Mirrer Yeshivah SYs: The Continuing Triumph of Isaac Shalom!
David Shasha
Mirrer Yeshivah SYs: The Continuing Triumph of Isaac Shalom!
Veteran SHU readers are by now aware of the historic conflict between Hakham Matloub Abadi and Isaac Shalom and how it has been the determinative factor in the downfall of the American Sephardic community:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fO_WyLY2gnqUOvbpDQ7KzsS82UOwW35j-ACCPi7sBDQ/edit
I recently provided additional context to the matter in my special newsletter devoted to the imperilled legacy of Rabbi Jose Faur:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T5hwSK5C4N8Vd50UYMptCy1jmk5LSyJbIUEh-Lq6_s8/edit
It is common knowledge that Shalom, the putative “founder” of the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community, felt threatened by Hakham Matloub and unceremoniously kicked him to the proverbial curb.
Indeed, it was the first in a long line of lethal bullying by lay leaders in the community, which continues to this day. It has taught our rabbis and teachers that money speaks louder than human values and intellectual attainment.
It is also common knowledge that Shalom chose Rabbi Jacob Kassin to be his yes-man puppet, which was one part of a multi-pronged strategy to destroy the Sephardic heritage and our Jewish Humanism.
The rabbis that Abadi hired to teach in the Magen David Talmud Torah were eventually supplanted by Shalom with his Ashkenazi-trained North African rabbis through the Otzar Hatorah institutional network:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Shalom
Many of these North African immigrants were sent to study at the Mirrer Yeshivah, an Ultra-Orthodox institution that rejects the Maimonidean tradition in the standard Haredi fashion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_Yeshiva_(Brooklyn)
Daniel Harari wrote an excellent article on Shalom and the Kassin family that provides the necessary background:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Sa4YGX4v5w3BRWFS6WfGVwICemodsyPVfmu2gt6_IJA/edit
The complete article follows this note.
On Monday morning I drove from my home to Kings Highway to do some errands, and when making the trip back I espied the shiny new Mirrer building:
You will notice that the photo prominently displays the Kassin Family entrance to the Yeshivah, dedicated to Jacob Kassin’s son Saul who was famously involved in the Shlomo Dwek Jersey Sting scandal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Dwek
Rabbi Saul Kassin was ultimately convicted in the scandal:
We will recall the CNBC program “American Greed” that presented the matter:
https://www.cnbc.com/id/100007745
This is all part of the prescient handiwork of Isaac Shalom who chose to erase our heritage in order to impose a deeply corrupt Ashkenazi Orthodox fiat on the community.
We recently received further confirmation from ArtScroll that the SYs have become Lakewood:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/lVbfy45d7Ic/m/gE9tzs9KBAAJ
As is the case in Mexico City as well:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/N2aA7pAyhKc
The move to Ashkenazi Orthodox corruption has clearly brought the SY community to a new low, as it has completely forgotten its rabbinical heritage and replaced it with that of Slobodka!
So, as we continue to mark the slow and painful death of the Sephardim, we need look no further than to the toxic legacy of Isaac Shalom and the manner in which he sought to decimate our intellectual-ethical heritage.
You can literally see the signs everywhere.
David Shasha
The American Sephardic Community of New York: Between Imagination and Reality
By: Daniel Harari
In a 1987 interview, Carlos Fuentes, lauded by the New York Times as “one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world,” described how his childhood spent in the United States, as a foreigner away from his home in Mexico, was formative in his development.
I felt that the country [Mexico] was above criticism because it was so assailed by the Americans…I had to defend it constantly. Well, when I arrived and I found it was not a perfect country, and that I had to deal with the imperfections, as well as the ideals of Mexico. And I discovered very quickly, that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you are very pessimistic about that society. And it is only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society, which is something that jingoists and chauvinists, in any country, Mexico, the United States do not understand well.
The critique Carlos Fuentes ultimately levels against his own culture is thus grounded in his optimism. Indeed, his observations of differences between his imagined ideal of Mexico and its reality is a hallmark of his creative process. He describes this phenomenon in the same interview:
I had to contrast what I had imagined Mexico to be with what Mexico actually was. In the tension between my imagination and reality, my literary possibilities as a novelist were born, because I started dealing with this tension, with this rupture between reality and the imagined…[this is] the great theme of novels since Cervantes, and Don Quixote and he inaugurated it, which is the relation between reality and illusion, or between imagination and daily life.
