. The organization was ordered to pay restitution to the plaintiffs and shut down within thirty days. Eleven days after the verdict, the founders created a conversion therapy organization called JIFGA using JONAH's assets. In June 2019, a New Jersey judge ordered JIFGA to shut down within thirty days and pay $3.5 million to victims. History JONAH was created in 1999 in Jersey City, New Jersey by two married couples, Theodore and Elaine Berk and Arthur and Jane Goldberg. They created the organization after finding out their sons were gay. Arthur Goldberg is a former secretary-treasurer of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality. During the 2014 trial against JONAH, it was revealed that Goldberg's license as a board certified professional counselor was revoked in 2011 because the American Psychotherapy Association learned that Goldberg had lied on his application by failing to disclose his felony conviction as a Wall Street municipal bonds manager. In 2000, JONAH provided literature and outreach to gay and bisexual Jews, and their families of all denominations, in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, advertising their supposed methods of reducing and eliminating homosexuality. JONAH eventually became a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation. Since then it expanded to include members in the United States, Israel, Canada, and various European nations. Trial