by Zev Chafets
The example elicited a stream of questions from the floor. Tom, who once spent two years in Israel and now serves as the Hebrew teacher, cited the Hertz Prayerbook’s speculation that the darkness might have been caused by an eclipse of the sun. “You have to realize that Rabbi Hertz was a polemicist who looked for rational arguments to support the Torah,” Maharam explained. “He thought that scientific explanations would convince skeptics.”
Tom nodded thoughtfully, but he was unwilling to abandon Hertz. “His explanation sounds at least interesting,” he said with the dispassion of a biblical scholar.
“Yeah, well the darkness lasted three days, didn’t it?” someone else called out. “Who ever heard of a three-day eclipse of the sun?” Tom was ready for this, too; he argued that since the sun was Egypt’s chief god, the Egyptians may easily have exaggerated the length of its disappearance. This gave rise to a series of loud protests as the congregation chose sides.
After a minute or two, Maharam rapped the rostrum for order and returned to the service. He raced through the Hebrew prayers, led the congregation in singing “Ain K’Eloheinu,” and then slipped off his tallis and joined his flock for coffee in the meeting room.
The main topic of conversation that morning was Jewish solidarity. The prison has no Jewish neighborhood—there are Jews in every one of the five cell blocks, including the one reserved for the hardest cases. “This is the worst prison in the state of Pennsylvania,” one man said, with a connoisseur’s certainty. “The prisoners run this jail. That’s why it’s so important for us to stick together.”
An example of Jewish unity had recently appeared in an article written for the temple bulletin by Nolan Gelman. Entitled “A New Man,” it described the author’s arrival at Graterford:
“I was processed in and sent to E Block, the quarantine block for newcomers. It is not unlike bedlam; cacophonous, grossly overcrowded, hostile and bewildering.…
“A number of individuals came by and asked if I would like to attend the Jewish congregation. I was surprised … [and] I accepted the invitation out of curiosity.… I was introduced to all the members and warmly welcomed. I was offered a care package containing every conceivable item an inmate might need, all donated by the members themselves.…
“My stay here has turned into a time of spiritual awakening and learning. This oasis created amidst the barren concrete of Graterford is testimony and monument to the spirit and resourcefulness of the Jewish inmates here.”
Gelman’s sentiments were echoed that morning by his fellow inmates. Tom, the argumentative Hebrew teacher, spoke for the group. “When you see the animals here, it’s nice to see good people at temple.” A tall, impressive man of forty with Clark Kent good looks, he projected a crisp moral authority that made me wonder if his incarceration might be a mistake. Later I learned that he was serving a sentence for sex crimes against minors.
“Per capita we’re the best-behaved prisoners at Graterford. We almost never get a misconduct. And we’re the most learned,” said Jules, a young man with sleepy brown eyes and a sensuous face. He was raised in suburban New Jersey, belonged to a Reform temple, and was an honor student in high school. He could have been a third-year law student getting ready to join a big New York firm; instead, he was doing life.
“What are you in for?” I asked him. Prison etiquette discourages such direct questions. On the way to Graterford Rabbi Maharam had cautioned me about being too inquisitive—“In jail everybody’s always innocent anyway,” he had said—but my curiosity overcame good manners.
Jules flushed at the question and hesitated. He couldn’t lie—the others knew what he had done—but he couldn’t quite bring himself to tell the truth, either. “I, ah, was at a party with this girl and it, ah, got a little out of hand,” he mumbled.
At the end of the table a squat man with a biker’s tattoo on his forearm and a ponytail burst into mocking laughter. Jules shot him a threatening look. “What’re you laughing at, asshole?” he demanded, and the ponytail held up a conciliatory hand.
Many, perhaps most, of the members of Temple JCAG are in for drug-related offenses. Some committed crimes under the influence, others were caught dealing. The addicts all claimed to have been cured, and they talked about their rehabilitation with the cool impersonality of social workers discussing other people’s problems.
