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Rochester and I both overslept the next morning, and it was a scramble to get him fed and walked, scarf down some breakfast myself, and head to Shomrei Torah for my second week of Bible study. I also wanted to thank Daniel Epstein for helping with the Yiddish translation.
Rabbi Goldberg had already started when Rochester and I arrived, though, so I slid into a chair beside Daniel with a quick apology. Rochester moved over to sniff Sadie and then slump down beside her. “Welcome,” Rabbi said. “We’ve just begun discussing this week’s parasha, a Torah reading called Ki Tavo. What God is telling us here is basically not to procrastinate, not to put off obeying God’s commandments, because we’re never going to have that stress-free day with no other responsibilities. We must utilize all our days to the maximum.”
He sighed. “This parasha has special meaning to me, because of the recent death of my brother Joel. Did I spend time every day showing him that I loved him? No. Did I do my best to help him through his illness? I have to admit that I did not. There were always other pressures, from life, other family, members of the congregation. What God is telling us here is to realize those obligations, both to the great spirit and to those around us, and not procrastinate in fulfilling them.”
I thought of Lili, in Florida with her mother. She had delayed in dealing with Senora Weinstock’s illness, and this was the result—an emergency visit to try and patch things up. That wasn’t good for either of them, or her brother and sister-in-law.
What could she do, though, from Pennsylvania? There was only so much one could accomplish in a phone call. I knew that, from my regulated calls to my father from prison as he was in his last days. I had felt terrible about my inability to be there with him, blaming the California penal system rather than accepting the responsibility for my own actions. Since then I’d come to peace with the situation – my father knew that I loved him. He had someone to take care of him, and he didn’t linger in pain waiting for me to come to him.
I was startled out of my reverie when Rochester came over to sniff my hand. I petted him and he settled beside me.
“This parasha also mentions bikkurim, the first fruits,” the rabbi continued. “That it is our obligation to take our first ripened fruits to the Temple. But this is not a tithe, or a requirement to feed the priests. Instead, it’s a way to remind us that we are not the Creator, that all we have is a gift from God. Everything from the fruits of the vine to our loved ones.”
We talked for a while, and then the rabbi wished us Shalom, and everyone stood up to leave. I walked over to him and asked, “Do you know where in Europe your family came from?”
“Back then, it was all Russia,” he said. “My father’s parents came from Lithuania, and my mother’s father from Belarus. Not sure about my mother’s mother—we could never find a town by the name she mentioned on the map.”
“But not Berlin? Or Germany?”
He shook his head. “Why?”
“Just something I’m working on.”
The rabbi lowered his voice. “I’m worried. Aaron Feinberg has been pressing me for details about what the police know about Joel’s death. He has been cloaking it with the idea that he’s protecting the congregation, but I’m worried that he may be collecting evidence to get me removed as rabbi. Just like what happened in Milwaukee.”
So the rabbi was worried about losing his job. Worried enough to have killed his brother to protect it? But then why ask me to snoop into Joel’s whereabouts and actions?
And why was Feinberg so interested in Joel’s death? Did he know more about what had gone on that evening than he was letting on?
“I was able to figure out Joel’s email password,” the rabbi continued. “I started looking through what he’d been reading and writing. He seemed to be focused on something that had happened during the Holocaust that still had reverberations today. But it was too upsetting for me to read.”
He looked at me. “You have a computer background, don’t you? If I gave you the password, could you look through my brother’s email account and see if there’s anything there that might tell me what he wanted from me?”
A tiny jolt of electricity buzzed through my brain. Offered access to someone’s private email? A password into someplace online I didn’t belong? That was just what had gotten me into trouble in the past. But because I was doing it on the rabbi’s behalf, it wouldn’t be illegal.
But I might be able to help the rabbi, and maybe even help Rick bring Joel Goldberg’s killer to justice. Of course I had to say yes.
I gave the rabbi my email address, thanked him and wished him shalom, and then put Rochester’s leash on and hurried out to catch up with Daniel Epstein. He was leaning heavily on his cane, his shoulders hunched, and his face looked grayer and more lined than it had only a few days before when I’d seen him at his home.
“Thanks for the translation,” I said. “It’s very interesting.”
“You’re welcome. It was a challenge to figure out some of the Yiddish.”
Aaron Feinberg joined us then, wearing a dark suit, crisp white shirt and blood-red tie. “You’re a translator now?” he asked Epstein. “Ir leyenen Yiddish?”
“I can read it, but not as well as I wish,” Daniel said. “Mostly I grew up speaking it with my parents. How about you?”
“My father spoke German but not Yiddish,” Feinberg said. “He was raised in a secular family. But I learned a little from listening to my mother and her family. Can’t read any of it, though.”
