A few days after my visit to Beth Elohim I took a train down to the Lower East Side of Manhattan to see Warren Feierstein again. I had been on the road for months by now, and had met a bewildering array of Jews—crawfish eaters and politicians, yuppies and welfare cases—all the way from the Succah in the Sky to the lesbian Havdalah hot tub. They had only one thing in common—they seemed like Jewish Americans. Now I wanted to meet American Jews, the hard core who still cling to the old Eastern European attitudes and traditions. Feierstein, who grew up on the Lower East Side, suggested I start in his neighborhood.
When I found him in his office at the Metropolitan Council on Poverty, his desk was stacked high with official-looking papers, and a walkie-talkie crackled from a shelf. Feierstein gestured at the receiver. “I’m a member of Hatzollah,” he said proudly. “And we’re always on duty.”
If you have the misfortune to need an ambulance in New York City, it could take as much as forty-five minutes for one to reach you. But if you are Jewish and live on the Lower East Side or in certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx, you can do a lot better than that. Call the right number, ask for help—in Yiddish, Hebrew, or English—and Hatzollah, the Jewish volunteer ambulance corps, will be at your door within ten minutes. “We’re like the Red Magen David,” Warren said, naming Israel’s national emergency first aid service. “Except, with all due respect, I think we’re a little more efficient.”
Hatzollah was not established only for the sake of efficiency, however. “There are a lot of people in our community who don’t know English well, and they have a hard time communicating with paramedics,” Feierstein explained. “And let’s face it, a lot of them, when they need help, they want to see a Jewish face, to feel like they’re with their own people.”
This is the essence of the Lower East Side mentality. There are about thirty thousand Jews left in the neighborhood—shopkeepers and blue collar workers, teachers and social workers, gentle Hebraists and karate-chopping Jewish Defense League militants—and they are indivisibly Jewish. They don’t need trips to Israel or UJA sensitivity sessions to tell them they are different from their fellow Americans. To them assimilation is a dirty word and the opportunities of the United States a mixed blessing.
Warren strapped on his walkie-talkie and took me out for a tour of his neighborhood. We walked along East Broadway, a street lined with kosher restaurants, religious bookstores, and more synagogues per capita than any other place in America. On one block, between Clinton and Montgomery, I counted twenty shuls and yeshivot—all of them Orthodox. Feierstein told me there isn’t a single Reform or Conservative congregation in the neighborhood, a claim not even the Chasidic strongholds of Borough Park and Crown Heights can make.
By far the most influential religious institution on the block is the Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem Yeshiva, which was the home base of the late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. Reb Moshe was the most respected rabbi of his generation, and on the Lower East Side his word was law. It was he, for example, who protected kosher butchers by outlawing self-service meat markets, and although he died a few years ago, the edict has survived. There aren’t many spiritual leaders in America of any denomination with that kind of posthumous clout.
Not even Reb Moshe was able to preserve the ethnic homogeneity of the Lower East Side, however. The Forvitz Building, once the home of America’s most influential Yiddish newspaper, is now the Ling Liang Building. Israel’s Bank Leumi’s sign is written in Hebrew and Mandarin. Not long ago, a small shul on the corner of Clinton and East Broadway was prevented by rabbinical court decree from selling out to a Buddhist shrine. But despite these incursions, the Lower East Side remains Jewish turf, an island of grass roots tradition and community.
If the rabbis hold the religious reins in the neighborhood, its corporeal power center is the Harry S. Truman Regular Democratic Club on East Broadway. Fittingly, its clubhouse is located in the basement of a Talmudic academy. At sundown the round-shouldered yeshiva boys go home and the little building is taken over by a more worldly group of men.
The leader of the HST Regulars is Whitey Warnetsky, a pink-faced fellow of indeterminate middle age. Whitey is central casting’s notion of a Lower East Side politico, from his flashing diamond pinky ring to his aromatic J&R alternative Honduran corona. He has been district leader since the early 1970s, and in the most recent election he had been returned to office unanimously. It takes a pretty good politician to run uncontested anyplace west of Rumania and I figured that he would have some interesting insights into the nature of power in a district of eight thousand mostly Orthodox Jewish voters.
On the way to the HST clubhouse it began to snow heavily. Given the inclement weather and Warnetsky’s recent landslide, I wondered if he would show up. But reliability is one of the leader’s secrets; when I arrived I found him and two associates seated behind a cheesecloth-covered card table on heraldic chairs that looked like they came from the set of Camelot. The three men were there to receive members of the voting public, a twice-weekly ritual that keeps Warnetsky in touch with the people of his district.
Warnetsky welcomed me warmly and introduced me to his colleagues—fellow cigar-smoker Dave Weinberger, a powerfully built young man in a yarmulke who serves as the HST sergeant-at-arms (“I throw people out if they need it,” he explained genially); and treasurer Harry Tuerack, a Kent smoker with the worried expression of a man who handles audited money. The public, less intrepid than its servants, had stayed home that night, and so I had the three statesmen all to myself.
“We have problems down here that other districts don’t encounter—Jewish problems, if you see what I mean,” Warnetsky said, puffing easily on his corona. “For example, let’s say with the traffic department. People who can’t drive on the Sabbath have a problem with alternate side parking.” He lowered his voice and adopted a tone of utmost piety. “This isn’t a parking issue, it’s a spiritual issue. We have some extremely religious people in this district. And, luckily, we’ve been able to help them out.”
Whitey regards himself as a big brother to his constituents. “I’ve helped many a young person down here get a position in life, but I never remind them of it. I don’t say, ‘Hey, look what I’ve done for you.’ Why not? I’ll be truthful with you, it doesn’t do any good. People aren’t grateful—that’s human nature.”
Harry the treasurer shook his head sorrowfully, contemplating the ingratitude. “You gotta have a strong stomach, some of the things you gotta put up with in this business,” he said.
Warnetsky and his fellow HST Regulars are careful to keep their beneficence on a strictly nonpartisan and nonsectarian basis. “I live by our law, the law of the Talmud,” he said. “People are hungry, feed them—that’s not hard to remember, know what I mean?” The HST organization passes out Passover bundles every year and distributes food and goodies before other Jewish holidays. “And that’s without reference to religion, race, or party affiliation,” said Dave Weinberger reverently.
There are quite a few gentiles on the Lower East Side, but it is not so easy to find Republicans. In Milwaukee, the boys at A.B. Data had said that Jews are genetically Democrats; and that certainly seems true in the cradle of American Jewry. According to Whitey, in the 1986 election, Democratic Assemblyman Sheldon Silver, a former yeshiva basketball star, carried the district ten to one. “We got a pretty smooth working organization down here,” Warnetsky said with modest understatement.
The leader has a couple of simple principles that enable him to keep things functioning on an even keel. “First, as it is written, do your good deeds in private. Our sage, Rabbi Maimonides, taught that.” Hallmark greeting cards provide the other pillar of his philosophy: “Second, it’s nice to be important, but it’s important to be nice. Those two things, in a nutshell, are what I believe,” said Whitey.
But politics on the Lower East Side aren’t all philosophy. Whitey is a practical man, and he has some more mundane rules for success. For one thing, he never discusses his work with his wife. And he is careful to respect other people’s privacy. “Let’s say you’re having dinner with a guy in a restaurant, and another guy comes over to the table. In that situation, I always get up and go to the bathroom. See, he might be offering the other guy something, see what I mean? And this is something I might be better off not knowing. So I walk away. It helps your longevity in my profession.”
