One autumn Friday night I took a sentimental journey to my old temple in Pontiac, Michigan. Predictably, the visit was a disappointment—everything was smaller, shabbier, and less familiar than I had imagined. The people I had grown up with were gone, and the congregation that night was made up of strangers.
Only the rabbi’s sermon was the same. He was a new man, but his talk that night was a set piece right out of my boyhood. It was divided into two parts. The first was its American message—that the prophets had all been liberal Democrats who would have supported the ERA, gun control, school busing, and a cutoff of aid to the contras. In my day, the prophets were Hubert Humphrey men; twenty years later, they were with Mario Cuomo and Michael Dukakis.
With the real—i.e., American—business out of the way, the rabbi turned to the obligatory “Jewish” part of his sermon. “We Jews have been persecuted throughout our history,” he told the congregation. “Titus, the Spanish inquisitors, Hitler—all have sought to destroy us; but they are gone, and we are still here. Adversity has kept the Jewish people alive.”
If Jewish survival depends on adversity, the Jews of America are in trouble: There isn’t a single Torquemada or Titus on the horizon. But the congregation, familiar with the standard rabbinical rhetoric about oppression, seemed untroubled. Invocations of the horrors of the Jewish past are stylized bows to tradition; the Jews in a place like Pontiac have no personal experience of persecution.
Seen from the inside, their suburban world is a warm, secure place. But below Eight Mile Road, in the inner city of Detroit, where most Jews no longer live or even visit, there is a tiny pocket of people who were left behind during the exodus of 1967. Fundraising to them means finding the rent money. They don’t go to Israel because they don’t have the bus fare.
A few years ago the federation opened a branch of the Jewish Vocational Service on Woodward Avenue. Woodward Avenue was once the grand thoroughfare of Detroit, a street lined with gracious public buildings, impressive Gothic churches, and fine stores. That was before 1967. Today it lies in the center of the city like a knife wound, raw and sore—a tawdry strip of two-hour motels and porno shops, tottering winos, drug addicts, and underemployed muggers.
Putting the Jewish Vocational Service on Woodward Avenue sent a clear message—it was there to serve the urban, non-Jewish poor. The federation wanted to do something to alleviate Detroit’s poverty problem, get a little good publicity, and provide some jobs for Jewish social workers. But when the doors opened, the staff was astonished to find dozens, and ultimately hundreds of Jews turning up for help. Some were mentally ill, others old and sick. A few were men and women on the skids, Jewish bums hiding out in flophouses, unable to face the pressures of suburban respectability.
One person who was not surprised by the appearance of these forgotten Jews was Rabbi Noah Gamze. Gamze had been dealing with them for years at the Downtown Synagogue, the funkiest congregation in the city of Detroit.
The Downtown is located right where it ought to be, in the center of Detroit’s once-bustling but now almost deserted business district. When I dropped by, on a weekday afternoon, the sidewalk in front of the small building was empty and there were parking spots right on the street. I rang the bell, and after being inspected through a speakeasylike peephole, I heard the clicking of multiple locks and Noah Gamze swung the door halfway open to let me in.
Rabbi Gamze ushered me into his office, a cluttered room barely large enough to hold a desk, shelves of books, and a threadbare couch. The Downtown Synagogue was founded in the days when hundreds of Jewish merchants worked in the city and sometimes needed a place to say Kaddish or to discharge some religious obligation. In those flush times the synagogue had been solvent, even prosperous. But most of the Jewish merchants left and it has become a struggle to keep things going. The Downtown still provides a daily minyan for businessmen, but Gamze has broadened his mandate; slowly, without intending to, he has become the chief rabbi of Detroit’s outsiders.
At first glance Noah Gamze seemed wildly miscast for the role. He is an almost comically mild-mannered little man with wire-rim glasses perched professorily on his nose and a black silk yarmulke resting on thinning white hair. I guessed he must be close to sixty, although his formal, stilted language, high-pitched monotone voice, and didactic conversational style made him seem much older.
My first indication that appearances might be deceiving came when Gamze offered me a drink. Rabbinical refreshments generally run to tea and cookies, but he lugged out a bottle of whisky and shyly asked if I’d join him in a l’chayim toast. I got the feeling that Gamze doesn’t get much drop-in trade.
“Isn’t it a little rough for you down here sometimes?” I asked. He shook his head mildly. “I’ve had some experience along those lines in the past,” he said. “For one thing, when I was a young rabbi in Chicago I was acquainted with Jacob Guzik. I even had the honor of presiding at his funeral.”
It took me a minute. “Jacob Guzik? You mean ‘Greasy Thumb’ Guzik from the Capone mob?” Gamze smiled modestly. “You were his rabbi?”
“Well, yes I was. And I must say, I always found Mr. Guzik to be a generous and charitable individual. Of course he wasn’t a strict observer of the Sabbath, but how many of my congregants are?” Gamze sighed theatrically. I wasn’t sure but I thought I detected a twinkle behind his thick spectacles.
There was a knock on the office door, and a tall, stooped man came in. He was dressed in a mismatched plaid jacket and trousers of indeterminate chemical composition, and, like Gamze, wore a black silk yarmulke. With great formality Rabbi Gamze introduced him as Sam Glass, janitor of the synagogue.
Sam Glass is the kind of Jew that people in the suburbs don’t believe exists. In his mid-fifties, he has spent his whole life in Detroit on the wrong side of the tracks; currently, he was living in the back of a burned-out store in the barrio. He had no connection with other Jews until a couple years ago when Rabbi Gamze found him selling newspapers in front of the Coney Island on Lafayette Street. Gamze took him in, and Glass has been with him ever since.
“This is Mr. Chafets, Sam,” said the rabbi. “He is a writer from Israel.”
“Uh, rabbi, you mean he came, uh, all the way from Israel?” gulped Sam in a hollow, Deputy Dawg baritone, a look of the utmost concentration on his face.
“Yes, that is correct,” piped Gamze. “He is a resident of Jerusalem, which as you know is the capital of Israel.” Sam nodded in affirmation, the pupil of a wise and learned master.
Rabbi Gamze was eager to talk about the media coverage of Israel, and he courteously included Sam in the conversation.
“Sam, Mr. Chafets has delved into the question of journalistic attitudes toward Israel. Perhaps you have seen some of his work on this most important subject?”
Glass let this nicety pass and waited.
“Mr. Chafets has examined the work of many prominent American journalists who are Jewish, such as Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Ted Koppel …”
Sam lunged forward in amazement. “Uh, wait a minute there, rabbi, are you, uh, saying that Ted Koppel is Jewish?”
“That is correct.”
“Gosh, I can’t believe it. Jewish! I always thought he was Danish.”
The doorbell rang and Sam, still shaking his head and muttering in astonishment, went to answer it. The afternoon minyan was beginning to arrive. It has been increasingly difficult to find a quorum in recent years. This, more than anything, is what prompted Noah Gamze to venture out into the inner city to search for new recruits. Combing the Cass Corridor, a greasy stretch of flop-houses not far from Wayne State University, he discovered several dozen down-on-their-luck Jews.
“They don’t always attend our services, of course, but occasionally some of them drop by. They have the status of paid guest worshipers,” Gamze told me.
“How much do they get paid?” I asked.
“Two bucks a shot,” he said benignly.
There were a couple guest worshipers in the congregation that afternoon. Gamze introduced me to Willie “The Barber” Schwartz, a nonunion man with a patch over one eye and a suspicious glare in the other. Curtis Dennis introduced himself. A thin black man in his fifties, he was dressed in a war surplus leather bomber jacket, work pants, and a Detroit Tigers baseball cap. Curtis Dennis is a convert to Judaism and a major player in Gamze’s game plan for achieving a daily minyan.
The day before, in a ghetto neighborhood not far from the synagogue, an eleven-year-old boy had been murdered by a fourteen-year-old in an argument over an imitation silk shirt. Dennis took me aside and confided that the victim had been his cousin. He also mentioned that he needed ten dollars to send the bereaved family a wreath. “I hope you come up with the money,” I told him, and he gave me a baleful look. A few minutes later I saw him talking earnestly to Rabbi Gamze, who listened respectfully, took out his wallet, and handed him a bill.
We went upstairs to the chapel. “Come on, rabbi, we’re running late,” said one of the businessmen, anxious not to get trapped downtown after dark. Mayor Coleman Young, in his ongoing cold war against the suburbs, had just erected a monument to Joe Louis—a giant black fist that extends over one of the city’s main freeway exit ramps. Most white merchants like to pass that statue heading north by sundown.
