On June 26, a new abortion fund “guided by Jewish values and teachings” officially launched online. The Red Tent Fund, founded by Allison Tombros Korman as a direct response to what she characterized as a reproductive rights movement “mired in antisemitism,” pledged to “not comment on political, military, and diplomatic developments here or abroad,” emphasizing the fund’s mission to provide abortion services on U.S. soil. 

Korman’s motivation stemmed from her experience since Oct. 7 as a Jewish woman within the ranks of the DC Abortion Fund (DCAF), she wrote in an April op-ed for Tablet Magazine, a conservative-leaning Jewish publication. According to Korman, she resigned from DCAF because she disagreed with the organization’s communications strategy to engage with Israel’s onslaught on Gaza as a reproductive justice issue. 

Korman’s version of the events that led her to quit what she described as her “dream job” has, so far, gone publicly undisputed. However, DCAF and several current and former staffers who spoke with Prism painted a sharply different portrait of what transpired. Before the Red Tent Fund’s creation, according to one current and one former DCAF staff member, DCAF was hit with a coordinated email and social media campaign targeting the abortion fund’s anti-war stance. That campaign, along with the emergence of the “Jewish values”-based fund soon afterward, is emblematic of the rift in the reproductive rights movement over support for Palestine. 

“We are aware that DCAF has been scapegoated by people with power and money because of our call for a ceasefire in Gaza—a decision we made alongside over 25 abortion funds and many more reproductive justice organizations,” DCAF wrote in a statement to Prism. “We also know that a former staff member has started a new fund whose target audience is wealthy donors.” DCAF also said that their staff have experienced online harassment and threats, and the fund has suffered withdrawals of funding in recent weeks, though there is no evidence that those incidents are connected to Korman’s departure. 

The Red Tent Fund and Korman did not respond to Prism’s request for comment. 

In a recent interview with Jewish Insider, Korman said that she created the Red Tent Fund so Jewish funders could continue to support abortion without being confronted with pro-Palestine sentiment. “I think lots of Jewish people felt like they no longer had a place to give money in the abortion movement after Oct. 7, and from my perspective, it’s not about whether you give the money to the Red Tent Fund or another abortion fund. It’s about making sure that people who need money for abortions can get that money,” Korman said.

According to the same article, the fund has already raised more than $30,000 from individuals and a Jewish family foundation. The fund pledges to start distributing money for abortion care in two-to-three months. 

DCAF staffers told Prism that the rift with Korman began after Oct. 7. The DCAF communications team, staffers said, typically operated autonomously in line with the organization’s reproductive justice mission, which had always included global liberation. But on Oct. 9, when DCAF shared an Indigenous People’s Day post on its Instagram story that demanded “land back” and called for a “Free Palestine,” Korman, who worked as senior operations and strategy director, expressed her disapproval and required all future posts mentioning Palestine to go through her for approval. 

In her op-ed, linked on the Red Tent Fund’s website, Korman pinpoints that post and several others shared via DCAF’s Instagram with language she found “offensive” and “harmful” and where Israel’s military attacks on Gaza were characterized as a “U.S.-backed genocide.”

After several confusing weeks of back-and-forth, staffers said, Korman met with the communications team on Nov. 14 to formulate a set of rules of engagement for DCAF’s social media posts. One source told Prism that they believed the goal of this meeting was to dissuade DCAF from speaking out about the ongoing reproductive rights crisis in Gaza. 

“What we learned is that there wasn’t a desire for communications at all,” said Mona, a former employee who preferred not to use their real name for fear of retribution. “The desire was to make us shut up about this issue and make it go away.”

According to DCAF staffers, many within the organization felt it was important to speak out about the reproductive health crisis in Gaza, where the collapse of the health care system due to Israeli attacks and blockades has forced women to deliver babies in cars, shelters, or on the street. Some staffers said that taking a stance in favor of a ceasefire aligns with the DCAF’s values of reproductive justice, which advocates for the right of all people in all countries to have or not to have children in sustainable conditions. 

Discussions on whether DCAF should speak out on the issue devolved into what sources described as internal and external harassment, as DCAF started receiving emails denouncing the fund when any anti-war content was shared. “My wife and I have canceled our monthly donation to DCAF, and I will do everything I can to make sure the donations of others are not misused for purposes other that they were intended,” read an email, viewed by Prism, that was signed by Roger Korman, Allison Korman’s father-in-law who is now listed as a partner of the Red Tent Fund. 

“When someone has the same last name as your boss, and you’re starting to get emails from them, you obviously make that connection,” Kimberly, who also preferred to use a pseudonym for safety, told Prism. Some of the emails DCAF received from donors, viewed by Prism, mentioned Korman as a friend and cited her experience with antisemitism at the fund as a reason for withdrawing donations. Kimberly added that some of these donors are now listed on the Red Tent Fund website. 

