When Estelle Evans met Meir Kahane, or Michael King as she knew him, her life was inextricably linked with the origins of a dark political movement. She knew her fiancé had betrayed her—she had no idea what else he was capable of, sarahw writes
Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images On July 30, 1966, two days before she expected to be married, Estelle Evans received a letter from her lover. She was 22, fairly fresh to New York, sharing an apartment near Columbus Circle with her roommate, Laura , and trying to earn some kind of coin as a model. Michael was nearly 34 and claimed to be a reporter investigating some secret government operation in war-torn Vietnam.
Then, seven months later, came the letter from her lover. He confessed to Estelle that he was not who he said he was. His name was not Michael King as he’d told her. He was married, with children, and could not leave them. He did not, in fact, live on the Upper East Side but with his family in Laurelton, Queens — 20 miles away. The romance was over, and he would not contact her again. He never revealed his true identity to her.
Laura was in hysterics. The patrolmen had arrived too late. Estelle, Laura told them, had bolted for the rail and jumped, plunging 135 feet into the water. She needed a new name because that’s what wayward girls did before moving to the big city. The old one had too many bad memories attached. Chauchie — well, that was kid stuff, a childhood nickname all too easy to outgrow, even if her family insisted on using it. And Gloria Jean was the name of a sad, lonely girl who wanted too much to settle for small-town life. She’d known as soon as puberty hit that she was destined for greatness, and that greatness didn’t live in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
She left her sister’s home on the night of November 30, 1958, clad in a black coat, blue hat, and black shoes, to board a New Haven–bound train to what they were calling “boarding school.” When the train arrived, Gloria wasn’t on it. This would not be the first time she would run away from the orphanage and her sister’s home.
Kahane’s deceptions yielded little success. “It was difficult on account of my religion. I constantly had to make up reasons why I couldn’t attend meetings on Friday nights,” he would later tell an interviewer for Playboy. But at 33, with strong features and a shock of dark hair, and a bachelor apartment on the Upper East Side, his failures could be sanded over to impress a much younger woman. He and Estelle began spending time together.
This rhetoric and subsequent actions were met with near-universal loathing within and outside the Jewish community. By the end of 1971, after receiving a five-year suspended sentence for a bomb plot, Kahane found the United States increasingly inhospitable and moved permanently to Israel. He eventually ceded day-to-day control of the JDL and concentrated his efforts on Kach, the Israeli political party he founded.
They stripped to their underclothes and dove into the East River together, life preservers in hand. When they reached Estelle, she was conscious. The patrolmen put the preserver over her head and began to swim, but the struggle in the icy-cold water threatened to drown them. All three ended up being rescued by a passing fishing boat.
Yet she was remembered, in circumstances equally bizarre and calculated, by her former lover. He claimed to have attended Gloria’s funeral, where he dropped to his knees and wailed, “Oh my darling, please forgive me.” He said he visited the cemetery several times over the following year to place roses upon her grave. And then he set up a memorial foundation in her name, which was a Trojan horse to raise money for the organization that became the Jewish Defense League.
A January 10, 1969, Brooklyn Daily article reported that the fund would “give needy Israelis desperately needed money without the stigma of charity.” The same article announced a $1,000 donation by a man establishing a Gemilat chesed fund in his name in Israel, one that would provide interest-free loans without a repayment deadline.
Kaufman and fellow Times reporter Richard Severo felt something was off about the foundation and set out to prove their suspicions that it was fraudulent. In the process, they unearthed Kahane’s dangerous hypocrisy: promoting ethnonationalism and preaching against intermarriage while covering up an affair with a non-Jewish woman. “We could have changed the history of Israel,” Severo said nearly two decades later.
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