By referencing Cervantes as his literary patriarch, Carlos Fuentes self-identifies historically with a respected and revered paradigm of his language and culture, whose reputation has withstood the test of time, and is one deeply connected to the Classical Sephardic literary tradition. By contrast, in Sarina Roffe’s vanity article, “Our Syrian Jewish Community – A Century of Accomplishment” published by Community Magazine [August 2016], and adapted from her new book, Branching Out From Sepharad: The Kassin Rabbinic Dynasty she expresses chauvinism towards the New York based, Syrian-Sephardic Community and extreme loyalty to the Kassin family with limited historical context. Rather, the article is a whitewashing of past faults and indiscretions on a communal and familial level. While Branching Out From Sepharad: The Kassin Rabbinic Dynasty will likely present a widely publicized view of how the Syrian-Sephardic community has developed over the past century, and the role of that the Kassin family has played, the purpose of this essay is to bring the tension of reality back into the forefront.
In her article Roffe cues up her framework by stating, “Religiously, we are Orthodox, ranging from ‘Modern’ to ‘Ultra’ and have great respect for our rabbis.” Contrary to this inaccurate simplification, the Syrian-Sephardic community has a wide range of religious participation and ideologies that do not fit neatly into clean categories. While the topic of diversity and denominationalism needs more careful consideration and is beyond the scope of this essay, it is overly simplistic to view the Syrian-Sephardic community through a lens of Ashkenazi denominationalism, and assume it starts cleanly at “Modern Orthodox” and moves in a linear direction rightward.
“Respect for our Rabbis”
I would like to focus on the concept Roffe presents of “respect for our rabbis” and how that particular dynamic has played out. While there is a general sense of respect for rabbinical leadership that is inherent to the Sephardic tradition, the leadership of the Syrian-Sephardic community has historically been chosen by opaque processes, with limited communal deliberation and determined by considerations other than the qualifications of the individual chosen to serve in a leadership capacity.
An example of this is the nature in which the “Kassin Dynasty” defined itself in the last generational transition: through the conferring of hereditary “rights”, sponsored by the financial resources of the Kassin family itself, in the formal elevation of R. Saul Kassin in 1984. In particular, it is a flawed presumption to infer any hereditary right to lead a Sephardic Community or any of its largest congregations or regions in America. While it is one thing for a family to have generation after generation of individuals who are learned and ultimately pursue a profession in religious leadership, it is quite another to have a presumed role because of some accident of birth. It is upon the individual to seek to and be considered for congregational or communal leadership roles if they are qualified. In fact, the longer-term history of American-Sephardic congregational leadership illustrates a model of democratic meritocracy that is representative of American ideals and values.
In reviewing the leading figures in American-Sephardic congregations from the founding of the United States to the end of the Ottoman Empire, and subsequent immigration from the Levant (1776-1918), there is no precedent of a singular Rabbinic dynasty with a presumed right to lead. Familial names such as Seixas, Leeser, Morais, Lyons, Fischel, Mendes and De Sola Pool come to mind, illustrating that over that period, American Sephardic Congregations were led by multiple rabbinic families, individuals born to lay-leader family dynasties, and as in Isaac Leeser’s case, an unknown German rabbi who had the ability to adapt to the Classical Sephardic intellectual, literary and religious tradition. Congregational leaders hailed from the Netherlands, London, Livorno, Kingston, the Rhine or were born in America.
Historically, American-Sephardic congregational leadership was never dominated by a singular family nor emanated from a specific geographic region, or even a particular ethnicity (e.g., ethnically Sephardic). Rather, each congregation chose their leadership through their own processes and each generation developed their own assembly of leadership who were trusted, respected, and indeed noble representatives of “Israel in America,” inside the Jewish community and out. Ascendancy was, ultimately, driven by the individual.
While initial communal support was indeed part of the process, elevation of any particular congregational leader was based on the individual’s abilities, including talent in communal education, knowledge of traditional texts in accordance with the Classical Sephardic tradition, industriousness, and most critically in an open and democratic environment, the ability to interact with and speak credibly in the public sphere on political, moral and ethical issues. It was under this framework that an individual earned “our respect for rabbis” in an American setting. While this contrasts with the selection process of religious high-leaders by government mandate under older Ottoman, British, and colonial governing constructs, it represents a positive evolution of ascendancy in communal leadership in an open society. In contrast, hereditary leadership, supreme-leaders, or figureheads chosen by opaque processes and private family interests, is a sub-optimal approach that results in a rabbinic leadership with an inability to lead. Further, the subtext of this arrangement is that the Rabbinical class is disrespected, in their de facto subservience to a lay-leadership who prefers to maintain unnecessary controls over those they have chosen.
