From the ARCHIVE: Death of the Sephardim Newsletter Special: Rabbi Eli Mansour Hired as Rabbinical Leader of Magen David Yeshivah!
David Shasha
Friends,
For those who do not live in the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community, it can often be bewildering to try and grasp not only its current situation, but to understand its history in America, and how this history has been deeply tied to a quite brutal form of Ashkenazification.
I have continued to present Zev Chafets’ New York Times article “The SY Empire” as a means to help process this recent history:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t4z5IL7aLzfmN5hgLNUhhY3rqY_7kD0J/view?ths=true
Central to the community’s exclusiveness, as Chafets notes, is the well-known Edict against Conversion, which is thoroughly discussed in the following paper:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nbcwNrH1Am1bgJYw_FqiJ7yhiLN34WKI9oRQnVxFShQ/edit
The history of the immigrants from the Old Country ultimately comes down to a battle for control of the soul of the community between Sephardic Religious Humanist Hakham Matloub Abadi and his nemesis, the corrupt lay leader Isaac Shalom.
I have presented the seminal thought of Abadi in the following special newsletter:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fO_WyLY2gnqUOvbpDQ7KzsS82UOwW35j-ACCPi7sBDQ/edit
You can hear a program on Abadi that was presented at the old Magen David Synagogue in Bensonhurst in connection to the special newsletter:
Daniel Harari wrote a very important article on the Kassin family, chosen by Shalom as his personal rabbinical authority in order to ensure that his autocratic ways, and the power of the wealthy laity, would be rubber-stamped at the very highest institutional levels of the community:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Sa4YGX4v5w3BRWFS6WfGVwICemodsyPVfmu2gt6_IJA/edit
This process ensured the power of an autocratic cadre of unaccountable leaders who have run the community with an iron hand for many decades now.
A logical outcome to this Ashkenazification process, and the ongoing battle between the YU SYs and the Lakewood SYs, has been the hiring of Haredi Rabbi Eli Mansour as religious head of the Magen David Yeshivah, just announced by its ignorant and malevolent board:
Dear Magen David Community,
It is with great excitement and gratitude to Hashem that we write you today.
We are proud to announce that Rabbi Eli J. Mansour has accepted the position of
Rabbinical Leader of Magen David Yeshivah. Rabbi Mansour is currently the presiding Rabbi and founder of the Edmond J. Safra Synagogue of Brooklyn, the presiding Rabbi of Ohel Yaacob Congregation (Lawrence Synagogue) in Deal, New Jersey and an internationally renowned speaker.
Rabbi Mansour is an alumnus of and has deep family roots in Magen David. The founding father of our great institution, Mr. Isaac Shalom A”H, was Rabbi Mansour’s great uncle and many of the Rabbi’s immediate family served as past presidents.
As such, Rabbi Mansour is cognizant of his role and that of which Magen David serves in our illustrious Community’s history. We are confident that the Rabbi will infuse a deep love of Torah and pride in our rich Sephardic culture and traditions, into our beautiful children and prepare them spiritually, to be able to face the world we live in.
It is with tremendous pride that we welcome our dear Rabbi Mansour back home and wish him the best of success.
Sincerely,
The Board of Trustees
The Board of Directors
The hiring will likely come as a shock to the YU SYs, but which I hope will not at all surprise SHU readers.
This special newsletter reproduces articles by and about Mansour and his Lakewood-loving ways that I have already published in the SHU since 2012. It was then that I began to read his Daily Halacha posts, which have become very popular in the Orthodox Jewish world; well beyond the constricted parameters of the Ocean Parkway SYs.
We saw this process in action back in April 2020 when the Orthodox Union held its massive “Torah New York” event at Citi Field in Queens, and invited Mansour as their sole SY representative. It was at that point that we came to realize that the Washington Heights world was not really so “Modern” Orthodox after all, and that Lakewood had penetrated the inner sanctum of the American Briskers.
Indeed, I came to learn, after much study, that the YU Soloveitchik tradition was actually that of the Litvak Yeshivas:
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-methodology-of-brisk/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brisker_method
In this sense, it is interesting to compare Mansour to other Self-Hating Sephardim like Rabbi Marc Angel. Both men have enthusiastically accepted the White Jewish Supremacy, but have done so from opposite sides of the Orthodox divide. They share a temperament which is intent on promoting Ashkenazi values and ideas, and are deeply worried that the Sephardic heritage might be seen as standing against that of the Shtetl. It is always about harmonizing the two traditions without rancor.
Perhaps even more than this, both men refuse the idea that there is such a thing as White Jewish Supremacy, as they desperately seek to align Sephardic tradition with that of the Ashkenazim who are intent on erasing us. And for this, both men have been richly honored and feted by their respective Ashkenazi institutional factions.
In this special newsletter I present articles by Mansour on subjects such as Sabbath observance, eating Egg Matzah on Passover, whether women can study Mishnah and wear the ritual fringes and phylacteries, but perhaps more important than any of these is how he has approached the matter of ancestor worship as it is practiced by Ashkenazim – in defiance of Maimonides’ strict ruling on doresh ‘el ha-metim – when they make pilgrimage to cemeteries and pray at the graves of the righteous dead. Equally shocking was his December 2020 on Sexuality in the rabbinic tradition, which inched dangerously close to Christian monasticism.
