Members of the Tribe

by Zev Chafets

  “One man told me that when he was a teenager he went to his rabbi and admitted he was a homosexual. The rabbi told him to join the temple youth group and meet some nice girls. Well, naturally that didn’t help, and a couple months later he went back to the rabbi and tried to talk to him again. And the rabbi told him again to meet some nice girls. Obviously the rabbi didn’t want to hear what he was being told; here, we listen.”

  There was a knock on the door and we were joined by Jerry Rosenstein, the temple treasurer. A thin, fastidious man in designer jeans and a well-tended winter tan, he was spending the day trying to get a handle on the temple’s shaky finances.

  “Forty percent of our members are at or near the poverty line,” he said. “We have a lot of single-parent families. And a lot of our people do mostly volunteer work or have low-paying jobs in social services. Economically we’re like an old urban synagogue—we don’t attract the upwardly mobile boutique owners.” He sighed in mock sorrow but I had the feeling that he wasn’t sorry. Ironically, Sha’ar Zahav is a family-style temple; high-rollers from Boutique Row would upset the community’s equilibrium.

  As we talked, I noticed that Rosenstein had a slight German accent. “Jerry is a concentration camp survivor,” Kahn told me when I mentioned it. “He was in Auschwitz.” Kahn is aware that many people consider him a freak rabbi at the head of a freak congregation. The presence of a Holocaust survivor somehow validates the temple, makes it unquestionably Jewish.

  The Holocaust has a special significance in the collective consciousness of Sha’ar Zahav. “Under Hitler, hundreds of thousands of homosexuals were rounded up by the Nazis,” said Rosenstein. “Gay Jews were forced to wear a Jewish star that was half yellow and half pink. Some of our people wear that symbol today in public, at demonstrations or community events.” The congregation also says a special prayer, before the mourners’ Kaddish, commemorating the “homosexual and lesbian martyrs of history.”

  Rosenstein and Kahn are close friends and collaborators but they disagree on one important issue. The treasurer is a devout environmentalist who believes that cremation is the only ecologically responsible way to go. Kahn is opposed. “It’s not just that cremation is frowned on in Jewish tradition,” he told Rosenstein. “I also admit that I’m squeamish about seeing it performed on a survivor of Auschwitz.”

  “Yes, I know it’s a problem,” agreed Rosenstein, with clinical detachment. “But I have to be true to my convictions.”

  It was a chilling discussion, made more so by the friendly courtesy with which the two men allowed me to listen. I was reminded of Gaston Hirsch, the last Jew in Donaldsonville; there was a blatant practicality to both men’s attitudes toward the future. It was a relief when the conversation ended and the treasurer went back to his ledgers.

  Sitting in the rabbi’s office I realized how much my attitude had changed in only a few hours. I had come to Sha’ar Zahav expecting a grotesque parody; instead I encountered Jews in distress—men and women coping with problems of identity and morality—turning, as Jews always have, to their religion and their fellow Jews for help and comfort.

  Norristown, Pennsylvania, is about as far as you can get from the Upper Market district of San Francisco. Norristown is Bruce Springsteen country, a bleak industrial city about forty minutes from Philadelphia. When I arrived, at eight o’clock on a freezing January morning, downtown Norristown was practically deserted and the only place to get breakfast was the Woolworth’s on the main drag. The store smelled like an old-fashioned five-and-dime, the essence of Double Bubble overwhelming the aroma of weak coffee that rose from the counter along the wall.

  I took a seat next to a red-faced man with a wool cap pulled over his ears and a set of industrial keys dangling from a belt loop. He regarded me with curiosity, but left the small town interrogation to the grandmotherly waitress. “New around here?” she asked, refilling my cup.

  I shook my head. “Just here for the day,” I said, and on an impulse added, “I’m going out to Graterford.” She smiled sympathetically. Graterford is the site of a state penitentiary for bad men—violent, dangerous criminals doing long, hard time.

  “You got somebody out there, hon?” she asked, and I sensed that the man in the cap was listening, too. I shook my head, dropped a dollar on the counter, and went outside to wait for David Maharam, chief rabbi of the JCAG Synagogue—the Jewish community at Graterford.