These dynamics of power and control make abuse of the historical respect for the “old lamps of our tradition” not only possible, but a hard reality that is painfully juxtaposed against our ideal and imaginative view of congregational and rabbinical leadership. We are now witness to a time where some Rabbis and our self-appointed lay-leadership just cannot be held accountable for their actions or failures. We should therefore be highly suspect of the sponsors of Branching Out From Sepharad: The Kassin Rabbinic Dynasty and consider it an effort to install yet another family member in a significant role, even potentially of a figurehead Chief Rabbi, of one of the largest Sephardic communities in the diaspora.
Instead, the Syrian-Sephardic community should advocate for a process that results in installing leaders, or groups of leaders that most authentically and reliably represent the Classical Sephardic tradition. Further, the historical precedents provide a framework to evaluate the true legacy of our current Chief Rabbi, R. Saul Kassin. When measured against historical standards of congregational leadership we would seek to identify his industriousness and productivity or being a leading figure in communal education. Further, even before he disqualified himself to speak on political, moral and ethical issues when he was arrested in July 2009, we would ask what voice he gave to the weak, downtrodden, and foreign-born, which was certainly a defining attribute of the leaders of American Sephardic congregations in centuries past, and representative of important aspects of the Classical Sephardic tradition. If R. Kassin limited his influence to that of a halachic decisor, then we should see a robust and well-articulated publication of Responsa covering the volumes of issues that challenged his congregation and community over the last 40 years, as he guided them as Chief Rabbi.
It is sad and unfortunate that we have none of the above, and all we will get is a vanity publication about the Kassin “Dynasty” and a singular publication by Rabbi Kassin, “The Light of the Law” (1980) that is a highly organized recounting of the biblical origins of the positive and negative commandments with references to rabbinic law and aphorisms along with some mystical lore. The publication also highlights communal directives intertwined with summaries of traditional Jewish sources. In trying to extract a clear a vision for communal life we find R. Kassin admonishing parents to encourage children to marry young, “at the proper age of sexual maturity”, and a warning that community members should avoid philosophical inquiry. We also find an incomprehensible moral relativism in the following passage under the header “Truth is the Seal of G-D,” which is ambiguous if R. Kassin is indicating that a lie is more or less severe when important people do it. Either he is justifying a leadership that lies, or providing a justification for the formation of a community made up of people who can lie to each other, individuals who are not Jewish, or even government organizations and their representatives:
Lying is ill mannered unethical and illegal, no matter who is being lied to. However, lies may be classed by degrees of severity depending on how important the perpetrator is and to whom the lie was directed.
Indeed the most impressive aspect of Rabbi Kassin’s publication is the Kassin family tree, and related descriptions of the maternal and paternal rabbinical dynasties of the Kassin family that extend back centuries to Señor Shelomo Kassin (b. ca. 1540) and his children Señor Ephraim Kassin and Señor Menashe Kassin (b. ca. 1590), contemporaries of, and quite likely educated readers of, Miguel de Cervantes.
The preceding discussion leads us to the painful conclusion that the role of Chief Rabbi, as currently occupied, is a proxy position to support the decision making process of a lay-leadership, for which as Chief Rabbi, R. Saul Kassin has no oversight, nor ability to provide any accountability. Yet, the predicament in which R. Saul Kassin finds himself is a continuation of the position his father, Chief Rabbi Jacob S. Kassin was in. During his tenure and early years in the pulpit, he was intimately connected to Mr. Isaac Shalom. As an indication of the Syrian-Sephardic communal structure of Isaac Shalom’s time, for example, Rabbi J. Kassin does not appear as an honorary president of Ozar Torah, with Isaac Shalom preferring R. Kalmanowitz, of Mir Yeshivah, for that local honorific.