Unlike Nassau County’s Ninth District, where the Berman-Skelos state senate race turned on foreign policy, people on the Lower East Side are concerned primarily with domestic issues. Support for Israel is a given; Lower East Siders are concerned more with the small services that help them live as their parents and grandparents did before them. The HST Regulars are there to provide those services. But that doesn’t mean they are indifferent to international affairs, which roughly speaking begin a block or two above East Broadway.
“You look at Jimmy Carter and his sweet mother,” said Harry, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I don’t like to say anything about a dead woman, but she and her son weren’t too wild about Jews, that’s for sure.” The others nodded in agreement.
Anti-Semitism has pretty much been licked on the Lower East Side, but the district leaders keep a wary eye on the rest of the country. For the next few minutes they traded horror stories, gleaned mostly from the Orthodox Jewish Press of Brooklyn, about Ku Klux Klan atrocities in Alabama, Connecticut, and other such godless precincts. They pronounced the names with distaste, shaking their heads at the mere mention of these exotic regions—places where you couldn’t fix alternate side parking even for Yom Kippur and people wouldn’t know what to do with a Passover bundle if you put one on their table.
In some ways the Lower East Side is Manhattan; in others, it resembles the smallest hick towns of Whitey Warnetsky’s nightmares. It has, for example, a general store—Bistritzky’s Kosher Specialties. The shop is a community institution, and when Warren Feierstein and I dropped in late the next afternoon, it was crowded with neighbors who were there to gossip and look over the fancy new kosher products now the vogue among modern Orthodox Jews.
There are other delicatessens in the area, but none has the crackerbarrel appeal of Bistritzky’s. Its owner, Leibel Bistritzky, is a genial Chasid with a white Santa beard. He and Warren are old friends, and he greeted us warmly, leading us to an aromatic little office in the rear of the shop. Bistritzky is a dispatcher for Hatzollah, and his shortwave radio crackled from time to time as he told us about himself and his neighborhood.
Leibel Bistritzky was born in Germany, and although he came to the United States as a boy, he still has a thick Yiddish accent. He started out raising chickens in Vineland, New Jersey, in the Jewish farm belt, and later he peddled eggs from door to door. But he needed more money to feed his ten children, so in the 1960s he and his wife opened up their shop. In those days Jews were still leaving the neighborhood for the suburbs; but in recent years, thanks to new middle-income housing, the community has stabilized.
Naturally this has been good for business, but Leibel Bistritzky considers himself more than just a businessman. Every day he closes his shop for an hour or so, invites fellow merchants to drop by, and leads them in afternoon prayers. The daily minyan, a neighborhood tradition, is not universally popular. As we were standing near the frozen food section, Leibel was accosted by a dissenter, a young man in a flannel shirt with a black yarmulke on his head.
“It’s a shonda what you’re doing, Bistritzky,” he said in a loud, aggressive tone. “A minyan belongs in shul, not with salami. You’re taking Jews out of shul. It’s a shonda!”
The man had a small cart of goodies, and Leibel listened to his tirade without comment; after all, the customer is always right. But after he left, Bistritzky cautioned me not to take him seriously. “The man’s a ‘ba’al tshuva’ [newly Orthodox],” he said. “I think he’s what they call ‘faced out.’ ”
The shelves of Bistritzky’s are stocked with products not usually available at your local A&P—Dagim white-chunk fancy tuna, Kemach Oreo cookies, and yellow and pink kosher El Bubble bubblegum cigars. There is also an assortment of gourmet kosher cheeses and health food products. The main customers for these delicacies are the “ba’ali tshuva” who live in the neighborhood.
The “ba’ali tshuva” movement is a much-discussed phenomenon in American Jewish life; not long after my visit to Bistritzky’s, it was elevated to the status of social phenomenon by New York Magazine, which reported on the trendy life-styles of young formerly assimilated Jews who have become observant. Many of them attend the uptown Lincoln Square Synagogue, the last word in designer Orthodoxy. Some rabbis and sociologists point to the movement as proof that young American-born Jews are returning to traditional Judaism. Similar claims were made a generation ago by Reform and Conservative thinkers about the Chavura movement. The truth is that these “trends” aren’t as important as their supporters would like them to be; the numbers in both cases are small. Still, “ba’ali tshuva” are good customers, and Leibel Bistritzky has become something of an expert on their habits.
“These people want kosher gourmet food because they miss certain tastes they got used to,” he explained, pulling a jar of Mrs. Adler’s Kosher Bacon Bits off the shelf. “Like, for example, a person used to eat, God forbid, chazer—pork products. So I give him some of this. They put it on their fried eggs and it tastes to them the same as chazer. Try some.” He shook some brown flakes into my hand and looked at me expectantly. They were made of vegetable and meant to simulate bacon, but the scientists who invented Mrs. Adler’s Kosher Bacon Bits must have been Orthodox Jews unacquainted with the real thing.
“Nu?” said Leibel, beaming. “How about that? Not bad, eh?”
He seemed so proud that I hated to disillusion him. “Tell me, Mr. Bistritzky, have you ever eaten bacon?” I asked, and he reacted as if I had thrown a snake into the frozen food section.
“Me. Eat chazer? God forbid!”
“Then how do you know that this tastes like bacon? I hate to say it, but it tastes like fish food,” I said.
“How do I know. People tell me. They come back for more. And besides, so what if it doesn’t taste like chazer—people can’t live without the taste of chazer?”
There are people who can and people who can’t. Mrs. Adler takes care of the latter. So do Miriam Mizakura and Rabbi Meyer Leifer, who cater to Orthodox Jews who want a little tempura and a few laughs without violating half a dozen commandments. Miriam is the proprietor of Shalom Japan, the only glatt kosher sushi joint and Jewish-Japanese nightclub in New York. Leifer is her rabbi.
Miriam Mizakura is a slim, attractive Japanese-born woman whose parents converted to Judaism for obscure reasons following World War II, shortly before she was born. In Japan she was an aspiring entertainer, and she came to the United States to break into show business. She didn’t have much success, though, until the day she went to visit a friend in the hospital and met Rabbi Meyer Leifer, spiritual leader of the 23rd Street Synagogue.
Leifer was intrigued by the young Japanese woman with the Jewish star dangling from her neck, and the two struck up a conversation that blossomed into a kind of partnership. Leifer encouraged her to open a kosher Japanese restaurant-supper club, and provided her with the rabbinical guidance to do it. Mizakura reciprocated by allowing Leifer, a frustrated crooner, to sing in her nightclub.
The first week it opened, Shalom Japan got more than one hundred telephone calls. “They all wanted to know one thing,” Leifer told me as we sat in the restaurant eating California rolls. “ ‘Where do you get your meat?’ Naturally the restaurant is kosher, and when they heard the answer, people started pouring in. For the first three months you couldn’t get a reservation.”
Some people come to Shalom Japan for the food, others for the floor show that takes place every Saturday night in the nightclub adjacent to the restaurant. The club’s decor is glatt kitsch—art posters from Tel Aviv and Tokyo, large wall fans, a mezuzah on the door, and a huge hand-painted kabuki set on the wall in back of the small stage. The entertainment, provided by Miriam and occasionally by Leifer, is pure schmaltz.
The rabbi took me into the deserted nightclub to hear Miriam rehearse. She has a pleasant voice and a one-joke comedy routine based on her dual identity. We sat at a little table and listened to a sample of her patter.
