The
Syrian-Jewish Empire of New York
Money in New
York
The Sy Empire
By ZEV CHAFETS
October 14, 2007
Geographically speaking, the Syrian
Jewish community of Brooklyn — 75,000 strong and growing fast — inhabits an
enclave running from Avenue I in the north to Avenue V in the south and
stretching eastward to Nostrand Avenue from West 6th Street. But the
community’s true boundaries are at once more expansive and more constricted.
The SY’s, as the community members call
themselves (pronounced “ess-why” — it’s a shorthand for “Syrian”), live in a
self-created entrepreneurial and mercantile empire whose current sources of
wealth are found everywhere from Coney Island to Shanghai. They are rich beyond
the dreams of their immigrant forebears. Many live in multimillion-dollar
mansions in the Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn, summer in fabulous seafront
homes on the Jersey shore and repair to winter enclaves in Florida. They have
their own synagogue in China. Businessmen from the community spend so much time
on the road that a small shop called Seuda’s in the Brooklyn enclave prepares
packages of kosher Syrian delicacies that can be picked up on the way to the
airport.
Yet no matter how far they roam or how
worldly and successful they become, the SY’s of Brooklyn are bound by an
invisible fence known as the Edict — a rabbinical threat of excommunication so
dire and so powerful that it has fixed the true parameters of the community for
generations. The Edict was issued in Brooklyn by five Syrian rabbis in 1935.
They had a simple goal: to preserve the age-old Syrian Jewish community in the
New World. This was not a
unique challenge. Every immigrant group in the United States has faced
something like it. Most struggle for a generation or two to maintain some sense
of identity and solidarity and then make their peace with the assimilative
power of America.
The Syrian Jews might have done the same.
They arrived in New York at the start of the last century and settled on the
Lower East Side of Manhattan. But the Eastern European Jews who dominated the
Lower East Side at the time disdained them as Arabische Yidden — Arab Jews.
Some of the Ashkenazim openly doubted that these foreigners from farther east
were Jews at all. The Syrian Jews were deeply insulted.
They are a proud people; community legend
boasts that King David built the first synagogue in Aleppo, in what is now Syria. The SY’s came to
derisively refer to the Ashkenazim as “J-Dubs,” a play on the first and third
letters of the English word “Jew.” As soon as they could, the Syrians moved, en
masse, to Brooklyn.
This independence was, in a way, natural.
Back in the Ottoman Empire, religious communities that paid their taxes and
kept out of trouble were generally allowed to live with a fair degree of
autonomy. Why should the New World be different? But the Syrian Jews soon
learned that in America, self-sufficiency alone did not ensure their survival.
They hadn’t reckoned on the additional risk posed by the allure of the open
society. In the old country, the Syrians had been merchants for generations,
and they started off in America as peddlers.
As they prospered, they began opening stores
in Manhattan. Conducting business outside the enclave meant meeting and dealing
with non-Syrians, speaking proper English and demonstrating at least a
rudimentary understanding of the customs and practices of the new land. These
were skills worth learning. SY kids were sent to public schools to assimilate —
though only up to a point. The goal was to produce children who, in the words
of a community maxim, were “100 percent American in Manhattan and 100 percent
Syrian in Brooklyn.”
The
Syrian Jewish Empire of New York - Part 2
Money in New York
The Sy Empire
By ZEV CHAFETS
In school, though, the SY kids mixed with
other children, not only J-Dubs but also gentiles. The gentiles posed the
gravest concern. Friendships with them developed, love affairs sprouted. There
were intermarriages. Some Christian partners even volunteered to convert to
Judaism.
Enter the rabbis with their Edict, in 1935.
They wanted to build an iron wall of self-separation around the community. They
couldn’t do this the Hassidic way, dressing the men in costumes of ancient
design, physically segregating women and making sure that children received
nothing in the way of useful secular education. After all, the Syrian men
couldn’t be expected to make money if they looked like figures from
18th-century Poland.
And so the rabbis turned to the heart of the
matter: matrimony. Most American Jewish communities in those days (and many
today) viewed intermarriage as a taboo. Conversion, however, was a loophole.
The Edict intended to close that loophole. It proclaimed, “No male or female
member of our community has the right to intermarry with non-Jews; this law
covers conversion, which we consider to be fictitious and valueless.”