“Hey, a Jewish doctor from Philly came in here the other day,” said Alex, the man who had been in the hole. “He heard I’m about to get out, and he offered me a place in his house for a few months. And this doctor, he doesn’t know me from a can of paint. He said, ‘You’re a Jew, and that’s enough for me.’ ” Alex, who was born in Brazil to Russian parents, was the only immigrant in the group. He was raised from early boyhood in Philadelphia and was happy to be going home.
“Hey, I’m gonna keep my nose clean, stay away from drugs, just be a mensch,” he said, and shammes Jay Schama, the head of the congregation, smiled approvingly. “Al is our rehabilitated guy here,” he said, affection mixing with regret. The position of shammes—the lay leader of the temple—is an elective one. Schama, like any politician, was sorry to be losing a supporter.
The shammes stands at the top of Temple JCAG’s hierarchy, which also includes a treasurer, secretary, and men’s club president. The job carries considerable influence and prestige, and abuses of power are not unknown. Several years ago, for example, one of Schama’s predecessors, entrusted with ordering special food for Passover, was caught trying to import several dozen tins of forbidden oysters and shrimp for the Seder.
In most synagogues the first duty of a shammes is finding ten men for a minyan. But this is not a major problem at Temple JCAG; unlike Sammy Davidson of Meridian, Mississippi, for example, Schama has a captive congregation. He is occupied primarily with foreign affairs—maintaining contacts with the Jewish community on the outside, and with the prison authorities. He is also in charge of the annual congregational dinner, a gala event that is the high point of the JCAG social calendar. A couple years ago former governor Milton Shapp gave the main address—a coup by the founding shammes, Victor Hassine.
Hassine was a charismatic lifer, an attorney by profession and Jewish activist by temperament. He was unpopular with the prison officials—particularly after he initiated a lawsuit over living conditions—and he stirred passions among his fellow Jews as well. After winning a hotly contested election for shammes, he received several anonymous death threats that he attributed to a rival faction. Then one day someone caught him off guard and threw a bucket of bleach on him. Hassine was transferred to another prison for his own protection, and a new shammes was installed. Congregational politics at Temple JCAG are definitely hardball.
Schama, the incumbent, is a far less controversial figure. A short, stocky man in his late twenties, he was raised in Philadelphia, dropped out of school after the seventh grade, and worked around town in a series of dead-end jobs. He also developed a drug habit that he tried unsuccessfully to support by armed robbery. Caught during a stickup, he was sentenced to five years; he still had two and a half left to do. Schama was already preparing for his release—he recently completed his high school equivalency exam—but he was determined not to leave a leadership vacuum. “Right now I’m grooming Jules,” he said. “He’s a perfect choice, you know, ’cause he’s in for life.”
If Jules does take over, the congregation is due for a hawkish administration. On the day I visited Graterford, Shiites in Beirut had just taken several American hostages and were demanding that Israel release imprisoned terrorists as the price for their return. “Do you think Israel will agree?” Tom asked me. I said I didn’t think so.
Jules snorted. “That’s what the Israelis said last time, and then the next thing you see is about a thousand Arabs in jogging suits getting on buses. That’s bullshit. What they should do is clear all the Americans out of Beirut, bring in the Sixth Fleet, and just flatten the place.”
Stan, a wrinkled old man in a gray work shirt w
ho hadn’t said a word all day, suddenly interrupted. “Do that and you start World War III,” he said, and a debate on Middle Eastern policy was under way. The men at Graterford take a keen interest in Israel; they even have a UJA drive that raises money to support an orphan in Netanya. Only Tom had been there, but several others said they would like to visit. Alex, the rehabilitated guy, wondered if the law of return applied to ex-cons. Another man asked if I could get them a copy of the Israeli film Beyond the Walls, which depicts life in an Israeli prison. “Be nice to see what it’s like being a majority,” he said wistfully.
In Israel, the early pioneers once boasted about Jewish criminals, seeing them as a sign of national normality. Today the country has its share of crooks, and there are several thousand Jews behind bars. They exist because Israel is a real country with the usual human continuum from good citizenship to criminality. But in America, Jews have no such continuum. They are expected to go to college, acquire a profession, raise a family, and become model citizens.