“How do you do?” she said in a thick oriental accent. “Welcome. I am a real JAP. Do you hear the one about Mr. Yakki who built a succah? Ah yes, people came to eat sukiyaki in Yakki’s succah.” This is a big laugh line on Saturday nights, when men in dark suits and yarmulkes bring their modestly dressed wives in from Kew Gardens, Borough Park, and Paramus for a night of eclectic dining (the menu offers tempura, sake no nikogori, sushi, cholent, corned beef on rye, and matzoh ball soup) and good clean fun.
Sometimes, when he is in the mood, Meyer Leifer takes the stage and does a little singing. I asked for a demonstration and he grabbed the mike, nodded to Miriam at the piano, and launched into a Tony Bennett-style rendition of the Hebrew standard, “Lila Lila.” He dipped his shoulder, closed his eyes on the high notes, and whipped the microphone cord around with professional ease. Miriam joined him on the chorus, singing the “lilas” with a distinct Japanese r where the l should have been.
“I love to sing,” Leifer said superfluously, putting down the microphone with reluctance. “I was a child prodigy cantor, I used to appear in synagogues all over the country. I don’t sing love songs, but Hebrew and Yiddish favorites are all right. There’s no reason that a rabbi shouldn’t sing in public. Singing is something that makes people happy.”
Shalom Japan is one of a growing number of kosher nightspots in New York that offer American entertainment to modern Orthodox patrons. American—but not too American. Even the most liberal brand of Orthodoxy requires its adherents to adopt a lifestyle based on values, attitudes, and behavior that are specifically Jewish. A kosher Japanese place without matzoh ball soup on the menu, or with a singer who sings in Japanese instead of Yiddish would be too much like the real thing. Mizakura and Rabbi Leifer have created a parody of a Japanese nightclub, and it is perfect because it spoofs America for its Orthodox patrons while allowing them, in Leibel Bistritzky’s admirable phrase, “a taste of chazer.”
There is a new sense of ascendency and self-confidence among modern Orthodox Jews in America. When they first came to the United States, most Eastern European Jews were “Orthodox.” But in a process of assimilation and secularization, the majority drifted into other, more easygoing denominations or dropped out of the Jewish community altogether. Alarmists predicted that Orthodox Judaism might disappear altogether in America.
But the pessimists underestimated the hold of tradition. Through gradual self-selection, a core of perhaps one million Orthodox Jews has crystallized in America. A minority of them are Chasidim, but the great majority—perhaps ninety percent—are modern Orthodox. They are college educated, speak English as their first language, read the sports page, and follow the stock market. They get married young, to other Orthodox Jews; have large families; and send their children to day schools where they are inculcated with a sense of being different from other Americans—and other American Jews. They have apparently found a way to live in America without losing their religion or their identity; and this discovery has given them a new feeling of control and optimism.
But if the modern Orthodox have found an American modus vivendi, they have yet to resolve their problem with Israel. Other Jews feel no compulsion to move to Israel; American Zionism takes a fan-club approach to the Jewish state. But the Orthodox have no such luxury. Three times a day they face Jerusalem and pray of their longing for Zion. They are required by their own ideology to acknowledge the centrality of Israel and to admit that Jewish life in Jerusalem has a greater validity than in New York. After all, one of their greatest rabbis, Abraham Isaac Kook, taught that “the commandment to live in Israel is as important as all the other commandments combined.”
Many modern Orthodox Jews have spent a year or two in an Israeli yeshiva or university. Most have contemplated living there permanently. All of them feel guilty about staying in America. But they stay, because they can make more money, pay less taxes, avoid military duty. They stay because life is easier.
There are various rationalizations for this violation of the commandment to live in Israel: Old people want to be near their grandchildren; yuppies say they can’t make a living; many claim that their aliyah to Jerusalem is just a matter of time. But none of the rationalizations really work; Israel is the worm in the shiny red apple of modern American Orthodoxy.
The balancing act between the American dream and the demands of the Torah may be a problem in places like the Lower East Side. But across the bridge in Brooklyn there are people who have never heard of sukiyaki, Mrs. Adler’s Kosher Bacon Bits, or kosher El Bubble chewing gum, and who consider living in the state of Israel unnecessary or even blasphemous. They are the Chasidim, the black-garbed ultras of Williamsburg, Borough Park, and Crown Heights.
A generation ago, there were about thirty thousand Chasidic Jews in Brooklyn; today they have more than tripled, to an estimated one hundred thousand. While the rest of American Jewry puzzles over demographic reports and watches its numbers dwindle, the Chasidim have tripled their size, mostly through natural increase.
The two superpowers of the Chasidic world are Lubavitch, located in Crown Heights, and Satmar, based in Williamsburg. To the untrained eye their members look as identical as snowflakes, but this is an optical illusion. The Lubavitcher (also known as “Chabad”) Chasidim are Jewish Jesuits—adventurous, relatively sophisticated, pseudointellectual, and extroverted. They regard non-religious Jews as opportunities, and they approach them with the friendly enthusiasm of aluminum siding salesmen.
Satmar Chasidim, on the other hand, are grumps. They are the hardest kernel of the hard core—introverted, self-absorbed, anti-intellectual, and militantly opposed to Americanization, Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism, Zionism, the State of Israel, most other Chasidic sects, and the twentieth century. They would no more go to Shalom Japan than they would attend a bullfight or the Miss Universe pageant.
While I was in New York, the Satmar Chasidim were involved in an illuminating controversy. They send their children to parochial schools, of course, but for some reason a group of Satmar girls were enrolled in a public school remedial education program. Satmar doesn’t allow its women to mingle freely with men, Jewish or otherwise, and the group’s leaders demanded that a screen be erected down the middle of the classroom to keep the girls separated from the rest of the students.
This demand was immediately and vocally rejected by the parents of the other children, most of whom were blacks and Puerto Ricans. For years there had been tensions between the communities, mostly over street crime and competition for public housing; the classroom controversy brought things to a head. A Puerto Rican spokesman claimed that the Chasidim were elitist and racist, a charge the Satmar spokesman blandly denied. “They think we look down on them,” he told reporters, “but they are mistaken. We don’t see them at all.”
Since that same attitude applies to writers, secular Jews, and Israelis, it was not easy finding a Satmar Chasid who would talk to me. After several abortive approaches, I was finally introduced to one by a mutual acquaintance. The Chasid agreed to meet me on the condition that I wouldn’t publish his name. This seemed like an unnecessary precaution—the Satmar Chasidim read only holy texts—but he insisted. “Just call me Mendel,” he said.
At thirty-four, Mendel is a short, stocky man with a beard, side locks, and a crewcut. He is a craftsman, and we met in his workshop, a small building located not far from the main shopping district of Williamsburg. Every time a customer came in, Mendel interrupted our conversation and pointedly ignored me. Speaking to strangers is frowned upon by the Satmar community, and he didn’t want to be caught in an act that could be construed as disloyal.
In the world of Satmar, the most talented young men spend their lives studying Talmud on a community dole. The merely clever go into business, and many can be found in the Diamond District around 47th Street in Manhattan. Neighborhood merchants and artisans like Mendel are at the bottom of the status ladder.
As a boy Mendel studied Talmud like everyone else. His secular education consisted of one hour a day—arithmetic, spelling, and grammar—for four years. “I was born in Williamsburg, but I din’t know Hinglish till I was a big boy,” he said, sounding as if he had just gotten off the boat from Europe.
As we talked, I saw that Mendel had two walkie-talkies strapped to his belt. One was for Hatzollah, the ambulance service. The other connected him to the shomrim network, a kind of Satmar Conelrad system of early warning against undesirable strangers in the neighborhood.