A 1946 clarification added specifics: “The
rabbi will not perform Religious Ceremonies” for such unkosher couples. “The
Congregation’s premises will be banned to them for use of any religious or
social nature. . . . After death of said person, he or she is not to be buried
on the Cemetery of our community . . . regardless of financial considerations.”
With these words, Chief Rabbi Jacob Kassin
effectively excommunicated any member of his flock who married a partner with
gentile blood. (There have been exceptions for converts judged to be “sincere”
— that is, those who converted without the intention to marry — but these have
been extremely rare and always controversial.)
The Edict was a bold move. No Jewish community in the world
(other than two small Syrian congregations in Mexico and Argentina) has ever
had such an extreme rule. Of course, enforcing it is something else. The rabbis
had no means of coercion. If the Edict was going to work, it would be up to the
tightly-knit clans of the enclave to enforce it on their own children.
At the end of this past August, Jakie Kassin, a
community leader, grandson of the author of the Edict and son of the current
chief rabbi, received a laminated wooden plaque measuring 4 feet by 2 feet for
his inspection. It was the most recent incarnation of the Edict. The original
Edict was a document signed by five dignitaries. Since then, it has been
reaffirmed in each generation by a progressively larger number of signatories.
The newest version, issued last year, was signed by 225 rabbis and lay leaders,
testimony to the growth of the community and the enduring power of the Edict.
“Never accept a convert or a child born of a convert,” Kassin told me
by phone, summarizing the message. “Push them away with strong hands from our
community. Why? Because we don’t want gentile characteristics.”
To
be continued..
The Syrian Jewish Empire of
New York - Part 3
Money in New York
The Sy Empire
By ZEV CHAFETS
Abadie is a cerebral fellow with a gentle manner, married to a J-Dub he
met at Yeshiva University.
But when it comes to the Edict, he is as unbending as Kassin, if a little more
diplomatic. “It’s really a matter of statistics,” he explained to me. “Except
for the Orthodox, the American Jewish community is shrinking, disappearing. In
two generations, most of their grandchildren won’t even be Jews. But our
community is growing. We have large families, five or six children. And only a
tiny fraction of our kids leave. The Edict is what makes that true.”
Abadie and Kassin agree that the vast majority of SY youth abide by the
strictures of the Edict. “Ninety-nine
percent accept it,” Kassin said. “When someone doesn’t, it’s painful, but it’s
better to lose a kid here and there and save the community. Families get
sick over it, sure, but that’s how it is.”
Kassin knows this from personal experience. His sister Anna ran off with a gentile.
Naturally it was a great scandal in the community, but the chief rabbi didn’t
bend the rules for his daughter. “We cut her off,” Jakie Kassin told me. “We
didn’t see her for 25 years. But we never stopped hoping she’d come back.
Finally, after all these years, she made contact. We told her she was welcome to
come back, but not with her husband or kids. She’s not here yet, but we
do talk on the telephone.”
In addition to the strictures imposed by the Edict in instances of
proposed intermarriage, any outsider who wants to marry into a Syrian family —
even a fellow Jew — is subject to thorough genealogical investigation. That
means producing proof, going back at least three generations and attested to by
an Orthodox rabbi, of the candidates’ kosher bona fides. This disqualifies the
vast majority of American Jews, who have no such proof. “We won’t take them —
not even if we go back three or four generations — if someone in their line was
married by a Reform or Conservative rabbi, because they don’t perform marriages
according to Orthodox law,” Kassin said. Even Orthodox candidates are screened,
to make sure there are no
gentiles or converts lurking in the family tree. In addition, all
prospective brides and grooms must take marital purity classes and pass a test
for HIV.
The force of the Edict is lasting: the children of people who have been
excluded under the terms of the Edict are themselves declared ineligible to
marry into the community. A local rabbi in the community told me the remarkable
story of a woman who confronted this fact. The woman, he explained, is the
daughter of a Syrian Jewish man and a gentile who converted to Judaism. The
woman was raised as a Jew, but the community regarded this as meaningless and
had no contact with the family. Years later, the woman met and fell in love
with a young SY. She moved to Israel and underwent a long and exacting Orthodox
conversion. When she returned to the enclave, she was told that her conversion
meant nothing — her father’s sin still made her ineligible for marriage.
(Speaking publicly about such matters is strongly discouraged among SY’s; the
rabbi spoke only on condition of anonymity and declined to name the woman.)