  Maharam came by a few minutes later in a battered compact car. He is a Conservative rabbi in his mid-thirties with a genial manner, receding red hair, and a red beard. His main pulpit is a Conservative congregation in Norristown, but twice a week he drives out to the prison to conduct services for the prison’s thirty or so Jewish inmates.

  There is no accurate census of Jewish prisoners in the United States, but experts put their number at about two thousand. Most of them are white collar types, but a few—like the men of Graterford—are hard-core criminals. “They’re nice guys,” Maharam told me on the way out to the prison, “but I wouldn’t necessarily want to meet one of them in a dark alley.”

  As we drove, I told Rabbi Maharam about a meeting I had in Detroit a few weeks earlier with Maxie Silk, one of the last of the old-time Jewish gangsters. Nearing eighty, Maxie runs the Left Field Deli, a diner located near Tiger Stadium. Dressed in his counterman’s outfit, he seems a sweet-faced old guy with a white mustache, a prominent nose, and a George C. Scott overbite. But he has the powerful body of a much younger man, and hawklike brown eyes that sparkle when he recalls the good old days.

  Although Maxie has gone straight, in his time he served three prison terms, one of them a ten-year stretch for armed hijacking. He talks about his previous career without evident remorse, in a language straight out of Damon Runyon. Italians are “luckshen” (the Yiddish word for noodles), women are “flanken” (beef), and good-looking women are “shtarke flanken”—strong beef. Any place with four walls and a roof is a joint.

  “After I got out of the can on the hijack beef I opened up a joint called The Shamrock,” he recalled with a laugh. “Talk about a tough spot, we had a guy working full time just repairing the chairs.” From The Shamrock Maxie went on to other joints—The Lothrup (“A good buck but I got tired of beating up hillbillies every Saturday night”) and his favorite, a “combination kosher deli and rib joint” next to the old Flame Show Bar whose customers included Joe Louis and Dinah Washington, Hank Greenberg and Delia Reese. “Now there was a joint with some real action,” he said with a faraway look.

  Maxie first came to Detroit from Cleveland during prohibition. “I was eighteen when I left,” he said, “and the wise guys back home were giving three-to-one I wouldn’t make nineteen.” It was the heyday of the Jewish gangster—people like Dutch Schultz, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Abner “Longy” Zwillman, and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter. Maxie, who had met some of the ex-yeshiva boys of Murder Incorporated during a short-lived stint as a rabbinical student in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, came to the Motor City looking to break into the big time.

  In Detroit, the Jewish mob was the Purple Gang, which controlled a good part of the liquor business, numbers, extortion and in Maxie’s fond phrase, “twenty square blocks of the best red-light district in the Middle West.” They did business with other Jewish gangs around the country and with old man Bronfman, the Canadian liquor supplier whose fortune later enabled his grandson Edgar to finance Israel Singer’s theft of the World Jewish Congress.

  Maxie is modest about his own affiliations; when I asked him if he had been a member of the Purple Gang, he just grinned and waved one hand in dismissal. “The Purple Gang? That name was a kind of joke. See, there was this fella by the name of Sammy Purple. Couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag, but one time he pulled a rod on a cop and got himself a little reputation. He was harmless, but after that every Jewish kid was automatically a member of the Purple Gang … y’know, Sammy’s brother is still alive,” Maxie said thoughtfully. “He’s a Shriner if I’m not
mistaken.”

  In the old days, Maxie and his friends were active in Democratic politics on behalf of Governor Frank Murphy (“He really knew how to keep a state running smooth”) and they avidly supported the local sports teams. One of the Purples, a Russian Jew nicknamed Patsy O’Toole, was famous as the most obnoxious rooter in the American League.

  “The Tigers used to take him on road trips, that’s how shtark he was,” said Maxie. “One time in Washington Roosevelt comes to the park and this really inspires him, see, I mean Patsy, not Roosevelt. Patsy hollered so loud they kicked him out of the game.” Maxie shook his head, grinning.