Gamze picked up his prayerbook and began to read. From the row behind me I felt a tap on my shoulder and Curtis Dennis, in a deep ghetto accent, said, “mincha, page one hundret and eleven.”
After services, Rabbi Gamze walked me to the door. “Tell me something, did you believe Dennis’s story about that kid being Dennis’s cousin?” I asked. The former spiritual advisor of Greasy Thumb Guzik looked at me closely, perhaps wondering if he had overestimated my sophistication. “Of course not.”
“Then why did you give him the ten?”
Gamze’s expression changed to one of gentle reproach. “Lying is a sin. But poverty is a worse sin. When a fellow Jew needs help, you help.” He turned to Sam Glass, standing at his elbow. “That is known as tzedaka. Are you familiar with that term, Sam?” Sam nodded vigorously. “Uh, yes rabbi, I, uh, learned it from you.”
Over two millennia Jews have been accustomed to turning to each other in times of crisis. In America, where the crises are few and far between, this tendency has been blunted—but not abandoned. When Jews are in real distress, they still turn inward, as if by instinct. That is true in the inner city of Detroit, and it is equally true at Temple Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco—a gay synagogue in the midst of a deadly epidemic.
There are homosexual congregations in almost every large city in the United States. But San Francisco is the capital of gay America and Sha’ar Zahav, with 250 members, is the most visible and influential gay synagogue in the country. I first heard about the congregation from a reporter on the Northern California Jewish Bulletin with the wonderfully unlikely name of Winston Pickett. I assumed that it might be difficult to make contact with Sha’ar Zahav but Pickett assured me that it would be easy, and it was. I simply called Rabbi Yoel Kahn from Sacramento, where I had gone to give a lecture, introduced myself and my project, and asked for an appointment. Kahn was more than agreeable; he suggested that we spend part of a day together, so that I could get a firsthand look at the inner workings of the temple.
Kahn’s openness stemmed from the fact that San Francisco takes Sha’ar Zahav in stride. The city is a liberal, tolerant place where Jews have long been accepted as members of the local establishment. Many of the old-line Jewish families, like Caspar Weinberger’s, have converted to Christianity, and the intermarriage rate is among the highest in the country. At the time San Francisco had a Jewish mayor, Dianne Feinstein, who was reportedly taken aback to learn, during a visit to Israel, that her Christian mother disqualified her as a Jew in the eyes of the Israeli rabbinical establishment.
This kind of Talmudic distinction is not taken seriously in San Francisco. Orthodox rabbis in the Bay Area maintain cordial relations with their Reform and Conservative colleagues, and even the local Chabad representative is said to be soft on heresy. Aquarian minyans and other New Age worship groups dot the city. San Francisco is probably the only place in the country where a gay synagogue could become a part of the Jewish establishment.
I took a bus from Sacramento, sharing the ride with commuters too smart to drive and travelers too poor to fly. As we boarded the Greyhound, the terminal’s loudspeaker boomed, “All aboard for San Francisco. Cigarette smoking is permitted in the last six rows of the coach. Please, no cigar, pipe, or marijuana smoking on board.” It was seven-fifteen in the morning. I laughed out loud and a businessman in a dark pinstripe suit standing behind me said, “California.”
Temple Sha’ar Zahav, which was once a Mormon church, turned out to be a disarmingly plain two-story white frame building located on a quiet residential street in the Upper Market area. Its ground floor is an unadorned chapel that seats several hundred on spare wooden benches. Upstairs there is an equally functional social hall and the rabbi’s modest office. I had expected something garish and lurid—a strobe ner tamid, sorcerers’ moons, and astrological signs on the ark—and I was a bit disappointed by the austere decor.
To an Israeli, the notion of a gay synagogue is as incongruous as kosher pork chops. The religious establishment in Israel takes the Scriptural view that homosexuality is an abomination, and even the nonreligious Jews tend to see it as a perversion or a sickness. There are a few gay bars and clubs in Tel Aviv, but homosexuality is far from accepted, and it takes considerable courage to come out of the closet. I entered Sha’ar Zahav full of wonder that there could be a synagogue for homosexuals, or that so many would be willing to publicly affiliate with it.
Rabbi Kahn was as disarming as his temple. A sturdy, apple-cheeked man in his late twenties, he was dressed in a ski sweater, blue corduroys, and loafers. And, although he is a Reform rabbi, he was wearing a yarmulke. The synagogue is a member of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), but many of its members come from Conservative or Orthodox backgrounds, and ritually it tends in some ways to be a right-wing Reform temple.
Kahn’s study had all the standard rabbinical equipment—a UAHC diploma on the wall, shelves of Hebrew and English books, a complete set of the Babylonian Talmud, and another of the Encyclopedia Judaica. Kahn’s library is of limited use, however; traditional Judaism offers little precedent to the rabbi of a homosexual congregation in the midst of an AIDS panic.
At the time of my visit, five of Temple Sha’ar Zahav’s members had already died of the disease, and Kahn told me that a number of others—he wouldn’t say how many—were ill. “Judaism becomes harder and stronger for people like ours during an AIDS epidemic,” Kahn said. “It raises questions about God and mortality, questions people wouldn’t normally consider. A lot of people wonder if they are being punished, and there’s a strong sense of guilt. That’s one of the main issues we have to deal with here.”
On the high holidays, when the rabbis of suburban America were discussing South African divestment, environmental protection, or Middle Eastern politics, Yoel Kahn preached to more than one thousand people about life and death, God and suffering.
“We enter this New Year with uncertainty,” he told his congregation. “Some of us are ill and others will become ill. Some of us are going to die—whether from complications of AIDS or of some other cause. We cannot undo actions we took years ago, before we understood what we understand today. Let us each forgive our pasts, which cannot be changed, and look to the future, which is in our power to alter.”
There was an almost Jobian sense of doom in the sermon, a call for faith in the face of inexplicable suffering. Kahn then led the congregation in a meshaberach, or special prayer, for the victims of AIDS. There is a Talmudic injunction against praying for the impossible, and since there is no known cure for the disease, Kahn had labored over a prayer that was theologically acceptable. “Source of mercy, spread Your mercy on the ill among us and our loved ones, and protect with a special love those who are struggling with AIDS … and may we all see the day of healing, amen.”
For the gay Jews of San Francisco, the synagogue is a refuge. An average of 150 people come to services on Friday nights—the biggest Sabbath eve attendance in the city. They come because they need comfort; and because they want that comfort from their own people and their own religion.
In the shadow of the epidemic, the Jews of Sha’ar Zahav, once the avant-garde of the Age of Aquarius, have become almost as tribal as their ancestors in Poland or Russia. “A lot of our members come from back East, but they stay out here when they get ill,” Kahn told me. “Often their families don’t want to have to deal with them or admit that they are sick. Their real family is here, within the congregation.” The dead are shipped home for burial, but Sha’ar Zahav has developed its own one-day ritual to replace the traditional shivah, or week of mourning. There is also a Bikur Holim committee that carries out the commandment to comfort the sick by providing around-the-clock care for the terminally ill.
No one knows exactly how many Jewish homosexuals and lesbians there are in San Francisco. Kahn estimated that there may be as many as ten thousand, a figure based on his assumption that one person in ten is gay. That number may be high, but obviously there are thousands of gay Jews in the Bay Area. The San Francisco Jewish Federation was the first in the country to take on a full-time social worker to deal with AIDS patients.
“People out here are a little more sympathetic than in other parts of the country, but there’s still a conspiracy of silence,” Kahn said sadly. “Jews are liberal in the abstract, but a lot of them don’t want to admit that they know any gays. Being homosexual remains a stigma in the Jewish mainstream.”
Kahn himself seemed comfortable talking about AIDS, but anxious to emphasize that Sha’ar Zahav is a synagogue, not just a crisis center. “Obviously AIDS is our first priority, but we’re going full speed ahead with the rest of our program, too,” he said. “You know, in a lot of ways this is just like any other congregation. People worry about their parents’ welfare, they grapple with the meaningful nature of life, the usual concerns. When I first got here I expected a lot of questions about coming out, but actually there have been very few. By the time people get to Sha’ar Zahav, they’re already out of the closet.”