According to the rabbi, the community’s refusal to recognize the woman’s
conversion drew the ire of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, at the time the chief Sephardic
rabbi of Israel. Rabbi Yosef, a man of volcanic temperament, came all the way
from Jerusalem to Brooklyn and informed the local rabbis that he, himself,
vouched for the girl’s Jewish authenticity. “There he was, in person, in Shaare
Zion” — the largest SY synagogue — “dressed in his robes and vestments,” the
rabbi, who was there, told me. “He gave an oath that he had personally affixed
his name to the girl’s conversion document. She was as Jewish as he was, and he
wanted her recognized as a member of our community.”
“And the answer was?” I asked the rabbi.
“No.”
“No? You turned down the chief rabbi of Israel?”
“We felt it was necessary,” the rabbi explained. “If we let our kids marry gentiles, they’ll try to
slip their kids back into the community via conversion. And then the
Edict will lack teeth.”
This affair nearly caused a schism in the Syrian community, which
officially regards Rabbi Yosef as the world’s most authoritative Talmudic
scholar. A group of dissident rabbis later met at the summer enclave in Deal,
N.J., and accepted the conversion as valid: she could marry. They reasoned that
it was wrong to humiliate Ovadia Yosef. They also reasoned that accepting this
case as precedent would actually have a deterrent effect: how many other
converts could expect the chief rabbi of Israel to go to bat for them?
continued..
ed: I would have given
anything to see that moment
Posted by Aimée Dassa
Kligman at 12/21/2007
10:00:00 PM
The Syrian Jewish Empire of New York - Part 4
Every Syrian rabbi is supposed to discuss the Edict from
the pulpit at least once a year. When Lance Suede was 15, he heard his
rabbi explain the rule. “It struck me as racist,” he recalls. “I was so upset
by it that I went home and banged on the kitchen table in anger and
frustration.” Today, he says he thinks it may have been a premonition.
By SY standards, Suede had an
unconventional upbringing. When he was 7, his parents moved from the enclave to
Long Island — Ashkenazi territory. There he met J-Dubs. The experience left him
both admiring and unsettled. “They made me see the Syrian community in a
different way,” told me recently. We were sitting in the starkly beautiful
conference room of the Midtown law firm where he is a partner specializing in
white-collar criminal defense. “In Brooklyn,” he went on, “the materialism was
so far over the top it’s hard to even explain. I found Ashkenazi Jews more
intellectual. They valued scholarship and education. They could be
materialistic, too — this is America, after all — but it was tempered by their
love of learning.”
Syrian Jews have always regarded
advanced secular education with something like suspicion. Not only does it
promote outside values, it also distracts a boy from his proper role as an
apprentice in the family business. “To understand us, you have to know that we
are profoundly Middle Eastern,” Suede said. “Education is never the most
important thing. People in the community thought we were weird because my older
brothers and I became professionals.”
Suede’s parents grew homesick for the
enclave and returned when he was 15. But he had already been bitten by the bug
of secular education and liberalism. He attended Brandeis University and
Harvard Law School. Then he willingly returned to the community. “It’s a
magical place,” he told me. “You come home from school and there are 10 women
in the kitchen, your mother and aunts and cousins, cooking special Syrian
delicacies. Every celebration is large, full of relatives. The etiquette is
what they call fadal — just come over, don’t be formal. Very Middle Eastern.
Very seductive and sensual.”
Suede began breaking the rules when he
attended a convention in Manhattan for the National Organization for
Women, where he met a gentile woman from
Idaho named Kim Croffoot. Just attending a feminist gathering was an odd thing
for a Syrian man to do; SY females are expected to stay home, rear children,
socialize and, if possible, dazzle. To be assessed bijan, or gorgeous, is a
high compliment.
Suede and Croffoot fell in love. She
received a Reconstructionist conversion to Judaism and they made plans to
marry. Suede expected resistance, but he underestimated its force. “Of course I
knew my parents would be upset,” he said. “But I thought time would heal the
rift. What son wouldn’t think that?”
He was wrong. “To this day, my wife and I and our children aren’t
welcome in the family,” he told me. “I knew that generally you weren’t supposed
to marry a convert. But when I heard the rabbi say that in shul, I thought that
was just, you know, a strongly held opinion.” This is not as implausible
as it seems. In Long Island, nobody knew anything about Edicts. And Suede’s
parents never said a word: “When they saw how strongly I felt about racism, how
I had banged on the table when I was 15, well, maybe they just didn’t want to
get into a fight over it.”
