New York – When Judith S. Lewis was being hired three years ago as rabbi of the Riverdale Temple in the Bronx, a board member in the temple’s Reform congregation made a prediction. The rabbi who led the Orthodox synagogue just a few blocks away, Joel I. Rosenblatt, would not deign to meet her.
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The self-appointed Cassandra offered no specific reasons for his prophecy, and perhaps he assumed no explanation was even necessary. Doctrinal disagreements over such basic issues as interfaith marriage and female equality in worship had polarized the Reform and Orthodox movements for decades. Some Orthodox rabbis would refer to their Reform counterparts only by the studiously neutral noun “clergy.”
A week or so after being installed, Rabbi Lewis picked up her phone. It was Rabbi Rosenblatt, the first of Riverdale’s numerous rabbis to formally welcome her to the neighborhood. She couldn’t say she was entirely surprised. She knew something her board member didn’t: Rabbi Lewis’s husband, Otto Kucera, was a funeral director who had worked with Rabbi Rosenblatt many times over nearly 20 years.
“Anyone good enough for Otto to marry,” Rabbi Rosenblatt, 52, recalled in a recent interview, “was good enough for me to have as a colleague.”
So they met for coffee in the summer of 2006 at a kosher restaurant, the Corner Cafe, and they crossed paths again some months later at a Jewish Federation fund-raiser at the temple. Then they, like so many other busy New Yorkers, kept promising to get together again soon, and kept being too busy to do it.
So it remained until May 20, 2009, and the most unimaginable occasion for a reunion. That night, the New York police and F.B.I. agents arrested four men on charges of trying to bomb two Jewish buildings in Riverdale: Rabbi Lewis’s Riverdale Temple and Rabbi Rosenblatt’s Riverdale Jewish Center. To those suspects, described by law enforcement officials as jailhouse converts to Islam and jihadi wannabes, the distinctions between Reform and Orthodox were either irrelevant or invisible.
Rabbi Lewis, 55, had been walking through the lobby of the temple about 8:15 that night when she spotted two people who turned out to be plainclothes police officers. They told her they were staking out an apartment across the street, looking for burglars. She joked that if they had to shoot, they should try not to break the temple’s new windows.
After she went into an administrative meeting, an S.U.V. pulled into the parking space reserved for the temple’s executive director. The building superintendent ordered the driver to move or get towed. The driver and several companions pulled around to the main entrance and, according to police accounts, planted what they believed to be bombs.
When Rabbi Lewis left for the night at 9:15, she found her route down Independence Avenue blocked by police officers and F.B.I. agents with helmets and machine guns. She was told cryptically, “Everything’s over.” Listening to the radio on her drive home to New Jersey, the rabbi heard that her temple had been a target of a terrorist attack.
Meanwhile, Rabbi Rosenblatt had just come home to Riverdale from visiting sick congregants at a hospital in Queens and then leading the evening prayer service at synagogue. He was just lifting his fork — the sort of detail that events have etched in his memory — when the phone rang with the community-liaison police officer for the neighborhood on the line.
“Rabbi, could you open the shul for a meeting?” Rabbi Rosenblatt recalls the officer asking.
“When?”
“Now,” the officer replied.
As the rabbi unlocked Riverdale Jewish Center 10 minutes later, a member showed him a printout from the Internet: terrorists trying to bomb two unnamed Riverdale synagogues. Moments later, when Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly arrived, Rabbi Rosenblatt found out that one was his.
“It was almost surreal,” he recalled the other day. “I almost felt the impulse to laugh. And not because of any humor. Because of the absurdity that we would be a target.”
In fact, over the last generation, several similar attacks had occurred in Riverdale. In 1989, someone firebombed the offices of The Riverdale Press, a weekly newspaper, after it published an editorial defending the writer Salman Rushdie, the subject of a fatwa ordering his death for his book “The Satanic Verses.”
On the eve of Yom Kippur in 2000, early in the second intifada, several Palestinian-American men tossed Molotov cocktails at a Conservative synagogue, Adath Israel. One of the men, Mazin Assi, was convicted of attempted arson, weapons charges and hate crimes, and is serving a 15-year prison sentence.
In the immediate maelstrom on May 20, Rabbi Lewis and Rabbi Rosenblatt reached first toward their own members. Rabbi Lewis had an entire contingent of parents, teachers and children showing up for the temple’s preschool early the next morning. Rabbi Rosenblatt had many Holocaust survivors in his congregation, and he knew that “the idea of a synagogue under attack would stir up terrible memories.”
By 11:30 that night, Rabbi Rosenblatt had placed auto-calls to all 750 households in his congregation. Rabbi Lewis drafted a letter of reassurance and resolve to her congregation. Each one made sure on May 21, the day after, to hold to some elements of normality — for Rabbi Rosenblatt the morning Shaharit service, for Rabbi Lewis a trip to the mikvah (ritual bath) with two candidates for conversion.
Only that afternoon, nearly 24 hours after the arrests, had enough calm returned for Rabbi Rosenblatt to call Rabbi Lewis on her cellphone, interrupting her dinner. “How are you?” he asked. “How you holding up?” she responded. And he couldn’t resist adding, “It’s really a shame we don’t get together for coffee more often.”