“Shomrim” is the Hebrew word for “guardians,” and Mendel is one of the unit’s senior members. A few years ago, street crime began to be a problem in Williamsburg. At first the Chasidim staged mass demonstrations at City Hall. They stormed the local police station after a woman was raped. Finally, unable to get satisfactory protection from the authorities, they created their own private vigilante force.
“We protect the people from the chayas, the animals on the street,” Mendel said in a soft voice. “Believe me, this is no expression, they are really chayas. We’re surrounded here by animals.” People in the neighborhood know the shomrim number, and they can call for help any time of the day or night. “We have a two-minute response time,” he said proudly.
“Two minutes for what kind of response?” I asked. Mendel looked around the shop, although there was no one there. “Two minutes for a chopsim,” he said, looking down at his workbench.
Chopsim, pronounced with a throat-clearing “ch,” is Yiddish for “grab ’em.” The phrase became a battle cry a few years ago when an elderly rabbi was mugged by a couple of street thugs. “Yidden, chopsim!” the old man managed to shout, and dozens of yeshiva boys came charging out of a nearby Talmudic academy in hot pursuit. Within seconds the thugs were a bloody pile on the sidewalk, and a new battle cry was born.
Since that night, the shomrim have become an organized force. Only married men can belong (“We see sometimes on the street things a boy shouldn’t see,” Mendel explained), and they patrol armed with walkie-talkies, clubs, blackjacks, and brass knuckles. “We are the eyes and ears of the police department on the street. We don’t bother nobody, but we keep the animals out of the neighborhood,” he said.
Before going out to Williamsburg, I had been briefed by a New York police officer who specializes in the Chasidic community. The officer, himself an observant Jew, clearly had mixed feelings about the Satmar approach to law and order. “All together, you got fifty-five different Chasidic groups out there,” he said, gesturing in the general direction of Brooklyn. “Most of them are pretty small and quiet. Of the big groups, your Lubavitchers rarely take to the streets. But your Satmar, when they get angry—look out, they don’t fool around.”
I asked the policeman about rumors that a rapist had once been beaten to death by an outraged group of Chasidim. “I never heard that one,” he said, “but nothing’s impossible. These are very dangerous people. A lot of them are Holocaust survivors and they want to be left in peace. They don’t start trouble but they aren’t about to be molested, either. I don’t know, maybe they’ve got the right idea after all.”
Much of the sect’s violence is directed against other Chasidic groups, or rivals within the group itself. For years, Satmar was controlled by a venerable old rebbe, Moshe Teitelbaum. When he died a power struggle broke out between his widow and her son, the official heir. Psychological warfare raged between the two camps, with the widow’s forces claiming that the young rabbi’s wife was insufficiently pious. The campaign came to a head when a group of Chasidim broke into the son’s house and smashed all the mirrors in protest against his wife’s alleged narcissism.
A few years ago a form of gang warfare broke out between the Satmar Chasidim and the rival Belz group. Satmar refuses to recognize the state of Israel on the grounds that only the Messiah can reestablish Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land. Belz takes a softer line, and its leader, the Belzer rebbe, agreed to accept Israeli government support for his schools in Israel. This decision precipitated a clash between the two groups. Synagogues were trashed and Chasidim fought each other in the streets. The two sects eventually reached a truce, but they still keep a wary eye on each other.
The great rivalry in the Chasidic world is between Satmar and Lubavitch. The police officer who briefed me recalled one time when reserves were needed to save the life of a Chabadnik who had ventured into the Satmar stronghold. “It was one of the holidays, and this fellow came to a synagogue in Williamsburg, got up, and tried to give holiday greetings from the Lubavitcher rebbe,” the cop said. “The Satmar people heard about it and I guess they thought it was a power play. They found him on the street and chased him all over the neighborhood. He finally ran into another shul, and in the meantime somebody called the precinct.
“When we got there the place was surrounded. At first he refused to leave with us—he didn’t want to violate the law by riding on a holiday. But I explained that his life was in danger, and that riding with us would be ‘pikuach nefesh’—saving a life—which is permitted. We finally got him out of there, but if they had got their hands on him he would have been a dead man, believe me.”
I asked Mendel about these incidents, but he had nothing to say. He had already said too much, and I could tell he regretted the meeting. There was no profit in this kind of encounter, nothing the Satmar Chasidim could gain from good publicity. They want to be left alone, to pursue their eighteenth century European lives in the heart of New York. His answers grew shorter and shorter, his silences more impatient.
“Have you ever seen a Charles Bronson movie?” I asked, closing my notebook and getting ready to leave. He looked at me with incomprehension. “He’s an actor,” I explained. “He makes movies about fighting chayas.” Mendel shook his head. “We don’t go to movies, or watch television. It’s a waste of time, goyishe naches [gentile pleasure],” he said.
“You mean you’ve never seen a movie?” I asked.
Mendel hesitated, and then, in a soft voice, confessed. “When I was a boy, I went once. I saw a cowboy by the name Roy Rogers.”
“Did you ever dream about being a cowboy after that?” I asked, but the mellow moment was past. “That’s ‘meshuggeh,’ ” he said harshly, almost pushing me in the direction of the door. “Only a goy would dream about being a cowboy.”
It is a short drive from Williamsburg to Crown Heights, capital of the Satmar’s great rival, Lubavitch. The two sects are more than political enemies; they are ideological foes, exponents of vastly different philosophies of Jewish survival. Satmar is isolationist, but Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe, is a man who believes in planting flags all over the world.
There is nothing else like Chabad in Jewish life. It is a cult of personality based on the charismatic leadership of Rabbi Schneerson. His supporters make extravagant claims for his wisdom, holiness, and mystical powers; his detractors consider him an egomaniac or even a false Messiah. But no one disputes that he is a powerful figure, able to command a small army of fanatically dedicated followers in his war against secularism, assimilation, and modernity.
Over the years the rebbe has wrapped himself in a carefully crafted cloak of mystery. He receives important visitors by candlelight in the middle of the night and he almost never leaves his home. “Once, back in 1949, the rebbe was going on vacation,” a Chabadnik once told me. “He got a flat tire on the way over the bridge, and he considered it a sign. He hasn’t left Brooklyn since.”
The rebbe has never visited Israel. Unlike his Satmar rivals, he strongly supports the Jewish state and is a hawk on its defense policies. On the Israeli political scene he is a force in absentia, directing his disciples’ lobbying efforts on behalf of an agenda full of theocratic legislation. But the rebbe himself stays at home and has remained silent about his refusal to travel to Jerusalem. “The time isn’t ripe yet,” his followers say, a mysterious evasion that has given rise to the charge that he has messianic pretensions.
There are thirty thousand Jews in Crown Heights, almost all of them connected with Chabad. The neighborhood itself looks a lot like Williamsburg—unimpressive apartment buildings along a main street, shoddy-looking shops with signs in Yiddish and Hebrew with names like The Shabbos Fish Market, The House of Glatt Butcher Shop, and M. Raskin’s Fancy Fruits and Vegetables. On the wall of Jacoff’s Drugs I saw a number of notices: an invitation to the Mitzvah Kashrus Tea, where Rivka Shurtzman was scheduled to give a talk titled “Keeping Kosher, My Giant Leap”; an ad for a Hot Shmurgesboard (sic) at the Olei Torah Ballroom; and a sign promising GOOD NEWS, NO MORE MESSY SCHACH for people who suffer from succah drip.