Suede, who now uses the surname Croffoot-Suede,
had another reason to suppose his family would eventually relent. Back in the
1920s, he told me, his grandmother’s sister married a gentile. “There was a
scandal, but it eventually blew over,” he said. “I thought that’s how it would
be for us.” But the Edict applies only to events after 1935. Croffoot-Suede’s
grandmother’s sister had been effectively grandfathered into the community. He
had no such luck.
Croffoot-Suede expressed his feelings
by writing a play, “Syria, America,” which was performed in 2000 at the
Greenwich Street Theater. Its subject was love and betrayal among four SY young
men.
Last year, Croffoot-Suede’s grandmother
died. He attended the funeral, although he didn’t sit with the rest of the
family. Sensing a thaw, he brought his wife to the house of mourning in
Brooklyn. It turned out to be a serious mistake. “My sister simply refused to
meet my wife and she left to avoid it. She stormed out and we left, too. Next
morning, my father called at 6 and told me not to come back to the shiva. He
said he’d call later, and we could meet in the city for a meal and discuss it.
That felt a little better. But he never called about it. My parents have
sacrificed their relationship with me for the sake of the community.”
Despite his being ostracized,
Croffoot-Suede says he still feels the emotional power of the enclave and
affords the community a kind of grudging respect. “There are thousands of
people who grew up in the community and are raising kids there who would say
that it’s a fulfilling life,” he told me. “It can be very warm and loving — if
you follow the rules.”
One of the rules of the community
forbids indulging in promiscuous chit-chat with outsiders. This is a practice
the Syrians brought with them from the old country, where a nosy stranger might
be a business rival or a representative of the tax collector. Reporters, an
American inconvenience, are equally unpopular. The community is still stewing
about an article published in The New York Times last year that revealed the astronomical
cost of real estate in the enclave — one house sold in 2003 for $11 million,
which may have made it the most expensive house in Brooklyn.
My first trip to the enclave was
conducted by a guide who insisted on being granted anonymity. He emphasized the
need for discretion by recounting the cautionary tale of a man I later learned
was named Sam Toussie. Some years ago, a reporter had come from some
unremembered publication to write an “inside” story on the enclave. At the
time, Toussie was a member of the community in good standing, but he made the
colossal error of talking about SY affairs, on the record, to the journalist.
When this was discovered, he was ostracized. But that did not go far enough for
some of the hardliners, who, I was told, actually prayed for his death. When he
did die, at a relatively young age, his passing was taken as a sign. “Somebody
put the evil eye on him,” my guide told me darkly.
But the solidarity of the SY community
is based on more than fear of excommunication and the evil eye. There are
positive inducements as well. Chief among these are the support and charity
that the community shows to its members. It is an intensely social place;
weddings of 1,000 guests or more are common (there are volunteer societies that
loan out dishes, silverware and even tables and chairs to enable everyone to
entertain in a respectable fashion). Grown children often live within walking
distance of the parents, and family Sabbath dinners of 30 or 40 are the norm.
Being an SY means never having to say you are hungry. The community is
charitable to a fault: at Sunday-morning house parties and festive holiday
cruises, grandees compete by making donations to one another’s pet charities.
The result is the most generous
cradle-to-grave mutual-welfare society this side of the Saudi royal family. The
community’s annual spending on charity and other civic services, including
education, is around $100 million. “The services here are preconception to
postmortem,” David Greenfield, executive director of the recently formed
Sephardic Community Federation, told me.
An SY in good standing can expect free
K-12 parochial education and summer camps for the kids, access to a palatial
communal ritual bath, use of grand recreational facilities in a community center
now being doubled in size, high-level care for the aged and attention to
whatever material problems life may present. “If there are poor people among
us, we try to help,” Jakie Kassin told me. “If a person falters in business,
other men step in. I’ve even seen people in the same business, direct
competitors, raise money to put the man back on his feet.”
In the early 1990s, President Hafez
Assad of Syria allowed his country’s remaining Jews, numbering 6,000 or so, to
emigrate on condition that they didn’t go to Israel. Naturally, they went to
Brooklyn instead. The new SY’s, as they are called, provided the enclave with
fresh faces and some old-country authenticity. In return they were given
housing, free schooling and whatever assistance they needed to establish
themselves. “They even got us lawyers to take care of the citizenship process,”
a recent immigrant told me. “It’s not just the money. We came to the U.S. with
some money. It was the way they took care of us as brothers.”