The men at Graterford are freaks and they know it. Sitting around their little shul, they speak in the vocabulary of the Jewish world: Israel, the Holocaust, affiliation with the UAHC, the need to be a mensch. They know the tones and cadences of American Jewish temple talk, and they used it with me, an outsider; but it is their second tongue. For all their Chanukah parties and Hebrew lessons, they are far closer to the harsh realities of their fellow prisoners than to the mellow, domesticated Jewish middle class.
“Don’t be fooled by these guys,” a prison official told me later. “They’re no different than anybody else in jail.” I recalled their sober vows of rehabilitation, their hatred of the coarseness and brutality of the penitentiary; somehow they didn’t seem to be real criminals. But the official was adamant. “You think because they’re Jews that makes them different? Forget it. Most of these guys, when they get released, they’ll be back. A lot of them belong in here.”
I didn’t doubt that he was right, but I resented him for saying so. My visit to the congregation at Graterford was a lesson in the emotional pull of Jewish solidarity. The final, irreducible point was that this minyan of murderers, sex fiends, and strong-arm men were members of my tribe. I didn’t know them, in Alex’s phrase, from a can of paint; but in some way they seemed as familiar as cousins.
It was getting toward noon when a guard came into the synagogue and reminded the congregants that they had to get to work. Rabbi Maharam and I said good-bye and began the long, long walk up the cinder block corridor to the gate. This time, though, we had an escort—half a dozen of the guys from the shul. Jay the shammes led the way, along with sleepy-eyed Jules, the ponytailed biker, Tom the Hebrew teacher, and a wiry man in a Mets cap named Jerry who was the congregational treasurer. As we walked we continued to talk, and I was so absorbed in the conversation that I was surprised when the group stopped. “This is as far as we can go,” Jay said with an apologetic smile, pointing to the heavy steel door at the exit.
Embarrassed, I began to shake hands with each of the men, wishing them luck. When I got to Jerry he quietly said, “I think you’ve forgotten something,” and then reached up and plucked a black silk yarmulke off my head.
“It belongs to the synagogue,” he said.
“Sorry, I wasn’t trying to rip you off,” I joked, and he gave me a skeptical grin. In prison, everyone’s always innocent.
There is a Horatio Alger quality to the Jews of America. In three generations they have gone from rags to riches and in the process have made great contributions to the culture, science, and economy of their new country. The rewards for their success have been prosperity, security, and an unprecedented social acceptance. Many Americans see Jews as a new, improved variety of WASP—Episcopalians with a touch of spice.
In New York, the capital of Jewish America, the situation is a little different. There, too, the great majority of Jews have reached the middle class and beyond. But unlike other American cities, New York also has a significant Jewish poverty class. A recent poll conducted by the UJA revealed eighty thousand Jewish families in the city with an annual income of less than $10,000, and another one hundred and ten thousand households with an income of less than $20,000 a year. Experts believe that there are three hundred thousand Jews in the New York area who qualify as poor—roughly fifteen percent of the total Jewish population.
Many of the poor Jews are Chasidim with huge families and little secular education. Others are old men and women on fixed incomes, or people out of work—perhaps as many as one hundred thousand in the metropolitan area, according to Jewish poverty workers.
At the bottom of the barrel are an estimated fifteen hundred homeless Jews, street people who sleep in the open and carry their belongings with them in shopping bags or on their backs. Warren Feierstein, who runs the Metropolitan New York Coordinating Council on Poverty for the Jewish Federation, has spent his professional life dealing with these people. A soft-spoken man in his mid-thirties, Feierstein is a realist who grew up on New York’s Lower East Side. To him, Jewish poverty is both natural and inevitable.
“You have Jewish hookers and Jewish beggars in Israel, why shouldn’t we have them here?” he asked reasonably when we met at the Stratford Arms Hotel. “Jews are just people like everybody else. There are strong ones and weak ones. Our job is to help the ones who can’t help themselves.”