That is a considerable understatement. The congregation is explicitly, even aggressively gay. Its statement of purpose defines it as “A progressive Jewish congregation with a special outreach to lesbians and gay men. At Sha’ar Zahav, we as lesbian and gay Jews, with lovers, friends and families, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have a supportive environment in which to express our spiritual, cultural and ethical values. Sha’ar Zahav enables us to integrate our Jewish heritages (sic) with our gay and lesbian lifestyles.…”
In some ways, this integration is straightforward. Sha’ar Zahav is active in the usual pursuits of the Jewish community—aid for Ethiopian Jewry, demonstrations on behalf of Soviet refuseniks, Chanukah book fairs, and outreach programs for the city’s Jewish elderly. The congregation has a relatively high percentage of leftists, many of whom are critical of Israel, but most of its members are, according to Kahn, mainstream Zionists of the AIPAC variety.
But along with Sha’ar Zahav’s traditional Jewish concerns and activities, the congregation is in the process of developing a unique Jewish homosexual religious culture. The temple bulletin, known as the Gaily Forward (a play on the Yiddish Daily Forward), advertises, “Out of Our Kitchen Closets: The San Francisco Gay Jewish Cookbook”—a new subcategory of Jewish cuisine. The bulletin lists anniversaries (Peter and Jeff, Marilyn and Marta) in straightfaced imitation of the middle-class style of the average suburban temple newsletter. And it announces special events not ordinarily associated with synagogues, such as Irene and Rosalinda’s lesbian hot tub Havdalah service.
As the spiritual leader of a largely experimental congregation, Yoel Kahn is customarily called upon to deal with issues not normally within the rabbinic sphere. His first appointment that day was with a lesbian couple who had recently had a baby boy through artificial insemination. The biological mother was Edith, a powerfully built blond in a lumberjack shirt. A Christian, she appeared at first to be a bit intimidated by Rabbi Kahn and his synagogue, but as the meeting progressed she grew more relaxed, informally flopping a breast out of her shirt to feed her baby.
Edith’s lover, Sally, was a Jew from New York, the daughter of old-time socialists. She had kinky black hair and wore jeans and a soiled red T-shirt. It was Sally who had initiated the meeting. She wanted their uncircumcised son to have a baby-naming ceremony in the temple. The baby was to be named Moshe, in memory of her father.
Kahn was agreeable in principle and he ran through their options. He seemed oblivious to the more unusual aspects of the situation and dealt with the two lesbians in a matter-of-fact style well beyond tolerance. But when Sally said that she wanted him to mention from the pulpit that Moshe’s parents came from two traditions, Kahn suddenly balked with the stubbornness of a Chasidic rebbe examining a badly slaughtered chicken.
“Either the child is a Jew or he is not,” he told the women. “If you want the ceremony in temple there can’t be any question of a dual identity.” Edith shrugged indifferently, but Sally was protective of her lover, and she and Kahn negotiated. Finally it was decided that Edith would be mentioned as the other parent, but that Kahn would make no reference to her religion.
“A couple like that puts me in a dilemma,” he told me after they left. “I want to help them, but obviously I can’t allow them to say in shul that the baby belongs to two traditions.”
I didn’t understand why this was obvious. Since Kahn makes up his rules as he goes along; every decision is a judgment call. Unlike many other Reform rabbis, he will not perform intermarriages; but he routinely officiates at “ceremonies of affirmation”—homosexual weddings—for gay men and lesbians. Similarly, Kahn was dismayed that baby Moshe had not had a ritual circumcision, but he didn’t insist on one as a condition for the naming ceremony. “An uncircumcised Jewish baby has an unfulfilled mitzvah. But that’s the parents’ fault, not his, and there’s no reason I should refuse to do the ceremony,” he explained.
Child rearing and education are traditional Jewish preoccupations, and Kahn proudly pointed out that his congregation has an increasing number of children. Some belong to homosexual men; others are the offspring of lesbian mothers, many of whom were artificially inseminated. Kahn told me that within a year or two there would be enough kids for a religious school, although it wouldn’t necessarily be gay. “The heterosexual-homosexual ratio among the children of gays is the same as in the general population,” he explained. “One reason that lesbian couples join Sha’ar Zahav is to expose their boys to male figures active in the temple.”
In Sha’ar Zahav’s early years there was considerable friction between the men and the women, but lately they had reached a modus vivendi. “The problem,” said Kahn, “was mostly the fault of the men. We basically weren’t sensitive enough to feminist thinking.” Under its constitution, Sha’ar Zahav alternates male and female presidents; and in general there is an effort to seek accommodation rather than confrontation. “After all, we’re all Jews. And we don’t have tough women in leather on one side, and decorator faggots on the other,” Kahn said reasonably.
The female-male issue has also surfaced in liturgical discussions. “We don’t say ‘Lord’ or ‘he’ when we refer to God,” the rabbi explained, “and we use ‘human’ instead of the generic ‘man.’ But it’s interesting; most people don’t want to make the same changes in Hebrew. We do say, ‘avinu malcainu, elohenu malcatenu’—our Father our king, our God our queen—but we haven’t made many other changes. Personally, I’m torn. I’m rooted in the traditional liturgy, but intellectually I’m committed to a change of language.”
Prayer is taken seriously at Sha’ar Zahav—both because of the AIDS panic and because many of Kahn’s congregants see prayer as a means to self-discovery and realization. The members of Sha’ar Zahav insist on participating in every aspect of worship, a demand Kahn enthusiastically endorses. He has veto power and occasionally he uses it—he recently banned the use of a Bob Dylan song from the singer’s born-again Christian period—but usually he goes along with experimental forms of worship.
That morning Kahn had a telephone appointment with a lesbian lawyer who was scheduled to lead services a few weeks hence. In the course of the conversation it emerged that the lawyer intended to turn the service into a public examination of her own spirituality. Kahn listened, feet on the desk and the earpiece cradled against his shoulder, as she outlined her main points. “I feel I don’t have enough spiritual content in my life, and I want to learn to find God in daily life, not just at temple. And I want to be better able to communicate with God, to use him as a resource in my life.…”
Kahn interrupted her in the patient voice of someone who had been through this before. “That’s very interesting,” Kahn interrupted in a diplomatic tone, “but perhaps it’s slightly self-reflective. Maybe when you tell the congregation how you feel you should pause, take a breath, let them reflect along with you.” They talked in this vein for a few more minutes, the rabbi swimming patiently upstream against the flow of the lawyer’s self-absorption. Kahn asked her to work on her ideas a little more and to call him later in the week.
“You have to understand that the people here are sometimes intoxicated by the chance to express themselves freely in a Jewish context,” Kahn said, defending the lawyer. “Mainstream congregations have no place for homosexuals, certainly not for avowed homosexuals. And a lot of the people here grew up afraid to come out of the closet.
“One man told me that when he was a teenager he went to his rabbi and admitted he was a homosexual. The rabbi told him to join the temple youth group and meet some nice girls. Well, naturally that didn’t help, and a couple months later he went back to the rabbi and tried to talk to him again. And the rabbi told him again to meet some nice girls. Obviously the rabbi didn’t want to hear what he was being told; here, we listen.”
There was a knock on the door and we were joined by Jerry Rosenstein, the temple treasurer. A thin, fastidious man in designer jeans and a well-tended winter tan, he was spending the day trying to get a handle on the temple’s shaky finances.
“Forty percent of our members are at or near the poverty line,” he said. “We have a lot of single-parent families. And a lot of our people do mostly volunteer work or have low-paying jobs in social services. Economically we’re like an old urban synagogue—we don’t attract the upwardly mobile boutique owners.” He sighed in mock sorrow but I had the feeling that he wasn’t sorry. Ironically, Sha’ar Zahav is a family-style temple; high-rollers from Boutique Row would upset the community’s equilibrium.
As we talked, I noticed that Rosenstein had a slight German accent. “Jerry is a concentration camp survivor,” Kahn told me when I mentioned it. “He was in Auschwitz.” Kahn is aware that many people consider him a freak rabbi at the head of a freak congregation. The presence of a Holocaust survivor somehow validates the temple, makes it unquestionably Jewish.
The Holocaust has a special significance in the collective consciousness of Sha’ar Zahav. “Under Hitler, hundreds of thousands of homosexuals were rounded up by the Nazis,” said Rosenstein. “Gay Jews were forced to wear a Jewish star that was half yellow and half pink. Some of our people wear that symbol today in public, at demonstrations or community events.” The congregation also says a special prayer, before the mourners’ Kaddish, commemorating the “homosexual and lesbian martyrs of history.”
Rosenstein and Kahn are close friends and collaborators but they disagree on one important issue. The treasurer is a devout environmentalist who believes that cremation is the only ecologically responsible way to go. Kahn is opposed. “It’s not just that cremation is frowned on in Jewish tradition,” he told Rosenstein. “I also admit that I’m squeamish about seeing it performed on a survivor of Auschwitz.”