  But there was another, more violent side to the Jewish mob scene. One of the worst incidents came in a clash between the Purples and the Little Jewish Navy, a group of Chicago hoods who ran a flotilla of rum-running ships on the Great Lakes. Their rivalry ended in the Collingwood Massacre, the Motor City equivalent of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  “See, the original Little Jewish Navy was a Detroit outfit, used to hang around Third and Seldon,” Maxie explained. “The main guys in that were Sleepy Louie Goldman and Shmulkie Solomon. And then these other bums from Chicago muscled in, Hymie Paul, Nigger Joe Levkowitz and the leader of that Chicago bunch …” I was taking notes, and Maxie paused to make sure I was getting things right. “Take down the name of the leader, Izzie ‘The Rat’ Sutker. Izzie the Rat. You know what kind of a bum you gotta be, get a nickname like that?

  “Anyways, these guys were shaking down whorehouses, and Raymond Bernstein, who was the leader of the Purples or whatever, got this guy Milton Levine to set up a meet over at the Collingwood Apartment House. And Bernstein, Irving Millburn, and this one other guy—I won’t mention his name ’cause he’s still alive—they took out them Chicago bums. They went to the joint for thirty years on a murder rap.”

  Not long afterward, Maxie himself went to prison. “We caught this thief who was stealing our booze, see. So we smacked him around a little and he goes and tells a cop he was held up. They had some rough judges in those days, and I was out on a bond at the time, see I had been picked up before on a b & e, and I had a previous in Cleveland …”

  Maxie wound up doing ten years. “I went in 1930 and came out 1940—I missed the whole depression. When I got out I was empty, but the boys took care of me. And it wasn’t so bad in the joint, I was able to move around pretty good, know what I mean?”

  I asked Maxie if there had been a synagogue in prison, and he shook his head. “We weren’t that organized. But we had respect for religion. Before I went in the can, I remember the rabbis used to come around to see us at the Sugar House over on Oakland Avenue. They never came away empty either. We did the right thing.”

  Maxie suddenly slapped the counter. “You know I almost forgot, but for a few years there we did have our own shul on the holidays. Not in the can, right here in Detroit. Not many people know this, but we used to rent the ballroom of a hotel and bring in our own rabbi. There was Sleep Out Louie Lefkowitz—we called him that because he didn’t like to go home much—Uncle Abe Ackerman the bail bondsman, and a couple of knock-around guys, Shorty the Bum and Marshall Abrams, we called him Bad Abe. They were the heads of the shul. We got a lot of people on the holidays, especially bookies, we must have had fifty of them.” Maxie smiled his sweet smile once again, remembering. “I’ll tell you one thing about that shul. Nobody stiffed us on their dues …”

  By the time I finished telling Rabbi Maharam about Maxie Silk, we were almost at the prison. He cautioned me against expecting anything as exotic as the wiseguys’ shul. There are no mobsters with colorful nicknames or fabulous wealth at Graterford; just a collection of losers who have committed crimes for reasons they themselves sometimes fail to understand. “If you’re looking for something romantic, you’re going to be disappointed,” Maharam told me.

  The prison itself was certainly prosaic—bleak, blunt concrete walls surrounded by barbed wire and adorned with guard towers. Inside, dispirited visitors sat on scarred benches in a drafty hall, waiting as the guards processed them one at a time. Rabbi Maharam, a regular, was admitted immediately. He waved me through as well, but on the other side of the large steel door I was stopped and asked to empty my pockets for inspection. When the guards were satisfied, I was given an infrared plastic I.D. bracelet. A second set of steel doors swung open, and Maharam and I entered the prison.

  The synagogue at Graterford is at the end of the main corridor; to get there we walked, unescorted, the length of the prison through a gauntlet of inmates who regarded us with unfriendly curiosity. On both sides of the yellow brick hallway were long, metallic-looking cell blocks. From time to time raucous laughter wafted our way, but most of the noise came from machinery in the prison’s shops and from the murmured conversations of men who loitered in the hall. Almost ninety percent of the inmates at Graterford are black, and I had the sense of walking down the hall of a very tough ghetto high school.