The differences between Crown Heights and Williamsburg are subtle. There are few women drivers in either neighborhood, but in Crown Heights wives sit next to their husbands in the front seat, while in Satmar country they stay in the back. And, not far from Chabad headquarters, there is a bookstore. It is not exactly Scribner’s, but in its display window Kosher Calories and King David and the Frog. shared a shelf with Brimstone and Fire. As I stood peering into the shop, two young men in dark raincoats and fedoras came out and smiled at me. The atmosphere in Crown Heights is friendly, hospitable; it is hard to imagine these people out on a chopsim.
The heart of the neighborhood is the rebbe’s mansion and headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway. It is from here that young men are dispatched to isolated Jewish communities to act as teachers, kosher butchers, and religious functionaries; orders are drafted for Chabad lobbyists in Israel; and the rebbe’s words are disseminated by pamphlet, tape, and videocassette.
I went, uninvited and unannounced, to the headquarters and asked to meet with someone who could tell me about Chabad. One of the yeshiva boys led me through a maze of classrooms and delivered me to the office of a young rabbi named Friedman. He had no idea who I was, and he was obviously busy; but he put everything aside and listened with an encouraging smile as I explained my project. Chabadniks have the missionary’s worldliness; unlike the Satmar Chasidim, they are comfortable with non-religious Jews and understand them, up to a point. They are also not averse to publicity. Friedman loaded me down with great piles of press clippings, translations of the rebbe’s speeches, and other “background material,” with the gentle insistence of a professional flack.
“Is there anything else you need?” he asked helpfully.
“Yes, I’d like to go out with one of your mitzvah tanks,” I told him. A mitzvah is, literally, a religious commandment. There are 613, regulating every aspect of life, but the rebbe especially emphasizes one—the commandment to put on tefillin, or prayer phylacteries. Chabad dispatches roving bands of Chasidim who visit businessmen in their offices and implore them to put on the leather straps; others run tefillin stations—known as mitzvah tanks—on street corners of major cities.
Rabbi Friedman picked up the phone with the dispatch of a junior executive and spoke briefly with a subordinate. “We’ve got a few mitzvah tanks going this week. You can visit any of them but I suggest the one on 47th and Fifth Avenue. That’s where the action is,” he said with a smile.
That Friday, I found the tank at its appointed spot in midtown Manhattan. Despite its paramilitary name, it proved to be a disappointingly civilian GMC Vandura mobile home, stocked with prayer books and sets of tefillin. The tank crew consisted of seven young men in their late teens or early twenties, all hardened veterans of two years of Chabad missionary work in the Pacific Northwest. Five were native Brooklynites; the other two were from Oak Park, Michigan, and São Paulo, Brazil.
Mendy (“it’s short for Mendel”) Kalmanson took charge of me. A smiling, fresh-faced boy in a man’s dark suit and fedora, he led me inside the van, offered me a diet Pepsi (“a little nosh,” he said shyly), and explained the operation. The crew is divided into two teams—outside men who stop passersby, strike up a conversation, and try to convince them to put on tefillin; and inside men, who wait in the tank and show the volunteers how to do it.
At headquarters, Rabbi Friedman had explained that the Chabad emphasis on tefillin stems from the Six-Day War, when the rebbe ordered his followers to convince fellow Jews to wear them in order to demonstrate Jewish power and solidarity. Rabbi Friedman strongly implied that Israel’s victory had been a result of that order—rebbe-centered explanations of historical events and natural phenomena are common among his disciples. But Mendy didn’t know the background of the tefillin campaign, and he seemed surprised that I would wonder about it. “It’s a commandment,” he told me with boyish conviction. “It’s straight outta the Torah. What more do you need?”
As we were talking, the door of the van opened and a young man in a business suit entered, followed by one of the outside men who blocked his retreat. The man, a Russian immigrant, looked around nervously. “We must make this quick, all right?” he said, but his concern was unnecessary; Mendy was already working with a practiced dispatch, rolling up the man’s sleeve and winding the leather straps around his arm. “We’ll have you out of here in a jiffy,” he said cheerfully as the man looked on with a dubious expression. Mendy handed him a prayerbook, led him in what was obviously an unfamiliar benediction, unwound the straps, and wished him a good Shabbes. The whole operation took about three minutes.
Thousands of people passed the mitzvah tank in the next hour, but only seven more came in—two more Russians, a Moroccan Jew from Montreal, an Israeli who lives in Queens, two Mexican tourists, and a Turkish businessman. There wasn’t a single American customer. I pointed this out to Mendy, but he simply shrugged. “It’s like anything else, you get your good days and your bad days. Besides, a Jew’s a Jew and a mitzvah’s a mitzvah.”
Curious to see what was happening on the street, I left the van and joined the outside men on the corner of 47th and 5th. Each one had a stack of pamphlets he offered to passersby, asking likely candidates, “Are you Jewish?” People rushed past without looking up, or shook their heads briefly. No one stopped.
“If a person says no right away, that means he isn’t Jewish,” explained Shaya Harlig, one of the outside men. “So I just say, ‘have a nice day.’ But if he hesitates before saying no, then he’s Jewish. Usually I don’t say anything, but sometimes, if he really looks Jewish, I say, ‘Come on, gimme a break.’ ”
“That’s right,” said another one of the boys. “But you know, sometimes people have funny reactions. Like one time a man came over to me and said, ‘Last week you asked if I was Jewish and I said no. I haven’t been able to sleep all week. So, yes, I’m Jewish.’ ”
“Did you get him into the tank?” I asked. The boy shook his head. “He said he was too busy. But at least it was a start,” he said, sighing.
A well-dressed lady stopped to talk. The mitzvah tank crew does not stop women, who have no religious duty to put on tefillin. But, unlike other Chasidic men, Chabadniks are not afraid to talk to them in public. The lady had just seen a production of The Merchant of Venice. “Are Jews allowed to charge interest or not?” she asked one of the crew, who answered her politely, as if he had been put on the corner as a municipal Talmudic information service.
One of the boys came up to me with a stack of pamphlets. “Why don’t you give it a try?” he offered with a grin. “You almost look like one of us.” I realized that he was right. I had a beard, a dark coat, and black trousers, as well as a black silk yarmulke on my head, and I looked like an older version of the tank crew. I accepted the pamphlets and, feeling somewhat foolish, took my place on the corner.
Menachem Begun, the Brazilian Chasid, gave me a little coaching. “Don’t try to stop everyone. Let the ones who don’t look Jewish go by—you know, blacks, Orientals, Latins. The other ones you should at least ask. You’re a beginner, you can’t pick out the Jews.”
“Can you?” I asked.
He smiled. “Sure. It’s easy, just look right here,” he said, pointing to his nose.
Even with coaching, I soon realized that stopping Jews on a midtown Manhattan corner is like trying to hit major league fastballs—they go whizzing by faster than they look from the stands. By the time I asked people if they were Jewish I was talking to the backs of their heads. After a couple minutes I was more or less continually mumbling, “Are you Jewish are you Jewish are you Jewish,” and attracting some peculiar stares. Menachem and Mendy, standing a few feet away, were immensely amused by the spectacle, but after a while they stepped in to give me some more pointers.
“Stand back and offer the pamphlets from a distance—if you get too close, it scares people off. Ask ‘Are you Jewish?’ in a loud voice, but polite. And you don’t have to ask the whole thing, just, ‘Ya Jewish?’ like that.” Mendy and Menachem made it sound easy, but even with my new stance and abbreviated text, I couldn’t get anyone to stop.