“Yes, I know it’s a problem,” agreed Rosenstein, with clinical detachment. “But I have to be true to my convictions.”
It was a chilling discussion, made more so by the friendly courtesy with which the two men allowed me to listen. I was reminded of Gaston Hirsch, the last Jew in Donaldsonville; there was a blatant practicality to both men’s attitudes toward the future. It was a relief when the conversation ended and the treasurer went back to his ledgers.
Sitting in the rabbi’s office I realized how much my attitude had changed in only a few hours. I had come to Sha’ar Zahav expecting a grotesque parody; instead I encountered Jews in distress—men and women coping with problems of identity and morality—turning, as Jews always have, to their religion and their fellow Jews for help and comfort.
Norristown, Pennsylvania, is about as far as you can get from the Upper Market district of San Francisco. Norristown is Bruce Springsteen country, a bleak industrial city about forty minutes from Philadelphia. When I arrived, at eight o’clock on a freezing January morning, downtown Norristown was practically deserted and the only place to get breakfast was the Woolworth’s on the main drag. The store smelled like an old-fashioned five-and-dime, the essence of Double Bubble overwhelming the aroma of weak coffee that rose from the counter along the wall.
I took a seat next to a red-faced man with a wool cap pulled over his ears and a set of industrial keys dangling from a belt loop. He regarded me with curiosity, but left the small town interrogation to the grandmotherly waitress. “New around here?” she asked, refilling my cup.
I shook my head. “Just here for the day,” I said, and on an impulse added, “I’m going out to Graterford.” She smiled sympathetically. Graterford is the site of a state penitentiary for bad men—violent, dangerous criminals doing long, hard time.
“You got somebody out there, hon?” she asked, and I sensed that the man in the cap was listening, too. I shook my head, dropped a dollar on the counter, and went outside to wait for David Maharam, chief rabbi of the JCAG Synagogue—the Jewish community at Graterford.
Maharam came by a few minutes later in a battered compact car. He is a Conservative rabbi in his mid-thirties with a genial manner, receding red hair, and a red beard. His main pulpit is a Conservative congregation in Norristown, but twice a week he drives out to the prison to conduct services for the prison’s thirty or so Jewish inmates.
There is no accurate census of Jewish prisoners in the United States, but experts put their number at about two thousand. Most of them are white collar types, but a few—like the men of Graterford—are hard-core criminals. “They’re nice guys,” Maharam told me on the way out to the prison, “but I wouldn’t necessarily want to meet one of them in a dark alley.”
As we drove, I told Rabbi Maharam about a meeting I had in Detroit a few weeks earlier with Maxie Silk, one of the last of the old-time Jewish gangsters. Nearing eighty, Maxie runs the Left Field Deli, a diner located near Tiger Stadium. Dressed in his counterman’s outfit, he seems a sweet-faced old guy with a white mustache, a prominent nose, and a George C. Scott overbite. But he has the powerful body of a much younger man, and hawklike brown eyes that sparkle when he recalls the good old days.
Although Maxie has gone straight, in his time he served three prison terms, one of them a ten-year stretch for armed hijacking. He talks about his previous career without evident remorse, in a language straight out of Damon Runyon. Italians are “luckshen” (the Yiddish word for noodles), women are “flanken” (beef), and good-looking women are “shtarke flanken”—strong beef. Any place with four walls and a roof is a joint.
“After I got out of the can on the hijack beef I opened up a joint called The Shamrock,” he recalled with a laugh. “Talk about a tough spot, we had a guy working full time just repairing the chairs.” From The Shamrock Maxie went on to other joints—The Lothrup (“A good buck but I got tired of beating up hillbillies every Saturday night”) and his favorite, a “combination kosher deli and rib joint” next to the old Flame Show Bar whose customers included Joe Louis and Dinah Washington, Hank Greenberg and Delia Reese. “Now there was a joint with some real action,” he said with a faraway look.
Maxie first came to Detroit from Cleveland during prohibition. “I was eighteen when I left,” he said, “and the wise guys back home were giving three-to-one I wouldn’t make nineteen.” It was the heyday of the Jewish gangster—people like Dutch Schultz, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Abner “Longy” Zwillman, and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter. Maxie, who had met some of the ex-yeshiva boys of Murder Incorporated during a short-lived stint as a rabbinical student in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, came to the Motor City looking to break into the big time.
In Detroit, the Jewish mob was the Purple Gang, which controlled a good part of the liquor business, numbers, extortion and in Maxie’s fond phrase, “twenty square blocks of the best red-light district in the Middle West.” They did business with other Jewish gangs around the country and with old man Bronfman, the Canadian liquor supplier whose fortune later enabled his grandson Edgar to finance Israel Singer’s theft of the World Jewish Congress.
Maxie is modest about his own affiliations; when I asked him if he had been a member of the Purple Gang, he just grinned and waved one hand in dismissal. “The Purple Gang? That name was a kind of joke. See, there was this fella by the name of Sammy Purple. Couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag, but one time he pulled a rod on a cop and got himself a little reputation. He was harmless, but after that every Jewish kid was automatically a member of the Purple Gang … y’know, Sammy’s brother is still alive,” Maxie said thoughtfully. “He’s a Shriner if I’m not mistaken.”
In the old days, Maxie and his friends were active in Democratic politics on behalf of Governor Frank Murphy (“He really knew how to keep a state running smooth”) and they avidly supported the local sports teams. One of the Purples, a Russian Jew nicknamed Patsy O’Toole, was famous as the most obnoxious rooter in the American League.
“The Tigers used to take him on road trips, that’s how shtark he was,” said Maxie. “One time in Washington Roosevelt comes to the park and this really inspires him, see, I mean Patsy, not Roosevelt. Patsy hollered so loud they kicked him out of the game.” Maxie shook his head, grinning.
But there was another, more violent side to the Jewish mob scene. One of the worst incidents came in a clash between the Purples and the Little Jewish Navy, a group of Chicago hoods who ran a flotilla of rum-running ships on the Great Lakes. Their rivalry ended in the Collingwood Massacre, the Motor City equivalent of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
“See, the original Little Jewish Navy was a Detroit outfit, used to hang around Third and Seldon,” Maxie explained. “The main guys in that were Sleepy Louie Goldman and Shmulkie Solomon. And then these other bums from Chicago muscled in, Hymie Paul, Nigger Joe Levkowitz and the leader of that Chicago bunch …” I was taking notes, and Maxie paused to make sure I was getting things right. “Take down the name of the leader, Izzie ‘The Rat’ Sutker. Izzie the Rat. You know what kind of a bum you gotta be, get a nickname like that?
“Anyways, these guys were shaking down whorehouses, and Raymond Bernstein, who was the leader of the Purples or whatever, got this guy Milton Levine to set up a meet over at the Collingwood Apartment House. And Bernstein, Irving Millburn, and this one other guy—I won’t mention his name ’cause he’s still alive—they took out them Chicago bums. They went to the joint for thirty years on a murder rap.”
Not long afterward, Maxie himself went to prison. “We caught this thief who was stealing our booze, see. So we smacked him around a little and he goes and tells a cop he was held up. They had some rough judges in those days, and I was out on a bond at the time, see I had been picked up before on a b & e, and I had a previous in Cleveland …”
Maxie wound up doing ten years. “I went in 1930 and came out 1940—I missed the whole depression. When I got out I was empty, but the boys took care of me. And it wasn’t so bad in the joint, I was able to move around pretty good, know what I mean?”
I asked Maxie if there had been a synagogue in prison, and he shook his head. “We weren’t that organized. But we had respect for religion. Before I went in the can, I remember the rabbis used to come around to see us at the Sugar House over on Oakland Avenue. They never came away empty either. We did the right thing.”
Maxie suddenly slapped the counter. “You know I almost forgot, but for a few years there we did have our own shul on the holidays. Not in the can, right here in Detroit. Not many people know this, but we used to rent the ballroom of a hotel and bring in our own rabbi. There was Sleep Out Louie Lefkowitz—we called him that because he didn’t like to go home much—Uncle Abe Ackerman the bail bondsman, and a couple of knock-around guys, Shorty the Bum and Marshall Abrams, we called him Bad Abe. They were the heads of the shul. We got a lot of people on the holidays, especially bookies, we must have had fifty of them.” Maxie smiled his sweet smile once again, remembering. “I’ll tell you one thing about that shul. Nobody stiffed us on their dues …”
By the time I finished telling Rabbi Maharam about Maxie Silk, we were almost at the prison. He cautioned me against expecting anything as exotic as the wiseguys’ shul. There are no mobsters with colorful nicknames or fabulous wealth at Graterford; just a collection of losers who have committed crimes for reasons they themselves sometimes fail to understand. “If you’re looking for something romantic, you’re going to be disappointed,” Maharam told me.