Nonetheless, the SY’s say they do not
want to be portrayed as enormously rich. “That’s a misperception,” Greenfield
said. “There are about 50 very successful SY families. Another 20 to 30 percent
are what you could call upper-middle class. But maybe a third of the community
lives at twice the poverty level.”
These statistics are based on broad
interpretation of what counts as the community. Many of those on the bottom
rungs of the income ladder are non-Syrian Sephardic Jews, an inclusive term of
art the community uses for Jews from Muslim countries. You can find Egyptians,
Moroccans and Iraqis in the Syrian community. Even so, they are considered
second-class citizens. “Let’s just say that the real SY’s are dominant,” my
guide told me. “We set the tone. They join us, not the other way around.”
The non-Syrian Sephardim, many of whom
are Israeli citizens, do a lot of the labor and neighborhood shopkeeping.
“Israelis own the local grocery stores,” my guide informed me in a dismissive
tone as we cruised down the enclave’s commercial strip on Kings Highway. “How
much can a grocery store bring in, enough to take care of one or two families?”
The community’s major institutions tend to be administered by J-Dubs like David
Greenfield — experienced professionals willing, unlike most SY’s, to do
white-collar work for hire.
Greenfield, who once was a staff member
for Senator Joe Lieberman, is
currently running a voter-registration drive in the enclave. Traditionally, the
SY’s haven’t voted much, largely because of an aversion to showing up on
government registries. That has changed, though, mostly because of the
realization that voting can result in money for faith-based enterprises. The
community is 2-to-1 Democratic, but they are ardent free-traders and hawkish on
Israel and security; it is generally assumed that Bush took a majority of the
community’s votes in 2004.
In 1995, Rabbi Abraham Hecht of Shaare
Zion synagogue made one of the community’s first international political
headlines. Hecht is a J-Dub, a Chabadnik preacher widely admired in the
community for his polemical skills in English. During the days of the Oslo
Peace Accords, Hecht displayed his eloquence by instructing an assembly that Israeli leaders who hand over
territory in the Holy Land may, according to Jewish law, be killed.
Five months later, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was
assassinated in Tel Aviv by a Sephardic Israeli yeshiva student with a similar
point of view. The Israeli government banned Hecht as a security threat, and he
was suspended from his pulpit, but he still has supporters in the enclave. So
does Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who, despite his softness on converts, has found
financial backers for his theocratic Shas Party. Jakie Kassin claims, in fact,
that the party’s seed money was raised in his living room in Deal, N.J., in the
early ’80s. to be continued...
There aren’t many famous SY’s. The
actor Dan Hedaya, who played Carla’s sleazy ex-husband, Nick, on the TV comedy
“Cheers,” grew up in the community. So did the designer Isaac Mizrahi, although
his open homosexuality has made him persona non grata. Jerry Seinfeld’s mother,
Betty, is an SY, but she married a J-Dub (not that there’s anything wrong with
that, as Jerry might say) and brought up her family in Long Island, far from
the enclave. Still, according to one Seinfeld biographer, Jerry Oppenheimer,
she retained enough of her early training to warn her son never to marry a
convert.
For many years, the most famous SY in the world was Eddie Antar, known
professionally as Crazy Eddie. In the ’70s, he revolutionized the home
electronics business and created an empire.
Nobody did retail theater better than Crazy Eddie. His souk-smart
salesmen — many of them relatives and friends from the enclave — choreographed
the shopping experience, waltzing the zboon (SY slang for “customer”) in
well-rehearsed steps toward the be’aah, the sale. His ads (“His prices
are insane!”) were commercial performance art. And when he was caught
defrauding his investors for almost $100 million dollars and subsequently fled
to Israel, Eddie provided an international drama that ended in extradition and
prison.
The Crazy Eddie case became a cause célèbre, shattering longstanding
community rules of silence and decorum. Eddie’s J-Dub wife, Debbie, caught him
in flagrante delicto with his mistress, who also happened to be a J-Dub
named Debbie, on the last day of December 1983 — a confrontation remembered
among old-timers as the New Year’s Eve massacre. The massacre was a real
bean-spiller, and it was followed by the testimony of Eddie’s first cousin (and
partner and C.F.O.) Sam E. Antar on how the illegal schemes had been carried out.