A little later, I looked up and saw that I was sharing the corner with a colleague, a funky-looking black man wearing an orange vest over a battered imitation leather jacket. Like me, he was distributing leaflets—but, I noted enviously, with considerably more success.
I sidled up to him. “What you got?” I asked, and he handed me a flyer announcing specials on stereo equipment at Sound City. I offered him one of mine, a personal letter from the Lubavitcher rebbe on the importance of tefillin. He took it out of professional courtesy, but when he thought I wasn’t looking he let it fall to the pavement.
Discouraged, I headed back to the tank, where some of the boys were talking to a beat cop. At first I thought he might be hassling them, but it turned out they were discussing the policeman’s days as a yeshiva boy in Kew Gardens. “As a cop, these guys are a pain in the ass,” he told me. “They won’t move their van when you tell them to; they play their klezmer music so loud that the storekeepers complain; and when you try to talk to them about it, they won’t even listen. But as a Jew, I like what they’re doing. I mean, somebody’s got to go out and remind people that they’re still Jews.”
In the mitzvah tank, the Chabadniks are reasonable and friendly, ready for amiable argument. But it is a bogus pose; there is a fanatic’s hard edge just under the personable facade. The Chabad Chasidim see themselves as medical missionaries in the midst of an epidemic of assimilation and impiety. The rebbe has prescribed a cure—fundamentalist Judaism—that very few American Jews are prepared to take plain. Chabad’s great skill is its ability to sugar-coat the pill.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Hollywood. Chabad and show business were meant for each other. The rebbe—for all his piety and isolation—is a master showman who stages his public appearances carefully and beams them around the world via satellite. And in recent years, Chabad has become expert in the use of another American show biz art form—the telethon.
The Chabad telethon is one of the great media events of the Jewish world. When I was in Los Angeles I watched a tape of one with Marilyn Miller, an old friend who was one of the original writers on Saturday Night Live. Marilyn grew up in Pittsburgh, where she was active in the Reform youth movement, and she still takes an interest in Jewish life. Lately she has been trying to establish a sitcom library for the Jerusalem Cinemateque. But none of the old comedy series, or even Saturday Night Live in its heyday, ever came up with a more improbable premise or a zanier entertainment than the Chabad special.
The show opened with a group of sweating Chabadniks dancing frenetically to the sound of a klezmer band. The number ended with one of them spinning wildly with a quart bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale balanced on his nose. This feat won loud applause from the host of the show, Jan Murray of Treasure Hunt fame, who emceed the evening dressed in a black tuxedo and matching silk yarmulke.
Murray told a couple of borscht belt jokes and then introduced the stars who were there to raise money for the rebbe—Ed Asner, Connie Francis, Shelley Berman, Martin Sheen, James Caan, Tony Randall, Elliot Gould, and dozens more. My personal favorite was a Korean nightclub crooner who sang “Volaré” and “B’Shanah Ha’ba’ah,” a Hebrew standard whose words he managed to mispronounce in their entirety. Murray didn’t seem to notice.
Performances alternated with film clips of Chabad’s philanthropic activities and testimonials from some of Hollywood’s most powerful (and least pious) Jewish stars and movie big shots. There was something about them that reminded me of a stoned Elvis appearing at the White House on behalf of Richard Nixon’s war against drugs.
The television special, like much of what Chabad does in America, was the product of dedicated and talented emissaries, men who know the world and are willing to reach out to assimilated Jews on their own terms. The effort goes on across the country—in Chabad houses on college campuses, in mitzvah tanks, and anywhere else the missionaries can gather an audience.
In L.A. on Super Bowl Sunday, I attended a Chabad show biz study session at the Westwood home of Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz, one of the rebbe’s chief West Coast operatives. I was invited by Roger Simon, a novelist whose Jewish private eye, Moses Wine, was portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss in the movie The Big Fix. Simon was working on a new Moses Wine story that involved Jewish mysticism, which is how he began attending the weekly class. His motives were of no great concern to Rabbi Schwartz, however; there is a rabbinical principle that holds that if you start out doing the right things for the wrong reasons, you will eventually do them for the right ones. Chabad believes in mitzvah momentum.
Simon and I arrived at Schwartz’s comfortably unpretentious home a few minutes before ten in the morning. A dozen men and women in French designer jogging outfits, Reeboks, and yarmulkes were gathered in the kitchen, sipping coffee. The men discussed the Super Bowl, which was being played that afternoon just down the road in Pasadena. The women debated the respective merits of jogging and speed walking. Most of them were between thirty-five and forty, and I knew from Roger that almost all of them had some connection with show business. He pointed out a high-powered agent, several musicians and movie-score composers, a couple of middle-level studio execs, and a film industry lawyer.
Chabad is not the only Jewish group that cultivates show biz contacts. The film industry is a Jewish business, after all, and many of its leading figures have been active on behalf of Israel or other Jewish causes. In Los Angeles, synagogues recruit Jewish stars as drawing cards. But no one has been as successful as Chabad in attracting and exploiting show biz people.
At exactly ten, Rabbi Schwartz joined the group. He is a short, tubby man in his mid-forties, with a red beard and a genial expression. Steel-rimmed glasses were perched on his nose and he wore paisley suspenders over a white, short-sleeved shirt. He looked like a campus eccentric, a sociology professor from the 1960s about to conduct a graduate seminar.
Schwartz took his place at the head of a long table and the others gathered around. For a few minutes he chatted idly with the group, making ostentatiously hip conversation dotted with references to Magic Johnson, Bob Dylan, and “the Village.” The technique was familiar; in Jerusalem, Chabadniks stop young tourists at the Wailing Wall, ask them if they want to turn on—and then hand them copies of the rebbe’s sermons, saying, “Turn on with this.”
The class came to attention after a few minutes, and Schwartz began with an announcement. Meir Kahane was scheduled to come to Los Angeles, and Schwartz suggested that they attend his lecture. Several people groaned, but the rabbi accepted the reaction with unruffled good nature. “You don’t have to agree with the man. But he has an interesting message. You owe it to yourselves to hear him firsthand.” This appeal to open-mindedness had an effect; several people wrote down the date of the JDL leader’s appearance.
Rabbi Schwartz then passed out a schedule of Chabad House events for the coming month. The group’s L.A. operation is a combination of Torah and tinsel. Its two major events for February were “Survivors, an evening with former concentration camp survivors”; and “Hollywood and Hassidism—Bruce Vilanch who wrote all the Donny and Marie Show sequences … will cause great diversion with humorous choice tidbits of today’s Hollywood.”
The flyer also advertised the Chabad House weekly Sabbath service: “Friday Night Live! Have a tequila sunrise at sundown every Friday night at Chabad House. The singing and dancing will break the ice. The horseradish on the gefilte fish will defrost the system. And the jalapeño pepper chicken soup will start the 100 proof juices flowing. Enjoy fascinating new faces that will tickle your Platonic fancy, and get some kosher smarts playing stump the rabbi.” And, at the bottom of the flyer, “For Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, non-affiliated and any Jew that moves.”
Chabad isn’t averse to selling Judaism like a singles bar, but in the est belt of Southern California its strongest card is mysticism. The Chabad House offers a number of courses, including a beginner’s seminar that promises “insights into human psychology, depression and ecstasy, divine and animal soul, meditation and self-awareness, male and female energy, spirituality and self-centeredness, ‘karma’ and free choice, etc.”