So they went again to the Corner Cafe last Wednesday. They chatted about the Israeli model of “steely determination” in the face of terror. They talked about plans for the Shavuot holiday. They expressed both concern for the children of the arrested men and worry about what kind of Islam is being propagated in prison. And then it was time to finish their respective seltzers and resume the rest of life.
“In the aftermath,” Rabbi Rosenblatt said, “the re-embrace of the prosaic is so sweet. Every regular service feels so nice. Even the nudniks who bother me — I love every one of those nudniks now.”
Rabbi Lewis nodded and chuckled as only another rabbi could.
This is a vonderful precedent and b’yritzah hashem will provide an example for other rabbonim to reach out to their reform and conservative neighbors. Rather than treating them like goyim (or worse as some posters often suggest) we can draw them closer to yiddeshkeit by engaging them in dialogue. There is nothing wrong for two rabbonim to meet over a pastrami sandwich at a kosher restaurant and explore issues of common concern in their community. I’m not a big fan of “interfaith” services (even among yidden) but this type of cooperation should be encouraged.
Rabbi Rosenblatt has in the past supported The PLO and arafat and has even gone to washinton and pleaded for money to be given to them , What goes around comes around.No wonder they picked his shul. when you shake the bloody hands of a ARafat.. He has put his shul in danger and as well as the community by being a outspoken supporter of the oslow so called peace process,
and now he takes it one more step by holding interfaith services..its time for him to leave the shul and move on some where else with his agenda.
Is there any purpose in the endless rants everytime reform jews are mentioned? Has any of it improved our own level of avodas hashem or brought any of the reform closer to the truth?
To the Jews who want to mikarev everyone… Have you ever considered that the reform want to mikarev you to thier apikorses hashkafah? Now while I do agree that a tinok shenishba should be respected and treated warmly and fully welcome into any frum yids home, I definately do NOT share the same belief about the leaders of these apikorses movements.
Imo the reform movement in many instances distances themselves from the conservative and othodox. For example, If a reform synagogue has a social event, why must they serve traif food? If they have a soup kitchen for the poor, why must they serve traif food? If the high cost of kosher meat is a factor, then serve kosher dairy food. Why must a reform synagogue that has a soup kitchen one day a week have it on shabbat, and cook the food on shabbat? In some instances it seems like they want to intentionally distance themselves and provoke the ire of the rest of the Jewish community.
rabbi goldin and rabbi rosenblat were both involved in support of making peace with the plo and did go to washington to ask for aid to the plo. why dont you google this.. by the way i just read that the shul invited a muslim woman to pray with them on shabbos…
the idea of having dialogue with reforms will result in them becoming orthodox sounds like a good idea but in reality it works just the opposite. as in halacha we know that 1 treife piece of meat can make a whole pot of kosher meat to be treif. but even many pieces of kosher meat can not make a treife piece to become kosher (even when its butel it does not become kosher, you are just aloud to eat it.) so in conclusion, our ovos hakdoishim thought us that any orthodox rabbi has a responsibility to make sure to be separated from any so called jewish derech that is not in accordance with the “whole” torah. that does not mean that we have to hate a jew that is a TINUK SHENISHBE and was brought up reform but we have to make sure that we and our children know that their derech has NOTHING to do with yiddishkeit.
Rather than spending the day with each side spewing hate towards the goiyishness of reform and the arrogance of the orthodox, why tell us whether you see ANY value in limited contacts, some form of dialogue on common problems and perhaps a few social events that are geared so that all can participate in terms of kashruth and program content. Is this possible or just a fantasy of one who would like to see achdus among yidden in my lifetime.
The “paper of record” got it wrong! The rabbi’s name is JONATHAN Rosenblatt, not Joel. Wonder what else they got wrong?
I have been involved with these people, and while the majority of the reform community are unfortunately in the category of “tinok shenishbu” their so called “rabbis” are not. The are in the category of “maysis u’maidiach” and should be dealt with in that way. They know what they are doing and why it is wrong. Most of them are not fundamentally reform but just enjoy the money, Kovod of being a rabbi. They know that they are either not smart enough to be an orthodox rabbi or they are just baalei taiva. In any case I would say that on an individual basis we should try to be mekarev them. One by one. But the rabbi’s? Forget them. They are lost. Maybe when they won’t have any more congregants they will realize that their derech is wrong and then they will come to orthodoxy themselves. All the gedolim of today and yesteryear opposed having any dialogue with them and they were not wrong. Had they allowed any dialogue, there would have been “korbonos” on our side. And throught history there have been more modern rabbis who have had dialogue with them and for the most part they ended up sympathetic with these rabbis. Let us look at our gedolim for direction in this but I believe that I conveyed their message very well.
Why does it require the threat of terrorism to create some degree of unity among yidden. While I don’t expect either side to give much in terms of their theological differences, we should not be initimidated by those who say that even talking with jews who don’t accept and live their lives c’daas torah implies acceptance. We had the same debate last year at the inaugeral interfaith service where a well known Agudath Yisroel or RCA rebbe participated. By talking and cooperating on common concerns regarding security and EY we are not yielding one inch that reform practices violate torah and cannot be regarded as “ok” for yidden who follow another derech.
All the Gedolim said its assur to dialogue with them, but anonymous bloggers know better as usual.
at the parade today there was a great show of achdus with all types,of jews coming as one