“Steve found a document in Yiddish he needed help understanding. A Holocaust survivor’s story.”
Feinberg turned to me. “Why would you care about such a thing? That’s old news to someone your age.”
So much for the “never forget” mantra that had been drilled into us in Sunday school. “I hope the Holocaust is still important for generations to come,” I said, a bit icily.
Feinberg humphed and stalked away. “I think you offended our esteemed president,” Epstein said with a smile. “He’s getting more and more touchy lately.” He leaned close. “I think he’s worried someone younger will challenge him for synagogue presidency.”
“Well, I believe what I said. George Santayana said those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, and I’d rather not get rounded up and placed in an internment camp or a gas chamber.”
“I agree with that. I heard too many stories of the camps when I was a child.”
“I’ve been thinking about that paper and how it might have ended up behind the wall at the old shul. Did you ever worship there?”
“Oh, yes, it’s where I celebrated my bar mitzvah. The rabbi then reminds me a lot of our Rabbi Goldberg. Young and enthusiastic. What a terrible shame he was dead only a few years later.”
“I read about his death when I was doing some research online, but I couldn’t find any information. Do you know what happened to him?”
“I don’t remember the details, but I know no one ever found out who killed him. It was a real tragedy, that. I collected all the newspaper articles about his death, if you want to know more.”
“I’d appreciate that. I’m not sure what I’m looking for but I feel like something happened back in the 1940s that might have some reverberations today.”
“I’m going home now. Would you like to stop by? Or do you have to be at work?”
“I’m my own boss,” I said, which was technically true, though I did report to the college president. “If you don’t mind that I bring Rochester with me, I can come by now.”
Epstein reached down to scratch Rochester’s head with the hand that wasn’t balanced on the cane. “A sweet dog like you is always welcome at my house,” he said.
I took Rochester over to the woods beside the sanctuary for a sniff and a pee, and by the time we got back to my car and drove to Epstein’s house, he was just pulling his battered Toyota sedan into his garage.
“Everything is in my office, the second bedroom on the right,” Epstein said as he ushered us inside. He stopped to scratch behind Rochester’s ears, and the dog gave him a goofy grin. “Most of the documents from back then are organized by years, piled on the shelves. You’ll forgive me if I don’t lead you up there.”
“I’ll be fine.” I started up the stairs as Rochester followed Epstein into the living room. I knew that my dog would be well-taken care of while I immersed myself in whatever Epstein had collected.
The second bedroom had a desk, an ergonomic chair, and built in cabinets along the walls. The desk was piled with papers, and there were shopping bags full of more paper in a neat row along one wall.
I began sorting through Epstein’s folders to find the material from the time after the Second World War. I felt like an archaeologist sifting through layers of history.
I sat on the floor with a teetering stack of newspapers, magazines and manila folders and began to go through them. I heard Epstein talking to Rochester, and the click of doggie toenails on a wooden floor somewhere, and then I was quickly lost in the 1940s.
Daniel had been born in 1932, and graduated from Trenton High in 1948. I found the program from his graduation and scanned through the names, some of them the same as those I’d found in the archives of Jewtown.
He had saved an article from the Trenton Times about the graduating class, and he was one of the few who was headed to college—New Jersey State Teachers College at Trenton, in his case. That was the predecessor to Trenton State, which had eventually become the College of New Jersey.
Rochester came into the room and sniffed at the pile beside me. I reached out to pet him as I flipped through a lot of stuff from Epstein’s college years—old football programs, dance cards, papers he’d written and tests he’d taken. Man, this guy hadn’t thrown anything away, had he?
Rochester lifted his paw and pushed the pile of material over, scattering everything on the tongue-and-groove flooring. “Oh, crap,” I said. He had his nose down on one particular folder, and when I picked it up I found that Epstein had labeled it “Rabbi Sapinsky.”
“Good boy,” I said to Rochester, even though it was going to be a pain to clean up all the paperwork. “This is just what I was looking for.”
He slumped down on the floor beside me, his back resting against my thigh, and I began to read. The first papers were programs from High Holy Day services at the old shul, where he’d been asked to read from the Torah one Yom Kippur. Beneath those was a series of articles from the Trentonian, the old morning paper, and the Trenton Evening Times.
We’d gotten both papers delivered when I was a kid, the Trentonian a tabloid that came before breakfast, while the Trenton Times showed up in the afternoon.
The first mention of Rabbi Sapinsky came on a March day in the Times. The headline of the short article was “Rabbi Found Dead in Jewtown.”