After the flyers had been distributed, Rabbi Schwartz began the class by describing how he had explained the hidden meaning of the Song of Songs to Carole King (and, having revealed its message, convinced her to sing an excerpt from it on the Chabad telethon). Then he passed around mimeographed copies of the day’s study material, “Bosi l’gani,” an article written by one of the Lubavitcher rebbe’s predecessors. The article is a mystical and linguistic interpretation of a single Hebrew phrase in the Song of Songs.
Schwartz read the phrase aloud in English: “I came into my garden, my sister, my bride.” Then he asked the man on his right—a sound track composer—to continue reading. The man cleared his throat and began to recite:
“The midrash explains that shir hashirim is not a simple love story, rather a metaphor describing the relationship between God and the Jewish people. The above verse refers to the time of the destruction of the sanctuary, when the shechinah, The Divine Presence, came into the garden—was revealed in the earth. Developing the concept further, the midrash (on the above verse) emphasizes the phonetic relationship between the Hebrew word for my garden, ‘gani,’ and the Hebrew word ‘ginuni,’ meaning ‘my bridal chamber’ (since the verse uses the term ‘gani,’ my garden, the possessive form, implying a place of privacy, it can be interpreted to mean, ‘my bridal chamber,’ a private place for the groom and bride [note commentaries on the midrash]. It interprets the above verse as ‘I came into my bridal chamber, the place where my essence was originally revealed’).” The sound track man put down his mimeographed sheet and several of the others nodded solemnly, as if they had been given a sudden insight into the workings of the universe.
One by one, the class recited from the article. They stumbled over unfamiliar Hebrew terms, sometimes completely losing their places as the text became more and more obscure. An intense young woman with a trained speaking voice and a scarf tied severely around her head grappled with “Normally the Hebrew word for ‘walking’ would be ‘mehalach.’ Instead the Torah uses ‘mis-halech’ (which implies a state of withdrawal), as the midrash comments, ‘walking and jumping, walking and jumping.’ ” When she finished reading, heads once again bobbed in agreement.
Orthodox Jews approach mysticism late, after long years of Torah and Talmudic study, and with a firm grasp of Hebrew. Even then, mystical texts are often inaccessible. Teaching “Bosi l’gani” to people like these was like teaching advanced nuclear physics to students who think that an apple thrown in the air will keep on going. The yuppies in Rabbi Schwartz’s living room that morning comprehended what they were reading about as well as a group of Yiddish-speaking Chasidim from Poland would have understood the front page of Variety.
If anyone was aware of the absurdity of the scene, however, they didn’t let on. Schwartz smiled benignly through the reading, and the students exhibited an adolescent eagerness mixed with the self-confidence of people who have made it in a tough town.
“Shlomo, I want to know if I’ve got the seven tzaddikim who brought the revelation right,” said one woman in a tentative voice. “Let’s see, there was Abraham, Isaac, and, ah, was Jacob in there someplace?” The woman managed to make the question sound like an inquiry about the final four at Wimbledon.
Another woman mentioned that she had recently read a midrash that explained how Eve’s creation gave forth an unnatural love of men by women. Rabbi Schwartz looked puzzled; he had never heard of any such thing. Suddenly she snapped her fingers and laughed without embarrassment. “Now I remember, it’s not a midrash, it’s from Milton.”
I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Rabbi Schwartz. It couldn’t have been easy for him to sit around in his paisley suspenders talking Torah to a bunch of Americans who wanted to know if God was sincere. Despite his ersatz American cool, Schwartz comes from a world where Judaism is a way of life, complete and consistent. His students, for all their earnest curiosity, were only visitors in that world.
One of the women in the group took me aside and confided that now that she had become religious, she was planning a pilgrimage to Mount Sinai during the holiday of Shavuot. “Is there, like, I don’t know, a Hilton or anything where I can stay nearby?” she asked. I told her there was only desert and a monastery, and she visibly cooled. “Well, in that case, maybe I’ll just come to Jerusalem. I know there’s a Hilton there,” she said. “Jerusalem is just as good as Mount Sinai, I guess.”
“Look me up when you get there,” I offered, and she smiled.
“Don’t worry, I will. Maybe you know some cute guys you could fix me up with.”
Not long after I got back to the East Coast, a friend, Arthur Samuelson, suggested that I go up to Boston to meet Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Horowitz, also known as the Bostoner Rebbe. I didn’t really want to go—Brooklyn and L.A. had satisfied my appetite for Chasidic encounters. But Arthur, normally a skeptical and irreverent fellow, was persistent. “Forget the stuff you saw in Williamsburg,” he said. “And forget all those stone-throwing fanatics in Jerusalem. This guy’s the real thing. Besides, how often do you get a chance to meet a genuine Chasidic rebbe?”
He had a point; I was still fascinated by the concept of a wonder-working, miracle-making rebbe, and eager to meet one. More than anyone else, the rebbes—dynastic heads of Chasidic sects—are representatives of the Jewish civilization of Eastern Europe that the Nazis destroyed. They are relics of another age, full of dark shtetel arts and mystical fervor, able to command the unquestioning obedience of followers who behave like subjects.
Most rebbes are ancient men from Europe, but Levi Yitzchak Horowitz, the Bostoner Rebbe, is an exception; the first Chasidic rebbe to be born and raised in the United States. According to one of the group’s publications, Horowitz “assumed the leadership of his court” at the age of twenty-three. Not many men born in the Dorchester section of Boston have their own court, and I was intrigued by the opportunity to see one face to face.
When I called the Bostoner synagogue, a woman with a brisk New England accent said, “New England Chasidic Center, rabbi’s study” in a businesslike tone. I wasn’t sure how to make an appointment with a mystic, but it turned out to be as simple as fixing a date with the dentist. The secretary gave me instructions on how to reach the Chasidic Center, requested a number where I could be reached in case of a change in plans, and wished me a good day. After I hung up, I realized she hadn’t even asked what I wanted to see the rebbe about.
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Horowitz claims descent from the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Chasidism, and from a long line of famous rebbes. His father, Pinchas David Horowitz, was born in Jerusalem and came to the United States during World War I; there he became the first Chasidic rebbe in Williamsburg. After a few years, the old man left New York for Boston and founded “the new dynasty” at 87 Poplar Street. The current rebbe was born there in 1921. Twenty years later the old man died, and in 1944 Levi Yitzchak took over the Boston court.
The literature of the New England Chasidic Center is refreshingly free of false modesty regarding the accomplishments of the rebbe, “[a] miracle man of mythical dimensions [who] is the surrogate for his Chasidim. His prayers are an intercession. He pleads as an advocate to heaven.” According to his pamphleteer, “This city of loving kindness, Boston, is famous because of the rebbe.”
Despite this claim, the Irish cabbie who drove me out to the rebbe’s Beacon Street headquarters in Brookline had never heard of Grand Rabbi Horowitz. He was a fortyish man who told me he grew up in Brockton, “the city of champions.”
“Today it’s Marvin Hagler,” he said, “but back when I was in school it was Rocky Marciano. Heavyweight champion of the world. What a guy.”
“Did you know him?” I asked.
“Yeah, him and his brothers. I knew the whole family. Hey, I took a lot of punches in the head because of the Rock.”
“You fought Rocky Marciano?”
“Naw, nothin’ like that. See, Rocky got to be champ when I was in high school. And all of a sudden, everybody in town wanted to be a fighter. People fought all over the place—on the way to school, in school, on the way home from school. Every time you turned around, somebody tried to punch you in the head.” The cabbie paused, lost in nostalgia, contemplating the prolonged donnybrook.