This gave the United States Attorney prosecuting the case, Michael Chertoff
(now the secretary of the Department of Homeland
Security), more than enough to work with.
Eddie went away for six years.
Unlike the late Toussie, however, Eddie Antar was not expelled from the
community. In fact, both Sam and Eddie live in the enclave today. Sam has a
simple explanation. “They don’t usually take back rats,” he told me. “But
everybody in our community knew that Eddie was setting me up to take the fall,
especially after he skipped out to Israel leaving me holding the bag. I had
worked for the Antar family my whole life. But because of the betrayal factor,
I haven’t been ostracized. There was no edict against me.” As for Eddie, he is
still considered mi’shelanu, “one of us.” “He did his time,” Sam said.
“He paid the price. That’s the way people see it.”
Since the demise of Crazy Eddie and Nobody Beats the Wiz (another SY-owned
business, sold on the verge of bankruptcy by the Jemal family to Cablevision
for a reported $101 million in 1998), the shmatte trade has supplanted
electronics as the signature Syrian business. Various V.I.P.’s own national
companies like Century 21 department stores, the Rainbow shops, Conway stores,
and Jordache and Bonjour jeans. Most of the merchandise these days is imported
from the Far East, much of it through Wal-Mart and other
chains. Sam Walton was a mentor to many young SY businessmen, who, now grown
old and rich, still speak of him with a veneration usually reserved for
high-class cantorial singers and first-class kosher chefs.
The Cayre brothers, from one of the world’s richest families, according
to Forbes magazine, got rich in the ’70s producing Latin music on the Salsoul
label and then got much richer distributing videocassettes via Wal-Mart. Joseph
Cayre was also among the major financiers behind the World Trade Center’s Larry Silverstein.
Joe Sitt is another Sam Walton disciple, who has fondly recalled playing
at the old man’s knee on his father’s sales trips to Arkansas. Sitt made his
own money with Ashley Stewart, a line of upscale clothing marketed to plus-size
African-American women. Since then, he has branched out. His company, Thor
Equities, is currently engaged in a controversial effort to buy up most of
Coney Island and recreate it as a modern entertainment district.
SY moguls tend to prefer the family-business model. Of course, they tend
to be related to everyone else in the community. Including, it turns out,
Solomon Dwek. Dwek, universally known as “the rabbi’s son,” is indeed the scion
of a prestigious clan. His father is a highly regarded spiritual leader in the
SY summer enclave in Deal, N.J. Solomon, still in his early 30s, made a name
for himself as a high-stakes real estate developer in Monmouth County, N.J.
Then, one memorable day in April 2006, according to an F.B.I.
statement filed in federal court, he rolled up to the window of a PNC Bank
branch in Eatontown, N.J., deposited a personal check for $25.2 million and
later wired out by telephone $22.8 million against it. After the check bounced,
Dwek was arrested by the F.B.I. for bank fraud.
In the wake of the bust, Dwek’s investors naturally began wondering what
happened to their money. Solomon Dwek’s uncle Joseph Dwek claimed to be owed
upward of $60 million. A close associate, Isaac Franco, demanded $30 million.
Criminal and civil trials are pending in New Jersey. In all, the names of the
allegedly defrauded investors reads like the guest list of an enclave bar
mitzvah. It remains to be seen whether, under the circumstances, the SY
community can once more display the unity, forgiveness and sangfroid it
mustered for Crazy Eddie and Rabbi Hecht.
It’s a good bet they will. In March of this year, Chief Rabbi Saul
Kassin wrote this in an open letter to his followers: “There is nothing more
important than our unity.” Every ethnic leader in America talks about unity,
but there are precious few willing and able to sacrifice their own children for
its sake.
Seventy years after the promulgation of the Edict, it seems fair to say
that, taken on its own terms, it has been an almost uniquely successful tool of
social engineering. The enclave grows and thrives beyond the dreams of its
founders. It offers a secure economic future and a sweet family life to those
who remain within its confines. As for those who could not or would not fit in, well, every fight for
survival has its collateral damage.
“People have to make
a choice,” Jakie Kassin told me. “Sure, it’s rough sometimes. But I’ll tell you
something — we should be an example to others. We’re building the No. 1 Jewish
community on planet Earth, right here in Brooklyn.”