The body of Rabbi Jacob Sapinsky, 50, was found in the sanctuary of his synagogue, Shomrei Torah on New Street, late yesterday evening. The rabbi was not known to be in poor health, though according to a police source he had been very involved with the Hebrew Sheltering Home. This facility, which has brought many Eastern European immigrants to Trenton, has been cited as a hotbed of contagious diseases including lung disease, influenza and tuberculosis.
The paper didn’t mention whether the rabbi had died of natural causes or something more violent, just inferred that because he had helped immigrants he might have caught something from one of them. It was the kind of xenophobic attitude I expected from certain right-wing publications even today.
The next morning’s article, from the Trentontian, was much more inflammatory, with a big headline that read “Second Murder in Jewtown.”
According to the writer, the police had revealed further details of the rabbi’s death; he had been shot at close range, his body discovered at the shul an hour after the end of the evening service.
The article went on to imply that crime was rising in Trenton because of an influx of Jews and other refugees from Eastern Europe. This was the second homicide in six months in Jewtown, the reporter noted, and he believed that the rabbi’s murder was a symptom of discord between established residents and new immigrants.
A second murder, before Rabbi Sapinsky? Who was the victim? There was nothing in Epstein’s archive about that earlier crime.
There were a few more articles on the rabbi’s death, but no new details were revealed, and it appeared that no one was ever charged. Beneath the articles was a single sheet of paper that reminded me of the mimeographed newsletters that were common when I was a kid, before everyone had access to copying machines. This one was headlined “To the members of Shomrei Torah,” and the blue printing was fuzzy and fading. At least it was written in English so I didn’t need anyone to translate it for me.
“Our rabbi’s death was a tragedy,” I read. “But members of Shomrei Torah are cautioned to avoid agitating with regard to the cause of his death. The Jewish position in the United States is still tenuous, and as a minority it is in our best interest to retain a low profile. Calls for further investigation by the police can only cause our community to be in the spotlight in a negative manner.”
The message was unsigned, and I wondered if it had come from an individual member or from the office of the shul.
When I was young, my grandmother and my great-aunts viewed everything that happened through the lens of “is it good for the Jews?” When a Jewish actor or musician won an award, they kvelled. When a Jew was arrested for theft or accused of some other crime, they agonized over the larger implications for us and our people.
Statistics I had found noted that the Jewish population of Trenton during that time comprised about six percent of the total. Was this is a case of fear of xenophobia? Or was someone trying to cover up the rabbi’s murder?
I went downstairs with a pile of material I wanted to take a closer look at. Daniel Epstein was dozing in an easy chair, but he woke at the sound of my footsteps on the wood floor. The poor guy looked ancient, and I hoped that he’d be able to get back to sleep after Rochester and I left.
“Do you mind if I borrow this material? I’ll bring it all back when I’m done.”
“Have you found something interesting?” He sat up in his chair and pulled on his glasses, and he looked a decade younger, and more vibrant.
“I read the articles you saved from the newspaper. But there was never any mention of a solution to the rabbi’s murder.”
“It was a shonda, that,” he said, using the Yiddish word for a sin. “People in the Jewish community wanted the murders hushed up because they were afraid the goyim would rise up against us if they thought we were criminals.”
“You said murders,” I said, remembering the brief note I’d read about a second death in Jewtown before the Rabbi’s. “There was another?”
“A cousin of the Namias family, I believe. At least, he stayed with them for a while. He worked at the junkyard they owned on New Street.”
“Do you know what happened to him?”
“He was found dead in an alley beside the junkyard. But Henry would know more.”
“Henry Namias? From the rabbi’s Talmud study group?”
“That’s the one. You should talk to him. I’ll call him if you want, introduce you.”
I said that would be great, and he made the call. “Henry, it’s Daniel Epstein,” he said. Then he looked confused. He looked up at me. “Awful things, these answering machines and voice mail. I never know if I’m talking to a person or a machine.” Then he turned back to the phone and left a message for Henry to call him.
Daniel already had my phone number, and he promised to call me once he’d spoken to Namias. “He’s an alter kocker, that one,” he said, using the name for a cranky old man. “But don’t you worry, I’ll soften him up for you.”
By then, Rochester had his head in Epstein’s lap. “As if anybody needs to be softened up for you, you sweet boy,” he said, scratching behind Rochester’s ears.
I had long ago accepted that people often liked my dog better than they did me. I hoped that might be the case with Henry Namias, too.
I wasn’t sure at all what I was looking for, but it seemed that the more I dug, the more unsolved murders in the past I came up with. Had Joel figured something out about those crimes? There was no statute of limitations on murder, but it was doubtful that whoever had killed Rabbi Sapinsky, and Henry Namias’s cousin, was still alive and able to have killed Joel. I’d have to look back at the time line to be sure, though.