The prison itself was certainly prosaic—bleak, blunt concrete walls surrounded by barbed wire and adorned with guard towers. Inside, dispirited visitors sat on scarred benches in a drafty hall, waiting as the guards processed them one at a time. Rabbi Maharam, a regular, was admitted immediately. He waved me through as well, but on the other side of the large steel door I was stopped and asked to empty my pockets for inspection. When the guards were satisfied, I was given an infrared plastic I.D. bracelet. A second set of steel doors swung open, and Maharam and I entered the prison.
The synagogue at Graterford is at the end of the main corridor; to get there we walked, unescorted, the length of the prison through a gauntlet of inmates who regarded us with unfriendly curiosity. On both sides of the yellow brick hallway were long, metallic-looking cell blocks. From time to time raucous laughter wafted our way, but most of the noise came from machinery in the prison’s shops and from the murmured conversations of men who loitered in the hall. Almost ninety percent of the inmates at Graterford are black, and I had the sense of walking down the hall of a very tough ghetto high school.
The temple is located directly over a Muslim mosque whose entrance is dominated by a mural of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock. The temple’s decor is less flamboyant. It consists of two carpeted, connected rooms: a chapel with the standard ark, eternal light, and folding chairs; and an adjacent meeting room dominated by a long table. Shelves along one wall hold Jewish books and a large television/VCR console. Behind a partition there is a small area with an electric coffee urn and plastic cups, knives, forks, and spoons—the temple kitchen. In another setting it would have been an unremarkable room; here, amid the thick, sweating walls and iron bars, it seemed like an oasis of civility and safety.
Although the Jews at Graterford are in jail for the same violent offenses as the men in the corridor, I felt a real sense of relief as we entered the synagogue. Jews have been conditioned for hundreds of years to fear physical violence from gentiles, but not from each other. This has changed to some extent in Israel, but in America it persists—Jews simply do not consider other Jews to be dangerous.
Certainly there was nothing aggressive or physically threatening about the inmates as they greeted Rabbi Maharam. They could have been a temple softball team or a B’nai B’rith lodge. Most were in their twenties and thirties, although one weatherbeaten man looked close to seventy. They wore civilian shirts or sweaters, gray institutional trousers with GRATERFORD STATE PENITENTIARY stamped across the upper leg, and jogging shoes. In the general prison population they go hatless, but here in the synagogue they wore yarmulkes or baseball caps.
Rabbi Maharam introduced me as a writer from Israel, and the men immediately became solicitous, even obsequious. One darted off to bring me coffee, another offered me a chair, a third leaped up to light my cigarette. Several convicts around my age called me “sir.” They had all heard stories about inmates sprung by sympathetic writers; and while they had no reason to suppose that I might be influential, or even friendly, they had nothing to lose. Besides, new people are always a break from the monotony of prison life.
After coffee we adjourned to the chapel for morning prayers. “Only about half of the congregation are full Jews,” Maharam had told me on the ride out to the prison. “The others have one Jewish parent, or maybe a Jewish spouse, some form of Jewish identity. It doesn’t matter, though, as long as they feel Jewish. In jail that’s what really counts.”
Whatever their credentials, the members of JCAG are among the most observant Jews in the country. Their lives revolve around the synagogue in ways that would seem excessive to most people on the outside. For one thing, they have time—for daily prayers, Hebrew lessons, Bible classes, Jewish books, or just sitting around the synagogue shmoozing with their fellow Jews. They have time to celebrate holidays—the fast of Tisha B’av and Lag B’Omer—that are normally observed in America only by Orthodox Jews.
The men of JCAG have motive as well as opportunity. Outside the synagogue is a prison full of angry convicts and casually brutal guards. There have been occasional clashes with Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam toughs, and almost all the Jewish inmates have been involved in random violence. The synagogue is the only place they can create what their temple bulletin, Davar, calls “a sanctuary of civilization in an otherwise barbaric environment.” It offers the same illusion of control and protection that Eastern European Jews found in their village shuls in the days of pogroms.
David Maharam is a Conservative rabbi, but the congregation is officially Reform, a member of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. The affiliation is a matter of great pride to its members. “Being in the UAHC means we’re legit,” one of them told me happily. Several of the prisoners grumbled that they should have joined the Conservative movement instead, but they were shouted down. Convicts, like theologians, have the leisure for arcane ecclesiastical dispute.
The morning service began with Rabbi Maharam reading from “Gates of Prayer.” He implored God “to open blind eyes, to bring out of prison the captive and from their dungeons those who sit in darkness.” The prayer ended in a chorus of heartfelt amens. As the service progressed, the congregation participated in loud, practiced voices. When the time came to remove the Torah from the ark they kissed the fringes of their prayer shawls and touched it reverently.
The Torah portion that morning was Exodus 10:23, the story of the ten plagues. Rabbi Maharam read the text and explained each of the plagues and its significance.
“Now, darkness is an unusual plague,” he told his congregation. “Unlike the others, it isn’t physically threatening or especially dangerous. But that can be deceptive. Have any of you been in the hole recently?” A titter went up from the group, and a dark, powerful-looking man raised his hand sheepishly. “Alex, what’s it like in the hole?” Maharam asked. “Uh, it’s dark as hell down there, Rabbi,” he said. There was another chorus of laughs, but Rabbi Maharam was pleased. “Exactly. Sometimes darkness can be a very effective punishment.”
The example elicited a stream of questions from the floor. Tom, who once spent two years in Israel and now serves as the Hebrew teacher, cited the Hertz Prayerbook’s speculation that the darkness might have been caused by an eclipse of the sun. “You have to realize that Rabbi Hertz was a polemicist who looked for rational arguments to support the Torah,” Maharam explained. “He thought that scientific explanations would convince skeptics.”
Tom nodded thoughtfully, but he was unwilling to abandon Hertz. “His explanation sounds at least interesting,” he said with the dispassion of a biblical scholar.
“Yeah, well the darkness lasted three days, didn’t it?” someone else called out. “Who ever heard of a three-day eclipse of the sun?” Tom was ready for this, too; he argued that since the sun was Egypt’s chief god, the Egyptians may easily have exaggerated the length of its disappearance. This gave rise to a series of loud protests as the congregation chose sides.
After a minute or two, Maharam rapped the rostrum for order and returned to the service. He raced through the Hebrew prayers, led the congregation in singing “Ain K’Eloheinu,” and then slipped off his tallis and joined his flock for coffee in the meeting room.
The main topic of conversation that morning was Jewish solidarity. The prison has no Jewish neighborhood—there are Jews in every one of the five cell blocks, including the one reserved for the hardest cases. “This is the worst prison in the state of Pennsylvania,” one man said, with a connoisseur’s certainty. “The prisoners run this jail. That’s why it’s so important for us to stick together.”
An example of Jewish unity had recently appeared in an article written for the temple bulletin by Nolan Gelman. Entitled “A New Man,” it described the author’s arrival at Graterford:
“I was processed in and sent to E Block, the quarantine block for newcomers. It is not unlike bedlam; cacophonous, grossly overcrowded, hostile and bewildering.…
“A number of individuals came by and asked if I would like to attend the Jewish congregation. I was surprised … [and] I accepted the invitation out of curiosity.… I was introduced to all the members and warmly welcomed. I was offered a care package containing every conceivable item an inmate might need, all donated by the members themselves.…
“My stay here has turned into a time of spiritual awakening and learning. This oasis created amidst the barren concrete of Graterford is testimony and monument to the spirit and resourcefulness of the Jewish inmates here.”
Gelman’s sentiments were echoed that morning by his fellow inmates. Tom, the argumentative Hebrew teacher, spoke for the group. “When you see the animals here, it’s nice to see good people at temple.” A tall, impressive man of forty with Clark Kent good looks, he projected a crisp moral authority that made me wonder if his incarceration might be a mistake. Later I learned that he was serving a sentence for sex crimes against minors.
“Per capita we’re the best-behaved prisoners at Graterford. We almost never get a misconduct. And we’re the most learned,” said Jules, a young man with sleepy brown eyes and a sensuous face. He was raised in suburban New Jersey, belonged to a Reform temple, and was an honor student in high school. He could have been a third-year law student getting ready to join a big New York firm; instead, he was doing life.