Thank you both to Liliane Saltiel and Viviane Paolini who sent me
this article on the same day!
A. Ovadia
said...
I am posting here an open letter
from me to Rabbie Elie Abadie regarding this Article, as follows:
Dear Rabbi Abadie:
As you know, you are personally implicated and cited as condoning the
statements in this article rejecting Jews and their descendants who happen to
have non-Jews in their genealogical tree, not only from the Brooklyn Syrian
ghettos, but indeed from Judaism altogether.
You indicated to me that you had prepared a rebuttal, and sent it to the New
York Times, but to no avail. No clarification of your position was published.
This blog offers you the opportunity to prevail, and have your rebuttal
published.
In my opinion, your comments and clarifications to the article's religious
statements would be extremely helpful. They would prevent the extension of an
already on-going internet war of statements and counter-statements, readily
revealed if you Google the words "SY Empire". Such a war can become
passionate, protracted and divisive, with severe detrimental effects to the
harmony of the Jewish community at large. You can defuse it.
If you click on the link below you will open the blog page in question. At the
bottom of the page, you can click on "Place a comment". This opens a
window in which you can type or paste your prepared rebuttal, or any text you
may wish, then "Preview" and click the orange "Publish your comment"
button.
The link is:
http://womenslens.blogspot.com/2007/12/syrian-jewish-empire-of-new-york-part-3.html
Contrary to your belief, statistics show that, for years, a wide majority of SY
children actually cannot stand the stuffy claustrophobia, the stifling
atmosphere and the nagging demands of this Brooklyn ghetto community.
They are eager to escape, and quickly move out, just after completing high
school, to other cities, to the West Coast, to foreign countries. They migrate
to Israel, or join reform judaism. They use marriage followed by divorce in
order to escape. Increasingly, they marry more open minded Ashkenazi or
Israelis Jews, and, of course, they do overwhelmingly opt for
"secularism", never to come back They eventually turn
"secular", after enjoying the comforts of getting their parents marry
them off into SY money at an early age.
No Edict is going to change these things, and Rabbi Abadie, your statistics are
all wrong: Growth has come from waves of immigration of Jews from Arab lands
and from the return from Israel of disillusioned olims. They came to Brooklyn
because that is where the ghetto is. They came to the Syrian synagogues because
they are ubiquitous there. But they are not Syrian, although they may call
themselves so..
In order to perpetuate their old time, Arab-tainted traditions, it is SY
parents' job to be creative to find personalized ways of working out with each
of their children their alienation and escape tendencies. It sometimes works...
But SY parents cannot relegate this task and this responsibility to some
illegitimate, (Messiah) insulting, free-will restricting, and guilt-gripping
external Edict, so that they can merrily devote themselves to dealings,
behaviors and hypocrisy which often inspire disrespect to their children.
Certainly, just as a lot of SY Jews do, most non-SY Jews would find it rather
unappealing to consider entering and marrying into a Haredi, Hassidic or SY
family. No external invasion nor contamination is to be a concern here. The
worm is in the fruit. It has to be dealt with from within.
However, positions and statements such as those found in this article can be
perceived as so disgraceful, so regressive and so plainly blasphemous, that
they would turn off many persons raised as Jews, and start the process of
losing them, and generating feelings of revulsion and repulsion at the idea of
belonging to any kind of Jewish religious group.
This Edict, and these kind of statements have proved to be counter-productive
and will continue to do so, if they are not tempered by strong and swift
language.
Rabbi, you were blessed to have made your Exodus from the SY Brooklyn enclave,
you are on the payroll of several non-SY organizations (Yeshiva University, Ms.
Lily Safra, Hospitals, etc.), you happily married a wonderful non-SY lady, and
you gave to a nice non-SY your beloved daughter, and your kids have blossomed
in the years following your departure from Brooklyn.
You know that fencing in people into SY-ness is not necessary. The goal is to
gather every spark of Nefesh Yehudi, especially the lost ones, and to guide
them into full Teshuvah, as this gathering is necessary for Geulah to take
place. The goal is not to hunt for sparks of non-Jewishness in genealogical
trees, and to reject Jewish souls from the Community. This would lead to
rejecting all Jews.
The ethical dilemma is real. What is your avenue for solution?
We both agreed to simultaneously post our comments on the Internet. I am doing
my part with a copy of this letter, and I am keen on reading yours.
All the best.
Ovadia Salama
January 6, 2008