Additionally, on the letterhead of the Union of Sephardic Congregations of that era, we do not find R. Kassin, or in fact any rabbinical figure, but rather Isaac Shalom, a lay-leader representing his community, as a foil to Rabbi David De Sola Pool who lead the historical community of American Sephardic Congregations. The difference between these two men could not be any starker and the comparison represents an inversion of roles of Rabbinical and lay-leadership that persists to today. While R. David De Sola Pool is accused by Roffe of disinterest in the Syrian-Sephardic community, it was more likely that a productive working relationship between the two men, to the benefit of the members of the nascent Syrian-Sephardic Community, was nothing short of impossible.
As background, Isaac Shalom was an individual who wielded immense power during the formative years of the Syrian-Sephardic community. A founder of a successful business, Oriental Jobbers, he provided many of the Syrian immigrants with their peddling wares, working with them on credit. He enabled these individuals to create lives and livelihoods for themselves by creating for them a system in which they could work while they acculturated to America. Isaac Shalom had an outsize influence in the community as well, founding Magen David Yeshiva and ending the Magen David Talmud Torah, establishing the Magen David Federation which attempted to consolidate the charity giving of the community, and advocating for the Ozar Hatorah school system in the Middle East and North Africa. He would direct the dealings of these organizations and was involved in many more. This arrangement enabled him to move the community in the direction he chose using his organizations and its leaders as his proxies. Between his commercial and philanthropic efforts, he positioned himself as someone who could make or break whoever he chose.
Today, most graduates of Magen David can tell you about Isaac Shalom, and Roffe perpetuates the accepted lore of the respected businessman and visionary leader in her article. However, he can also be viewed as an unlettered businessman, who forced his point of view on an entire generation, where now none of his students can speak of Cervantes, the Classical Sephardic Tradition, nor can they recollect R. Matloub Abadi nor do they have familiarity with R. David De Sola Pool and his predecessors. An oil painting of Isaac Shalom still hangs on the wall of Magen David Yeshiva. In comparison, the model institutions he copied have painted images or epic stories of Dr. Joel Braverman and Rabbi Joseph Lookstein, each highly educated men who developed Jewish Day Schools. Magen David Yeshiva was a direct copy of those institutions, but is presented as Isaac Shalom’s vision. It was not truly his, it was developed by pillars of the Ashkenazi community and combined with a commercial brutality, to deleterious effect on the children who grew up and continue to grow up in his community. In Isaac Shalom we have an awful accident of history. Although in every generation and geography, the Jewish community had ignorant and unlettered individuals, in America, Isaac Shalom was able to use his commercial success to attempt to define an entire community as he was. The myth that is well circulated is that Sephardim have always been uneducated, and that such men are to be honored above all.
By contrast, R. David De Sola Pool was a man who led his congregation through a clear articulation of a set of religious and ideological beliefs in speech and in writing, consecrated the American Sephardic community through his publication and editing of prayer books, was an accomplished Hazzan and musician, and along with his wife, Tamar, wrote the history of the American Jewish community through the lens of Shearith Israel, the oldest congregation in the United States. He was respected in the Jewish community, as well as the public sphere. He was the Jewish religious leader who was asked to provide a public radio address honoring and inspiring the brave men and women of the armed forces and their families, in prayer, on the eve of the 1944 D-Day invasion.
Additionally, in 1914, a few years after Isaac Shalom arrived in New York, R. David De Sola Pool authored a policy paper for the Jewish Charities on “Immigration of Levantine Jews” that illustrates his interest in the emerging Syrian, Sephardic community, an interest that Roffe improperly denies.
It should be recognized that if R. David De Sola Pool or a man like him tried to operate inside of the Syrian-Sephardic Community under Isaac Shalom’s leadership, he would have likely suffered the same fate as R. Matloub Abadi, marginalized and removed from communal influence and history and if remembered at all, set at the foot of a more prominent lay-leadership. Once again, on review of the Ozar Torah letterhead, we find Isaac Shalom elevating his name above R. De Sola Pool, who appears below several other rabbinical leaders, who themselves are all beneath Isaac Shalom’s own name, at a time when R. Pool was the foremost Sephardic rabbinical leader in the country.
In all this, there is a need to come to terms with the Syrian-Sephardic community as children of a lost generation who now need to reconnect with a noble identity that is rooted in reading, Jewish literacy, development of moral character, awe for traditional law and respect for the rabbinical leadership who represented it. As a first step and a communal corrective action, Rabbi Saul Kassin should independently consider doing what is truthful in the eyes of children: publicly apologize to his congregants and voluntary resign his post as Chief Rabbi, without naming a successor. An open post of Chief Rabbi of the Syrian-Sephardic community will serve as a clear reminder that we can do better. It will bolster faith and optimism in what is possible, and what can be accomplished.