  The temple is located directly over a Muslim mosque whose entrance is dominated by a mural of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock. The temple’s decor is less flamboyant. It consists of two carpeted, connected rooms: a chapel with the standard ark, eternal light, and folding chairs; and an adjacent meeting room dominated by a long table. Shelves along one wall hold Jewish books and a large television/VCR console. Behind a partition there is a small area with an electric coffee urn and plastic cups, knives, forks, and spoons—the temple kitchen. In another setting it would have been an unremarkable room; here, amid the thick, sweating walls and iron bars, it seemed like an oasis of civility and safety.

  Although the Jews at Graterford are in jail for the same violent offenses as the men in the corridor, I felt a real sense of relief as we entered the synagogue. Jews have been conditioned for hundreds of years to fear physical violence from gentiles, but not from each other. This has changed to some extent in Israel, but in America it persists—Jews simply do not consider other Jews to be dangerous.

  Certainly there was nothing aggressive or physically threatening about the inmates as they greeted Rabbi Maharam. They could have been a temple softball team or a B’nai B’rith lodge. Most were in their twenties and thirties, although one weatherbeaten man looked close to seventy. They wore civilian shirts or sweaters, gray institutional trousers with GRATERFORD STATE PENITENTIARY stamped across the upper leg, and jogging shoes. In the general prison population they go hatless, but here in the synagogue they wore yarmulkes or baseball caps.

  Rabbi Maharam introduced me as a writer from Israel, and the men immediately became solicitous, even obsequious. One darted off to bring me coffee, another offered me a chair, a third leaped up to light my cigarette. Several convicts around my age called me “sir.” They had all heard stories about inmates sprung by sympathetic writers; and while they had no reason to suppose that I might be influential, or even friendly, they had nothing to lose. Besides, new people are always a break from the monotony of prison life.

  After coffee we adjourned to the chapel for morning prayers. “Only about half of the congregation are full Jews,” Maharam had told me on the ride out to the prison. “The others have one Jewish parent, or maybe a Jewish spouse, some form of Jewish identity. It doesn’t matter, though, as long as they feel Jewish. In jail that’s what really counts.”

  Whatever their credentials, the members of JCAG are among the most observant Jews in the country. Their lives revolve around the synagogue in ways that would seem excessive to most people on the outside. For one thing, they have time—for daily prayers, Hebrew lessons, Bible classes, Jewish books, or just sitting around the synagogue shmoozing with their fellow Jews. They have time to celebrate holidays—the fast of Tisha B’av and Lag B’Omer—that are normally observed in America only by Orthodox Jews.

  The men of JCAG have motive as well as opportunity. Outside the synagogue is a prison full of angry convicts and casually brutal guards. There have been occasional clashes with Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam toughs, and almost a
ll the Jewish inmates have been involved in random violence. The synagogue is the only place they can create what their temple bulletin, Davar, calls “a sanctuary of civilization in an otherwise barbaric environment.” It offers the same illusion of control and protection that Eastern European Jews found in their village shuls in the days of pogroms.

  David Maharam is a Conservative rabbi, but the congregation is officially Reform, a member of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. The affiliation is a matter of great pride to its members. “Being in the UAHC means we’re legit,” one of them told me happily. Several of the prisoners grumbled that they should have joined the Conservative movement instead, but they were shouted down. Convicts, like theologians, have the leisure for arcane ecclesiastical dispute.

  The morning service began with Rabbi Maharam reading from “Gates of Prayer.” He implored God “to open blind eyes, to bring out of prison the captive and from their dungeons those who sit in darkness.” The prayer ended in a chorus of heartfelt amens. As the service progressed, the congregation participated in loud, practiced voices. When the time came to remove the Torah from the ark they kissed the fringes of their prayer shawls and touched it reverently.

  The Torah portion that morning was Exodus 10:23, the story of the ten plagues. Rabbi Maharam read the text and explained each of the plagues and its significance.

  “Now, darkness is an unusual plague,” he told his congregation. “Unlike the others, it isn’t physically threatening or especially dangerous. But that can be deceptive. Have any of you been in the hole recently?” A titter went up from the group, and a dark, powerful-looking man raised his hand sheepishly. “Alex, what’s it like in the hole?” Maharam asked. “Uh, it’s dark as hell down there, Rabbi,” he said. There was another chorus of laughs, but Rabbi Maharam was pleased. “Exactly. Sometimes darkness can be a very effective punishment.”