“I’ll tell you one thing, though. He really put Brockton on the map,” he said. “Anywhere in the world, you say ‘Brockton’ and people say, ‘home of Rocky Marciano.’ ”
“Boston is famous because of the rebbe,” I said.
“Yeah? Reggie who?”
The New England Chasidic Center, when we reached it, did not look like the site of a dynastic court. It is a simple brick building that contains a synagogue and study hall and, up two flights of stairs, the rebbe’s study. In a large outer office, two modestly dressed secretaries busied themselves with clerical tasks, and a young man with a beard sat typing noiselessly on a personal computer. Through the open door of an adjoining room I caught occasional glimpses of a white-bearded figure who paced back and forth, wrapped in a large white prayer shawl.
After a few minutes the man, now wearing an old-fashioned black frock coat, came into the waiting room. He exchanged a few words with the secretaries, peered briefly at the computer screen, and walked over to me and introduced himself as Rabbi Horowitz. He was an arresting figure, the very picture of a Chasidic rebbe—high forehead, prominent nose, long white beard, and soft, expressive brown eyes—and he radiated presence.
The rebbe ushered me into his study, sat at his desk, and motioned me to a chair across from him. He regarded me with a benign stare that I found surprisingly unsettling—for a moment I imagined he was reading my mind. I was impressed, and annoyed with myself for being impressed.
Twenty years ago, when I first moved to Jerusalem, I had a romantic attraction to Chasidic Jews and the lost world they symbolized. But as their fundamentalist fervor grew, I began to see them as the enemy—people who throw stones at my car on the Sabbath, seek to impose theocratic restraints on my freedom, shirk their duties as citizens, and consider me to be a second-class Jew at best. I came to Boston to see the rebbe out of curiosity; but I never considered the possibility that I might find him impressive.
My discomfort made me go on the offensive. “I’m writing a book about Jews in America,” I said, “and I’m curious about what you do. Can you really work miracles?”
The rebbe ignored the unmistakable irony in my voice and gazed at me thoughtfully for a long moment. “I think you have a misconception about the role of a Chasidic rebbe,” he said in a dry, analytical tone. “A person doesn’t feel good in the world if he or she is all alone. That’s why people need a rebbe. A Chasidic rebbe is, in essence, a support system.
“There is a special relationship between a Chasid and his rebbe. But to be satisfactory it can’t be based on blind obedience. I want my Chasidim to understand me—why I do certain things, the way I see the world—and then to act on that understanding. A Chasid shouldn’t be a robot. His relationship with me, or with any rebbe, should make him more sensitive.”
“I thought Chasidic rebbes were supposed to be wonder workers, intercede with God, act as an advocate to heaven,” I said.
The rebbe smiled, recognizing the phrase from his brochure. “The role of a rebbe depends upon the needs of his Chasidim,” he said. “Those who dealt with more ignorant kinds of Jews went in for fairy tales and legends about the rebbe. Others, like the Lubavitcher, became total authority figures for their Chasidim. To a large extent, a rebbe has to be responsive to the needs and limitations of the people he leads.
“Now in the case of our dynasty, when my father came to Boston he found Chasidim here from various courts. All of them had different ideas about what a rebbe should be. He had to be flexible, appeal to everyone, give each person what he needed. That was my father’s way, and it’s mine.”
“You mean, if somebody expects miracles, then you perform miracles?” I asked, and this time he sighed. “No, I don’t perform miracles. No Chasidic rebbe can do the supernatural. A good rebbe is like a top doctor, a specialist. If your family doctor needs some help in dealing with a problem, he refers you to an expert. This expert can’t perform miracles, but he can get the most out of his training and knowledge, the most out of the natural. Of course, some experts are quacks,” he added dryly.
I found his candor disarming. “To be honest, from my perspective as an Israeli, most of them seem like quacks,” I said. “Why are people like the Satmar rebbe so intolerant?”
“I think you may misunderstand him,” he said. “I was just in Brooklyn for a visit with the Satmar—our families have a special relationship. And believe me, he’s a very fine man. But our world is based on different premises than yours, and it’s not always easy to understand one another.”
The Bostoner was in a reflective mood that morning, and he turned my interview into a monologue. His topics were seemingly unrelated—the place of women in Judaism, the relationship between faith and science, Massachusetts state politics, town planning in Jerusalem—but somehow he managed to connect them, displaying a subtle intelligence and a surprisingly moderate view of the world.
I was determined not to be seduced, however. “Let me ask you something, rabbi,” I said. “Are you a Zionist?”
“A Zionist? Of course I’m a Zionist. I may not agree with every single policy of the Israeli government, but is that a reason to punish Israel?”
“A lot of Chasidim seem to think so,” I said, and he sighed again. “Look, I have a lot of followers in Har Nof, in Yerushalaim. The neighborhood where they live is ninety-seven percent Orthodox. But the other three percent here have rights, too. So I told my supporters, don’t close the streets to traffic on Shabbes—let those who want to drive, drive. We can make Shabbes here without stopping the traffic.” I noticed that when he said “here,” he meant Jerusalem.
“You see,” he continued, “ ‘Shabbes’ used to be the most beautiful word in the Jewish vocabulary. And the stone throwers have turned it into a curse, a threat. When a Jew hears the word ‘Shabbes’ he should think of flowers, not stones.”
“What about here in America?” I asked. “A lot of American Jews don’t even know what the word ‘Shabbes’ means.”
The rebbe nodded in agreement. “We’ve been doing outreach programs in Boston since 1950. Singing, dancing—you’d think such things are old-fashioned, foreign to American students. But it’s surprising—a lot of assimilated students respond to it very strongly. I think Americans may be missing certain things in life, certain spiritual things. We respect them, even if they’re not religious. We try to understand them, and to remember that it isn’t their fault. They haven’t had a chance to learn.
“But the problem is, what will keep them ‘yidden’ in the future? Most of the liberal Jews who come to Harvard or MIT don’t have any Yiddishkeit and they don’t want any. The ones who want it will find it, but the majority will marry goyim. It’s happening now. And their children won’t be Jews. We real Jews, with everything we’ve got, can’t hold on to our Judaism here in America; what chance does the child of a mixed marriage have?” He spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, but there was real pain in his eyes.
There was a knock on the door and the rebbe’s secretary came in to remind him that his next appointment was waiting. I looked at my watch and was amazed to see that we had been talking for almost two hours.
“I’d like to tell you something personal,” I said. “I’m not religious, and I have a pretty cynical view of what Orthodoxy is in Israel. But talking to you makes me almost wish that I had a rebbe.”
Horowitz smiled gently. “Don’t be so surprised. Everyone needs a rebbe sometimes.”
“Who’s your rebbe?” I asked, and for the first time in our conversation I had caught him off guard.
“Good question,” he said in a soft voice. “You know once, in Jerusalem, a man had a problem, and he decided to travel to Poland to consult with a famous rebbe. His friend said, ‘Why leave Jerusalem? After all, here you have the Kotel, the Wailing Wall.’ And the man said, ‘I’m going to Poland because I want a rebbe who can answer back when I talk to him.’
“You see, my father’s example is always before me. I try to imagine what he would do,” the Bostoner said in a wistful tone. “But I don’t have a rebbe who can answer back.” Suddenly his eyes cleared, and his voice resumed its matter-of-fact tone. “Nu, that’s just the way it is. There are occupational hazards in every profession. Even mine.”