However, the work does not end there. The Syrian-Sephardic community has to begin to ask the tough questions of those who lurk in the shadows with no accountability for their actions and who amplify their point of view through proxy. The intent behind some of the levers of influence to whom members of this community are subject are not in the open and indeed are behind a curtain. In order to illustrate this point, it is unfortunately necessary to reveal a private discussion, an action that I take no pride in.
Not long after the arrest of Rabbi Saul Kassin, I found myself having a discussion with Jack Albert Kassin, his nephew, at his beach club, made famous for parties that encourage young members of the community to meet and form lasting relationships. In the discussion it was made clear that it was the opinion of this community elder that the purpose of his festive soirées and indeed the lesson he learned from the communal restriction against accepting converts for marriage (“Takana”), is that it is vital and essential to maintain the bloodlines of the Aleppo community. It was not just an admission of racism, he was taking pride in his being truthful and illustrating his pride in the success he had in promoting his eugenic worldview.
It should be noted that Sarina Roffe, the now biographer of the Kassin Family, alluded to the importance of bloodlines as a potential rationale behind the Takana in her 2005 Masters Thesis, “An Analysis of Brooklyn’s Rabbinical Takana Prohibiting Syrian and Near Eastern Jews From Marrying Converts.”
In the Takana, the term “protect our identity and religious integrity is used as justification for the Takana, implying that marriage with a convert or non-jew would compromise the identity of Syrian Jews as well as their motivation to practice religious Judaism. The term “protect our identity” is indicative of those protecting their birthright, or “purebloods” as done in Spain by the Old Christians.
While it is incredibly difficult to assess whether or not overt racism was part of the creation story of the Takana, without Jack Albert Kassin’s explanation, it is believable to understand it as a complicated solution to a very difficult problem. However, when we stare in the face of an individual so close to the family that was instrumental in the development and implementation of the Takana, it confirms that it can only be seen today as a stain on the soul of every person who walks by it in their Synagogue and acquiesces to its relevance. Like the Kassin Dynasty, the Takana also needs to have a reduced power and influence in the Syrian-Sephardic Community. In a critical process of evaluating the Takana, the Syrian-Sephardic Community can explore its many positive attributes and potentially mark the Takana as an unnecessary evil that indeed teaches the wrong lesson about identity, and has nothing to do with maintaining a dignified and noble religious tradition.
Perhaps, the imagining (or reality) of the Takana as a lesson of desiring racial cleanliness of the Syrian-Sephardic Community is because all that is left of the religious, moral and literary character espoused by Sephardim is now an ethnic identity alone. Aside from the glaring loss of literary and religious tradition, a present day manifestation of the diminished moral character of the Syrian-Sephardic community can be found at Magen David Yeshiva, which borrowed tens of millions of dollars through an Industrial Development program. When it was clear that the school mortgaged its future in various ways to complete its new construction, a series of transactions graciously sponsored by Jeff Sutton successfully alleviated that burden of debt. In turn the events taught a lesson to every child in the Syrian-Sephardic community that not paying your debt is an acceptable path for communal and personal success. This well known, but little talked about debt restructuring is a far cry from the pride and joy the Syrian-Sephardic Community had in their “burn the mortgage” celebrations in Synagogues, back when “burn the mortgage” meant actually repaying lenders and setting a document ablaze. While it was a transaction done in the context of markets and willing participants, it anchored the school in a “moral zone of insolvency” and placed direct operational control of Magen David Yeshiva in the hands of a single individual who was neither qualified as an educator nor someone who has dedicated their life in the service of the religious edification of a community or congregation.
So we now return to Carlos Fuentes, who reminds us of Cervantes and our own literary tradition. He presents us with a model to evaluate what we imagine, what ideals we have, and the reality with which we are presented. In the Syrian-Sephardic community, the rupture between reality and imagination is significant and disorienting. In order to successfully address this tension on a societal and communal level, we are called upon to be open to self-criticism and find a way to look behind the curtain, and hold accountable those who have failed in their leadership obligations, so that we may instead promote renewed and legitimate respect for the “old lamps of our tradition.” The windmills in our path may indeed look like giants, but the only way to move past them is to see them for what they truly are.
From SHU 760, October 19, 2016