Mansour is very much tied to irrationalism and superstition, as he seeks to merge Sephardim into the Yeshivah world and its occult ways.
In this collection of Mansour’s articles, I provide detailed comments showing how he has aggressively rejected the values of Sephardic Rabbinic Humanism in both the conceptual-philosophical heritage and in the Halakhic-ritual tradition.
I do not recall Mansour ever discussing Abortion, but it is quite certain that he has no sense of how our Sephardic Sages have handled the matter; as we learned in the following article that references Hakham Yehuda ibn Ayyash and his critical ruling:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UdaevoTLfXjrkmOHfVfij1CCzBYhK2A_7vKh5aCodUU/edit
Mansour must be acknowledged as a master of the Ashkenazi PILPUL system, and a learned exponent of Shtetl White Jewish Supremacy. Like Angel in regard to YU Modern Orthodoxy, Mansour is at great pains to align Sephardim with the Ashkenazi tradition; reading the texts of our rabbinical past in a selective and often duplicitous manner that makes it seem as if Aleppo was Slobodka.
It was something that we saw in looking at Mansour ally Rabbi David Sutton’s 2005 book Aleppo: City of Scholars, which integrated the Sephardic rabbinical heritage into the ArtScroll system:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C7oM2lxCJliAFbpL4CHqqnJK7HZAao9heo6XoBrI9n8/edit
With Magen David’s hiring of Mansour as its chief rabbinical authority, the Haredization process that began in the late 1960s and accelerated through the 1970s and 80s, is now veritably complete.
I recently wrote an article on the late Rabbi David Eliach which sought to clarify MDY’s primary competitor the Yeshivah of Flatbush as part of that SY Ashkenazification process, and the community’s willful erasure of its own Sephardic heritage:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fvgd94a2OB84vBnKwa8M8ams-vhm1x2vaXoMl8f3jA0/edit
Flatbush remains a firm bastion of the Washington Heights ethos, while the current iteration of Isaac Shalom’s MDY has taken the leap, consistent with the wishes of its lay founder, into the Haredi Yeshivah world, as it continues to happily stamp out the intellectual elements of our noble Sephardic literary-religious heritage.
In this regard, I have also included my articles on Donald Trump’s visit to the Deal, New Jersey summer SY enclave, with especial emphasis on Mansour’s formal ruling at the time that we must all pronounce the religious blessing for rulers on Trump. It is truly indicative of what the debased SY community stands for at the present time.
This special newsletter will certainly help those trying to understand the internal workings of the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community figure out how Rabbi Eli Mansour now represents the vast majority of its members, and how they have turned their backs on our heritage and its rigorous moral standards.
David Shasha
Laws and Customs of Kapparot
By: Rabbi Eli Mansour
Sephardim Becoming Ashkenazim: The Kapparot Ritual
By: David Shasha
Is it Permissible to Eat Egg Masa on Pesah?
By: Rabbi Eli Mansour
When Should One Recite Kiddush and Eat the Shabbat Meal when Accepting Shabbat Early?
By: Rabbi Eli Mansour
Everyone has His Own Share of Torah
By: Rabbi Eli Mansour
Every Prayer is Effective
By: Rabbi Eli Mansour
Visiting the Graves of Sadikim and Family Members
By: Rabbi Eli Mansour
The Significance of Visiting Graves of Sadikim
By: Rabbi Eli Mansour
Must One Recite a Beracha Over Water or Wine During a Meal?
By: Rabbi Eli Mansour
Is it Permissible for a Woman to Wear Tefillin?
By: Rabbi Eli Mansour
Everybody Gets What He is Supposed to Get
By: Rabbi Eli Mansour
Cards and Stickers with the Words “En Od Milebado”
By: Rabbi Eli Mansour
Teaching Girls Mishna
By: Rabbi Eli Mansour
Praying at the Cemetery on Ereb Rosh Hashanah
By: Rabbi Eli Mansour
When Does Shabbat End?
By: Rabbi Eli Mansour
Rabbi Eli Mansour: Anti-Maimonidean Ashkenazi PILPUL Master
By: David Shasha
Rabbi Eli Mansour on Playing Ball and Riding a Bike on Shabbat: Sephardi Only When He Wants to Be!
By: David Shasha
Women Wearing Sisit: Rabbi Eli Mansour is at it Again!
By: David Shasha
Rabbi Eli Mansour: Destroying Our Noble Sephardic Heritage
By: David Shasha
Rabbi Eli Mansour and the Modern Orthodox: The Centrists Might Not Be So Centrist After All
By: David Shasha
The SY Trumpscum Dig Deep: Mr. Lysol Coronavirus Death Comes to Deal, New Jersey!
By: David Shasha
Lysol Comes to SY Deal Addendum: Rabbi Eli Mansour Demands that We Bless the President!
By: David Shasha
Rabbi Eli Mansour Moves Ever Closer to Christianity: Ben Azzai and Sexual Abstinence
By: David Shasha
Can a Torah Scholar be Exempt From the Misva of Procreation?
By: Rabbi Eli Mansour