“What are you in for?” I asked him. Prison etiquette discourages such direct questions. On the way to Graterford Rabbi Maharam had cautioned me about being too inquisitive—“In jail everybody’s always innocent anyway,” he had said—but my curiosity overcame good manners.
Jules flushed at the question and hesitated. He couldn’t lie—the others knew what he had done—but he couldn’t quite bring himself to tell the truth, either. “I, ah, was at a party with this girl and it, ah, got a little out of hand,” he mumbled.
At the end of the table a squat man with a biker’s tattoo on his forearm and a ponytail burst into mocking laughter. Jules shot him a threatening look. “What’re you laughing at, asshole?” he demanded, and the ponytail held up a conciliatory hand.
Many, perhaps most, of the members of Temple JCAG are in for drug-related offenses. Some committed crimes under the influence, others were caught dealing. The addicts all claimed to have been cured, and they talked about their rehabilitation with the cool impersonality of social workers discussing other people’s problems.
“Hey, a Jewish doctor from Philly came in here the other day,” said Alex, the man who had been in the hole. “He heard I’m about to get out, and he offered me a place in his house for a few months. And this doctor, he doesn’t know me from a can of paint. He said, ‘You’re a Jew, and that’s enough for me.’ ” Alex, who was born in Brazil to Russian parents, was the only immigrant in the group. He was raised from early boyhood in Philadelphia and was happy to be going home.
“Hey, I’m gonna keep my nose clean, stay away from drugs, just be a mensch,” he said, and shammes Jay Schama, the head of the congregation, smiled approvingly. “Al is our rehabilitated guy here,” he said, affection mixing with regret. The position of shammes—the lay leader of the temple—is an elective one. Schama, like any politician, was sorry to be losing a supporter.
The shammes stands at the top of Temple JCAG’s hierarchy, which also includes a treasurer, secretary, and men’s club president. The job carries considerable influence and prestige, and abuses of power are not unknown. Several years ago, for example, one of Schama’s predecessors, entrusted with ordering special food for Passover, was caught trying to import several dozen tins of forbidden oysters and shrimp for the Seder.
In most synagogues the first duty of a shammes is finding ten men for a minyan. But this is not a major problem at Temple JCAG; unlike Sammy Davidson of Meridian, Mississippi, for example, Schama has a captive congregation. He is occupied primarily with foreign affairs—maintaining contacts with the Jewish community on the outside, and with the prison authorities. He is also in charge of the annual congregational dinner, a gala event that is the high point of the JCAG social calendar. A couple years ago former governor Milton Shapp gave the main address—a coup by the founding shammes, Victor Hassine.
Hassine was a charismatic lifer, an attorney by profession and Jewish activist by temperament. He was unpopular with the prison officials—particularly after he initiated a lawsuit over living conditions—and he stirred passions among his fellow Jews as well. After winning a hotly contested election for shammes, he received several anonymous death threats that he attributed to a rival faction. Then one day someone caught him off guard and threw a bucket of bleach on him. Hassine was transferred to another prison for his own protection, and a new shammes was installed. Congregational politics at Temple JCAG are definitely hardball.
Schama, the incumbent, is a far less controversial figure. A short, stocky man in his late twenties, he was raised in Philadelphia, dropped out of school after the seventh grade, and worked around town in a series of dead-end jobs. He also developed a drug habit that he tried unsuccessfully to support by armed robbery. Caught during a stickup, he was sentenced to five years; he still had two and a half left to do. Schama was already preparing for his release—he recently completed his high school equivalency exam—but he was determined not to leave a leadership vacuum. “Right now I’m grooming Jules,” he said. “He’s a perfect choice, you know, ’cause he’s in for life.”
If Jules does take over, the congregation is due for a hawkish administration. On the day I visited Graterford, Shiites in Beirut had just taken several American hostages and were demanding that Israel release imprisoned terrorists as the price for their return. “Do you think Israel will agree?” Tom asked me. I said I didn’t think so.
Jules snorted. “That’s what the Israelis said last time, and then the next thing you see is about a thousand Arabs in jogging suits getting on buses. That’s bullshit. What they should do is clear all the Americans out of Beirut, bring in the Sixth Fleet, and just flatten the place.”
Stan, a wrinkled old man in a gray work shirt who hadn’t said a word all day, suddenly interrupted. “Do that and you start World War III,” he said, and a debate on Middle Eastern policy was under way. The men at Graterford take a keen interest in Israel; they even have a UJA drive that raises money to support an orphan in Netanya. Only Tom had been there, but several others said they would like to visit. Alex, the rehabilitated guy, wondered if the law of return applied to ex-cons. Another man asked if I could get them a copy of the Israeli film Beyond the Walls, which depicts life in an Israeli prison. “Be nice to see what it’s like being a majority,” he said wistfully.
In Israel, the early pioneers once boasted about Jewish criminals, seeing them as a sign of national normality. Today the country has its share of crooks, and there are several thousand Jews behind bars. They exist because Israel is a real country with the usual human continuum from good citizenship to criminality. But in America, Jews have no such continuum. They are expected to go to college, acquire a profession, raise a family, and become model citizens.
The men at Graterford are freaks and they know it. Sitting around their little shul, they speak in the vocabulary of the Jewish world: Israel, the Holocaust, affiliation with the UAHC, the need to be a mensch. They know the tones and cadences of American Jewish temple talk, and they used it with me, an outsider; but it is their second tongue. For all their Chanukah parties and Hebrew lessons, they are far closer to the harsh realities of their fellow prisoners than to the mellow, domesticated Jewish middle class.
“Don’t be fooled by these guys,” a prison official told me later. “They’re no different than anybody else in jail.” I recalled their sober vows of rehabilitation, their hatred of the coarseness and brutality of the penitentiary; somehow they didn’t seem to be real criminals. But the official was adamant. “You think because they’re Jews that makes them different? Forget it. Most of these guys, when they get released, they’ll be back. A lot of them belong in here.”
I didn’t doubt that he was right, but I resented him for saying so. My visit to the congregation at Graterford was a lesson in the emotional pull of Jewish solidarity. The final, irreducible point was that this minyan of murderers, sex fiends, and strong-arm men were members of my tribe. I didn’t know them, in Alex’s phrase, from a can of paint; but in some way they seemed as familiar as cousins.
It was getting toward noon when a guard came into the synagogue and reminded the congregants that they had to get to work. Rabbi Maharam and I said good-bye and began the long, long walk up the cinder block corridor to the gate. This time, though, we had an escort—half a dozen of the guys from the shul. Jay the shammes led the way, along with sleepy-eyed Jules, the ponytailed biker, Tom the Hebrew teacher, and a wiry man in a Mets cap named Jerry who was the congregational treasurer. As we walked we continued to talk, and I was so absorbed in the conversation that I was surprised when the group stopped. “This is as far as we can go,” Jay said with an apologetic smile, pointing to the heavy steel door at the exit.
Embarrassed, I began to shake hands with each of the men, wishing them luck. When I got to Jerry he quietly said, “I think you’ve forgotten something,” and then reached up and plucked a black silk yarmulke off my head.
“It belongs to the synagogue,” he said.
“Sorry, I wasn’t trying to rip you off,” I joked, and he gave me a skeptical grin. In prison, everyone’s always innocent.
There is a Horatio Alger quality to the Jews of America. In three generations they have gone from rags to riches and in the process have made great contributions to the culture, science, and economy of their new country. The rewards for their success have been prosperity, security, and an unprecedented social acceptance. Many Americans see Jews as a new, improved variety of WASP—Episcopalians with a touch of spice.
In New York, the capital of Jewish America, the situation is a little different. There, too, the great majority of Jews have reached the middle class and beyond. But unlike other American cities, New York also has a significant Jewish poverty class. A recent poll conducted by the UJA revealed eighty thousand Jewish families in the city with an annual income of less than $10,000, and another one hundred and ten thousand households with an income of less than $20,000 a year. Experts believe that there are three hundred thousand Jews in the New York area who qualify as poor—roughly fifteen percent of the total Jewish population.
Many of the poor Jews are Chasidim with huge families and little secular education. Others are old men and women on fixed incomes, or people out of work—perhaps as many as one hundred thousand in the metropolitan area, according to Jewish poverty workers.
At the bottom of the barrel are an estimated fifteen hundred homeless Jews, street people who sleep in the open and carry their belongings with them in shopping bags or on their backs. Warren Feierstein, who runs the Metropolitan New York Coordinating Council on Poverty for the Jewish Federation, has spent his professional life dealing with these people. A soft-spoken man in his mid-thirties, Feierstein is a realist who grew up on New York’s Lower East Side. To him, Jewish poverty is both natural and inevitable.