The website also lists the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington (JCRC) as a partner, which issued a statement in April condemning alleged antisemitism within DCAF. 

Korman quit DCAF on Nov. 21, seven days after the meeting with the comms team, and went on to launch the Red Tent Fund.

One of the major donors of her new fund is Meadow Clinic founder Dr. Sara Imershein, an abortion provider and funder in the DMV area and George Washington University (GWU) instructor. The Red Tent Fund website lists Imershein as a “trailblazer,” or donor of at least $10,000. 

On April 22, Imershein sent an email to DCAF—later posted publicly on the Organizing Women to Lead Facebook page—claiming that Palestinians protect Hamas and accusing Gazans of harboring terrorists. “I’m offended you blame Israel for defending themselves from terrorists. But Israel is also defending ME from Jihad,” Dr. Imershein wrote in the email, provided to Prism by DCAF staff. 

Imershein did not respond to Prism’s requests for comment.

But it wasn’t the first time she was accused of criticizing reproductive rights groups over their stance on Palestine. An anonymous source close to the GWU-based student group Reproductive Autonomy and Gender Equity (RAGE) disclosed to Prism that Imershein tried to force the group to retract its pro-Palestine statement by sending an email, obtained by Prism, to the university’s dean of students on March 23. Dr. Imershein used to have a working relationship with RAGE but immediately ended it when she read about RAGE’s position on Palestine in one of its newsletters, the anonymous source told Prism. 

The source said Imershein’s email didn’t intimidate the group into changing its position, but it “definitely impacted our relationship with our dean of students and her perspective on our organizing.”

For Mona, this means that DCAF’s harassers are working together to establish the Red Tent Fund. 

“This new project is a collaboration between multiple organizations and multiple individuals who have been engaged in the threatening and harassing of the DC Abortion Fund, including our mission, our staff, and our community because of our anti-war stance,” Mona said. “A lot of those same individuals are now publicly involved in The Red Tent fund from multiple angles.” 

Mona also expressed concern that the Red Tent Fund was set up to comfort donors who no longer want to support abortion funds that have called for a ceasefire.

“There are already over a hundred abortion funds that do this work every day and could fund more people if they had more resources,” she said. “All this does is further complicate accessing abortion care for seekers as they have to call another number or fill out another form.”  

In its statement to Prism responding to the allegations, DCAF asked the public to continue supporting local abortion funds. “You can always count on your local abortion funds that are operating from an intersectional, reproductive justice lens to center abortion seekers because we are unflinching in our commitment. When you’re choosing how to fight back, invest in local abortion funds like DCAF as an antidote to political frustration and hopelessness.”

Concerns from anti-Zionist Jewish repro workers

Anti-Zionist Jewish repro workers and one Jewish volunteer at DCAF expressed concerns to Prism about the Red Tent Fund conflating Zionism, or support for Israel, and Judaism. Citing the Jewish faith’s historical support for reproductive justice, the Red Tent Fund website claims that Jewish people who support reproductive rights felt that “they had to pick between their Jewish identity and their support for reproductive rights” after reproductive rights organizations “refused to acknowledge the atrocities” of Oct. 7. 

Lisa, a Jewish DCAF volunteer using a pseudonym for fear of retribution, said the Red Tent Fund’s position exemplifies a key division within the U.S. abortion movement. As abortion funds often tend to work with marginalized communities with people of color seeking abortion care, Lisa said it’s essential for white women in this space to understand that collective liberation should ultimately be the goal.

“Yes, DCAF is a local fund, but we work with people from across the U.S. and even across the world, and we especially work with and serve marginalized communities, people of color from a variety of different backgrounds,” she said. “[So] it makes sense that we would take a stance on one of the most important issues in the news cycle [that] intersects with the identities of many of our callers, especially given the reproductive justice concerns and crises that are going on on the ground in Palestine.”

Lisa said the creation of the Red Tent Fund seemed “divisive in nature and intention.” 

“I think having a fund that is based on Jewish values can be a really wonderful thing,” she told Prism, but she said those involved in the new fund “are weaponizing Jewish values to create more divisions within an already fractured movement rather than using this Jewish lens as an empowering, compassionate way to raise funds and make things easier for our callers and people who are seeking financial assistance for abortion.”

The emergence of the Red Tent Fund has raised alarms across the reproductive justice movement beyond DCAF. A collective of anti-Zionist Jewish workers in the reproductive movement told Prism that they are also concerned about the “dangerous” conflation of Zionism and Judaism and that Zionism is “antithetical to reproductive justice.” 

“We’re feeling grief and concern more than anything over an organization that was founded based on Zionism, claiming that as Jewish values,” a spokesperson for the collective said. “Zionism denies the indigenous people of Palestine the ability to maintain bodily autonomy and to decide if, when, and how to have children or not have children. We’re now seeing the extreme of how the Zionist settler-colonial project denies Palestinians the ability to raise families in safe, sustainable communities.”