Despite the logic of this approach, poor Jews are something of an embarrassment to the establishment. For years it was difficult to convince the federation to face the issue of Jewish poverty with any seriousness. This changed when Mayor Ed Koch, himself a Jew, publicly berated the community for its indifference. “The third floor of the Stratford Arms is our answer to Koch,” Feierstein said.
Nestled between the brownstones on West 70th between Columbus and Broadway, the Stratford Arms looks like a typical Upper West Side residential hotel. But when we went inside that morning it was immediately obvious that the hotel specializes in people with nowhere else to go. The lobby was bare of furniture, and patrons sat on the uncarpeted floor, drinking steaming coffee from white styrofoam cups. Others leaned aimlessly against peeling walls and stared into space. From time to time an unshaven man erupted into barks of unprompted laughter. At the desk, a red-nosed clerk regarded the scene with utter disinterest. Even the candy bars in the lobby’s vending machine were crumpled and stale, chocolate-covered reminders of the pervasiveness of poverty.
The Stratford Arms’s clientele is made up of people of all races and religions, but the third floor is its Jewish neighborhood. The floor has been taken over by the Metropolitan Council on Poverty, and it serves as a shelter for a shifting collection of misfits and losers. “We had a family of six—a couple with four kids—who drove all the way up here from Florida,” Warren told me, as we ascended in the rickety elevator. “He was a factory worker out of a job, and they didn’t know what else to do. Poor people have always migrated to New York from the South, why shouldn’t Jews?”
The corridor of the third floor reeked of industrial cleanser, stale whisky, and stale cigarettes. A woman in a tattered bathrobe passed us in the hall without looking up, but otherwise the floor was deserted. “It’s too early for a lot of them; they’re still sleeping,” Warren told me. I looked at my watch and saw it was ten-thirty.
Warren Feierstein is a former yeshiva boy who wears a skullcap and considers himself Orthodox, but he is undogmatic about identifying poor Jews. “We can usually tell by the name or by the accent—a lot of our clients are from Eastern Europe,” he said. “But basically, if someone claims to be Jewish, we take their word for it. It doesn’t really make much sense to go into people’s backgrounds. By the time they get here, they need help no matter who they are.”
Occasionally Feierstein does find out about a client’s background, but the information isn’t always helpful. “We had a woman here not long ago, the daughter of a prominent Chasidic rabbi in Brooklyn,” Warren told me. “She was a really pretty girl in her late teens. He
r parents were extremely strict and she wanted to wear makeup, tight jeans, that sort of thing. So she ran away from home or her parents threw her out, I’m not sure which. Anyway, she wound up on the streets, and she came to us for help. We got her a job as a margin clerk at the stock market and gave her a room here. Then, about six weeks later, she disappeared. I didn’t hear from her until I got a call from the police; she had been picked up on Times Square for hooking.”
“What did you do?” I asked. Warren shrugged. “There isn’t much you can do. I wish there was. We do what we can. It isn’t very much fun to be poor, but at least Jews have a place to turn. That’s something. And believe me, there are an awful lot of poor Jews in New York, young and old, religious and not religious, immigrants and native-born, black and white.…”
“Blacks? You mean like Chasidim?” In Israel, ultra-Orthodox Jews are sometimes called “blacks” because of their dark hats and coats.
“Them too. But I’m talking about black blacks. You’d be surprised how many black Jews there are in this city. They even have some congregations. I’m not sure where but I could try to find out if you’re interested,” he said.
I was, but Feierstein, despite his extensive network of contacts, proved unable to find a black synagogue. My curiosity was aroused, and I tried several other Jewish organizations, but none of them knew what I was talking about. Clearly, if there was a black congregation in New York it was very far out of the Jewish mainstream.
Unwilling to let go, I called The New York Amsterdam News in Harlem and spoke to the religion editor. In a Caribbean accent he told me he had heard of black Jewish congregations but didn’t know of any personally. “We have a Jewish woman on our switchboard,” he said. “Why don’t I ring you through and you can ask her.” I introduced myself to the operator and asked if she knew the whereabouts of a black synagogue. She was noncommittal but she took my number and said she’d see what she could do.