“You have Jewish hookers and Jewish beggars in Israel, why shouldn’t we have them here?” he asked reasonably when we met at the Stratford Arms Hotel. “Jews are just people like everybody else. There are strong ones and weak ones. Our job is to help the ones who can’t help themselves.”
Despite the logic of this approach, poor Jews are something of an embarrassment to the establishment. For years it was difficult to convince the federation to face the issue of Jewish poverty with any seriousness. This changed when Mayor Ed Koch, himself a Jew, publicly berated the community for its indifference. “The third floor of the Stratford Arms is our answer to Koch,” Feierstein said.
Nestled between the brownstones on West 70th between Columbus and Broadway, the Stratford Arms looks like a typical Upper West Side residential hotel. But when we went inside that morning it was immediately obvious that the hotel specializes in people with nowhere else to go. The lobby was bare of furniture, and patrons sat on the uncarpeted floor, drinking steaming coffee from white styrofoam cups. Others leaned aimlessly against peeling walls and stared into space. From time to time an unshaven man erupted into barks of unprompted laughter. At the desk, a red-nosed clerk regarded the scene with utter disinterest. Even the candy bars in the lobby’s vending machine were crumpled and stale, chocolate-covered reminders of the pervasiveness of poverty.
The Stratford Arms’s clientele is made up of people of all races and religions, but the third floor is its Jewish neighborhood. The floor has been taken over by the Metropolitan Council on Poverty, and it serves as a shelter for a shifting collection of misfits and losers. “We had a family of six—a couple with four kids—who drove all the way up here from Florida,” Warren told me, as we ascended in the rickety elevator. “He was a factory worker out of a job, and they didn’t know what else to do. Poor people have always migrated to New York from the South, why shouldn’t Jews?”
The corridor of the third floor reeked of industrial cleanser, stale whisky, and stale cigarettes. A woman in a tattered bathrobe passed us in the hall without looking up, but otherwise the floor was deserted. “It’s too early for a lot of them; they’re still sleeping,” Warren told me. I looked at my watch and saw it was ten-thirty.
Warren Feierstein is a former yeshiva boy who wears a skullcap and considers himself Orthodox, but he is undogmatic about identifying poor Jews. “We can usually tell by the name or by the accent—a lot of our clients are from Eastern Europe,” he said. “But basically, if someone claims to be Jewish, we take their word for it. It doesn’t really make much sense to go into people’s backgrounds. By the time they get here, they need help no matter who they are.”
Occasionally Feierstein does find out about a client’s background, but the information isn’t always helpful. “We had a woman here not long ago, the daughter of a prominent Chasidic rabbi in Brooklyn,” Warren told me. “She was a really pretty girl in her late teens. Her parents were extremely strict and she wanted to wear makeup, tight jeans, that sort of thing. So she ran away from home or her parents threw her out, I’m not sure which. Anyway, she wound up on the streets, and she came to us for help. We got her a job as a margin clerk at the stock market and gave her a room here. Then, about six weeks later, she disappeared. I didn’t hear from her until I got a call from the police; she had been picked up on Times Square for hooking.”
“What did you do?” I asked. Warren shrugged. “There isn’t much you can do. I wish there was. We do what we can. It isn’t very much fun to be poor, but at least Jews have a place to turn. That’s something. And believe me, there are an awful lot of poor Jews in New York, young and old, religious and not religious, immigrants and native-born, black and white.…”
“Blacks? You mean like Chasidim?” In Israel, ultra-Orthodox Jews are sometimes called “blacks” because of their dark hats and coats.
“Them too. But I’m talking about black blacks. You’d be surprised how many black Jews there are in this city. They even have some congregations. I’m not sure where but I could try to find out if you’re interested,” he said.
I was, but Feierstein, despite his extensive network of contacts, proved unable to find a black synagogue. My curiosity was aroused, and I tried several other Jewish organizations, but none of them knew what I was talking about. Clearly, if there was a black congregation in New York it was very far out of the Jewish mainstream.
Unwilling to let go, I called The New York Amsterdam News in Harlem and spoke to the religion editor. In a Caribbean accent he told me he had heard of black Jewish congregations but didn’t know of any personally. “We have a Jewish woman on our switchboard,” he said. “Why don’t I ring you through and you can ask her.” I introduced myself to the operator and asked if she knew the whereabouts of a black synagogue. She was noncommittal but she took my number and said she’d see what she could do.
That evening I got a call from a man named Zakiahu Levy, who invited me to attend Sabbath morning services at Beth Elohim, his shul on Linden Boulevard in St. Albans, Queens. “When you get there just tell the shammes you talked to me and it’ll be cool,” he said.
Feeling foolish, I asked him if a jacket and tie were the appropriate dress. “Yeah,” he said. “Jacket and tie are fine. We dress western, we’re a Talmudic congregation. Just be sure you bring your kippah [the Hebrew word for skullcap]. You got a kippah, dontcha?” I assured him that I did, and thanked him for his help. “Happy to do it,” he said. “Shabbat shalom.”
I went out to Queens expecting to find a sect. Israel has a group of “Black Hebrews” from America, led by a charismatic preacher named Ben Ami Carter, who claims that the original Hebrews of the Bible were black, and that modern blacks are, ipso facto, the real Jews. This philosophy has not won him many Israeli supporters; and the Black Hebrews, who entered the country illegally as tourists, live a separate communal life in a couple of Israel’s less attractive desert towns.
The Black Hebrews of Israel do not practice Judaism. Their religion consists of homemade rules and rituals—polygamy, vegetarianism, and strict abstinence from alcohol, drugs, and tobacco. The men dress in white, the women wear long robes and cover their heads with turbans. The members all have Hebrew names bestowed by Ben Ami Carter that are said to express each person’s personality and character traits. The sect has only one holiday—Appreciation Day (“You just invite anyone you appreciate,” a member of the group once told me). Ben Ami Carter, who considers himself the Messiah and tools around in a large Cadillac surrounded by admiring Hebrew sisters, is the most appreciated man in the group.
That’s more or less what I expected to find on Linden Boulevard. Instead I entered a storefront synagogue that reminded me of the small shuls that dot Jerusalem’s downtown. Beth Elohim (the House of God) is a one-room chapel arranged in the Orthodox way—men’s section in front, women’s in the rear. Wooden pews face a small platform. On the far wall is a simple ark, and above it an eternal light. A door on the side of the chapel opens to a flight of stairs leading to some basement classrooms. On the door is a sign that reads TALMUD TORAH.
Although it was past ten when I arrived, the chapel was almost empty. A dark-suited usher wished me “Shabbat shalom,” discreetly peeked at my head to make sure I was wearing a yarmulke, and then showed me to a seat in the front row. I told him I had been invited by Zakiahu Levy and he nodded his recognition. “You’re welcome here,” he said reassuringly, and he left me alone on the hard wooden bench.
I heard a rustling in back of me and turned to see three stout ladies sitting in the women’s section. All three wore pastel print dresses, held prayer books in white-gloved hands, and covered their heads with bonnetlike hats. Although the women’s section was otherwise empty, they sat shoulder to shoulder, as if they were joined together. I smiled at them. They smiled and called out, “Shabbat shalom.”
Gradually members of the congregation began straggling in. The men wore dark business suits, prayer shawls, and knitted yarmulkes or hats; the women covered their heads with hats or scarves and wore festive dresses. The only whites other than myself were a woman who accompanied her husband and teenage daughters and an old lady who looked like she had wandered in to get out of the cold.
While we waited for the service to begin, I leafed through the prayerbook that had been laying on my seat. Beth Elohim uses the Chasidic edition published by Mercaz L’Inyonei Chinuch, Inc., of Brooklyn. The book contained the standard Orthodox service in Hebrew, along with an English translation.
A few minutes before eleven, Rabbi Levi Ben Levi and Cantor Nathaniel Davis entered the room and took their places on the platform. Ben Levi is a dark-skinned, rotund man with a studious, somewhat stiff demeanor. He wore a black robe and white tallis, and he nodded to the congregation in solemn greeting. Ben Levi, I later learned, is the spiritual leader not only of Beth Elohim but of its sister congregation in Harlem.
The rabbi began by sternly admonishing his flock to come on time in the future (“We on CPT in this shul,” whispered a man sitting next to me. “You know—Colored People’s Time”); then the cantor, Nathaniel Davis, began to chant the service in a warm, thick baritone. Like Ben Levi he wore a black robe and white tallis, but instead of a regular yarmulke he had on a high black hat like the ones worn by Eastern European cantors.
Davis’s melodies were heavily tinged with gospel influence, and they went remarkably well with the ancient Hebrew prayers. He studied cantorial music with the renowned Josef Malovany of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York, and he is familiar with traditional liturgical music. “I can doven [pray] Ashkenazi style,” he told me after the service, “but our people prefer the down-home sound.” Down home for the Jews of Linden Boulevard is Mississippi, not Minsk.
Beth Elohim has about 250 members and, judging from the people at services that morning, almost all of them can read Hebrew. They joined in the responsive readings and mumbled along with the cantor like old pros in any shul in the world. But from time to time someone shouted “Hallelujah!” and once or twice a lady in back loudly sighed, “Amen, ain’t my Lord somethin’!”
It was a kind of soul Yiddishkeit that reminded me of the fervor of Chasidic synagogues. Later, Davis complained that it had been a quiet morning. Rabbi Ben Levi’s son, who plays the piano, was away at Yale, and several of the women who normally beat on tambourines weren’t at services. “You wanna hear something, you come by on Simchas Torah. Man, we really rock the shul,” the cantor said proudly.
The story of black Jews in America is shrouded in mystery, confusion, and self-interested inaccuracy. A few claim descent from Jewish slave masters. Some are converts or the children of converts. And others have simply decided, more or less on their own, that they are Jews.
Some black Jews belong to mainstream synagogues, but most are members of various black congregations, which are divided along doctrinal lines. “Eastern” black Jews, such as the Ben Ami Carter group in Israel, are sects that believe all blacks are Hebrews. They usually dress in African or Arab garb, use Hebrew in their prayers, mix Christian, Moslem, and Jewish theology and ritual, celebrate holidays with self-ordained customs, and feel no connection to white Jews.
Beth Elohim, on the other hand, calls itself a Talmudic synagogue, which means it practices traditional Judaism. It is not strictly Orthodox—its members ride to synagogue on the Sabbath, and at the service a collection plate is passed around—but ritually it is unmistakably Jewish. The only specific nod to race is the rabbi’s prayer, given before his sermon, for the peace of “Eretz Yisrael, Eretz Africa, and Eretz America—the lands of Israel, Africa, and America.”
And yet, emotionally the congregation is very much within the holiness tradition of the black church. Its members are poor people, working class and lucky to be. They come to synagogue for only one reason—they need spiritual fortification to get through very hard lives. Black religion is God-oriented, and black Judaism is no exception.
In his sermon that morning, Rabbi Ben Levi spoke about the need for purity and obedience to God’s law. “To be a good Jew, you got to do three things. You got to eat right—I’m talking about kosher food now. You got to think right—I’m talking about Torah thoughts, the word of God—can I get an amen? And you got to do right—I’m talking about the commandments of the ‘kodosh boruchu,’ God almighty.”
A murmured amen followed each one of Ben Levi’s three principles and he beamed avuncularly at the congregation. “Now, I know that there are people here this morning whose lives aren’t going just like they want them to. There are people here today who are in pain, people suffering physically, mentally, emotionally. But I want you to know one thing—you do right and God’s gonna do right, too. You take a step toward him and he’s going to take two steps toward you. If you eat right and think right and do right, God’s going to see to it that your bank book is balanced at the end of the month! God’s going to keep you on your job! God’s going to help you find the strength to carry on, to take care of your families, and meet your obligations, yes he is, say amen!”
A few weeks earlier, in Jacksonville, Florida, I had met a young Reform rabbi named Michael Matuson, who claimed to detect a new spiritual hunger among his congregants. “People here have everything,” he told me. “Materially they can’t even think of things to want anymore. But a lot of them are desperate for awe. At services on Friday nights I invite them up to the Torah. I tell them, ‘If you’ve had an experience during the week that needs spiritual transformation, touch the Torah and meditate on it.’ You’d be surprised how many people are moved by it.
“The people in a congregation like this want to believe in a myth,” Matuson said. “The problem is, most of them don’t believe in God. And to tell you the truth, most rabbis don’t believe in God, either—at least not the second grade notion of some old man sitting on a cloud.”
Rabbi Ben Levi and his congregation believe. Their God can balance your checkbook, cares what you eat for dinner, rewards the righteous and punishes the sinner. It is a primitive kind of religion, close to the roots of Judaism. “American Jews don’t feel comfortable with verbal affirmations of God’s glory,” Ben Waldman, Pat Robertson’s advisor, had told me in Washington. “We’re a more subtle religion than that.” But in synagogues filled with poor people, God is more than just an abstraction. The Jews of Beth Elohim reminded me of people I had seen at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, slipping prayers between the cracks with tears in their eyes.
After his sermon, Rabbi Ben Levi introduced me as a visitor from Israel and invited me to say a few words. I stood facing the congregation, which had grown to about sixty during the service, and was greeted by shouts of “Praise God!” and “Jerusalem!” For a brief, adrenaline-crazed moment I was tempted to launch into an imitation of Prophet Jones, a holiness preacher who was a boyhood idol of mine in Detroit. Instead, I told them how comfortable I felt in their synagogue and mentioned that I was writing a book about American Jews that would certainly include them. Several people shouted “Praise God,” but Rabbi Ben Levi seemed a bit disconcerted. “You are very welcome among us,” he intoned, and then somewhat cryptically added, “my life is an open book.”
Cantor Davis ended the service with a chillingly beautiful rendition of “Yerushalaim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold),” an anthem of the Six-Day War. In Israel the song is a cliché, the kind of thing small children sing in talent shows; but Davis’s version—half Yossele Rosenblatt, half Sam Cooke—had the whole synagogue swaying and clapping.
After services one of the women I had seen when I first came in approached me. “You’re from Israel,” she said, “maybe you know my son Shlomo? He’s at the Tel Aviv University.” I told her I didn’t, but promised to call and say hello when I got back home. The lady smiled, took my hand in hers, fingers curved as if she were holding a golf club, and pumped my arm. “Shabbat shalom to you,” she said. A few handshakes later I realized that the grip is part of the Beth Elohim ritual.
I wanted to talk to some of the members of the congregation, but although they were uniformly friendly, shaking my hand until it hurt and wishing me “Shabbat shalom,” none was willing to be interviewed. “You better ask Rabbi about that,” was the standard answer, and Rabbi Ben Levi didn’t want to talk.
“I’d like to have a discussion, but I can’t do it on the Shabbat. I restrict myself to holy thoughts on the Shabbat,” he said as we stood on the street in front of the synagogue, surrounded by a small knot of worshippers. He told me to call him at his office for an appointment (I did, but he never returned my calls), gave me a Beth Elohim handshake, and headed down Linden Boulevard.
Rabbi Ben Levi’s departure left me standing on the sidewalk with Marshall and Gladys, a mixed couple. Gladys comes from a Jewish family in Kew Gardens and teaches Hebrew school at Beth Elohim. Her husband works for the city in a capacity he declined to specify. A light-skinned man with serious eyes and an earnest manner, he had appeared, in the synagogue, to be elegantly dressed. Now, in the sunlight of Linden Boulevard, I saw that his overcoat was threadbare and his shoes were slightly cracked. He wore a porkpie hat, and he noticed I was bareheaded.
“Ah, excuse my question, but you from Israel. That means you a Jew, right?” I acknowledged that I was. “Well, not meaning any disrespect, why is it that your head is uncovered?”
It seemed a strange question—there are hundreds of thousands of bare-headed Jews in New York. Maybe, I thought, they don’t look Jewish to Marshall.
“I’m a secular Jew,” I told him. “I’m not religious.”
Marshall gazed at me in frank appraisal. “Now, when you say you not religious, you keep the laws of kashrut, don’t you? Don’t be telling me you eat pork products in Jerusalem?”
It sounded pretty bad when he put it that way and suddenly I felt defensive. “I do sometimes, yes. It’s not all that easy to find them, of course, and usually I don’t, but …”
As I talked I saw the expression on Marshall’s face change from friendly curiosity to alarm. It was there in his eyes: This man don’t eat right, which means he don’t think right, and he probably don’t do right. He cast a nervous glance at his teenage daughters.
I wanted to reassure him, tell him there are plenty of good Jews in the world who do right even though they don’t keep every commandment or even believe in God. I had examples; it’s an old argument. But I left it alone. Marshall and the other members of Beth Elohim aren’t interested in Jewish sociology. They are poor people, Jews with the blues. God is a necessity, not a debating point. So I gave Marshall the secret handshake, wished him and his wife a Shabbat shalom, and headed toward the subway and Manhattan.