Members of the Tribe

by Zev Chafets

  Yossil also studied English literature at Brooklyn College; his first job was teaching English at his old yeshiva, Torah v’Das. By this time, though, he was out of the Satmar community for good.

  “I still go home to visit,” he said. “People are happy to see me, and I’m happy to see them. They have no idea what a Hillel director does, but they know where I come from and who I really am. Their attitude is, ‘You’ve come for a visit, it’s good to see you again.’ My family accepts me with love, but they don’t understand my world.”

  Yossil and Dora want their son to know his Satmar roots, and occasionally they take him to visit Brooklyn. “Akiva’s bar mitzvah has caused us to seriously consider sending him to New York to a Jewish school,” Yossil said. “You can’t carry Yiddishkeit on the narrow shoulders of a nuclear family. Our son needs hard learning and a Jewish environment. We want him to have that, but we won’t send him to Satmar. Even I couldn’t survive there anymore. It’s very hard to find the proper balance for Akiva.”

  Yossil Friedman has no illusions about the power of America. He himself was seduced by Bob Cousy and Killer Joe, and although he has enough residual Jewishness to last a lifetime, he can’t be sure even about his own children. He and Dora have created a Jewish home in Gainesville; but, like the mimeographed Chasidic stories at the Hillel, it draws its sustenance from other times and other places.

  “You know, I named our Akiva after Rabbi Akiva,” said Dora. “He was always a special hero of mine, a real ‘ohev israel’ [a lover of Israel].”

  Friedman looked at her fondly. “He was a hero of mine, too,” he said with a smile.

  “Yes,” she replied with gentle insistence, “but that name was my idea, Yossil.”

  Friedman gave her a look of mock disagreement and then broke into a Chasidic song about the famous rabbi. “I could sing six or eight songs about Rabbi Akiva right now,” he said, smiling. “That’s a yeshiva thing to do. Not just to know, but to show that you know. That’s what my kind of education gives you—that, and a feeling of pity for other Jews who don’t know what you do, Jews who have traded a place in the Palace for a condominium in Florida.”

  We sat up late talking about family things. Strangely, I felt very close to the Friedmans. I grew up as an assimilated kid in the Midwest; in those days I never even met a Chasid or a Holocaust survivor. But after twenty years in Israel, I understood the Friedmans perfectly, and they understood me. That night at their place we talked Jew talk—not Israeli politics or federation business, certainly not religion—just simple conversation among members of the same tribe, people with shared values and a common understanding of the world.

  “You know what the saddest thing is?” said Yossil. “People down here don’t understand that Judaism isn’t just about being—it’s about doing. I can teach if I have to, and I can counsel if I need to, but first and foremost I’m not a Hillel director, I’m a Jew. Jews do. They lead Jewish lives.”

  “I went to a conference not long ago,” said Dora, “on ‘Intermarriage: Prevention and Cure.’ There was a whole room full of Conservative rabbis, and not one had any idea what to do. One got up and said, ‘The converts I have are better than born Jews.’ Imagine that. I’ve got nothing against converts, but how could he say a thing like that? How much Yiddishkeit can a convert have?”

  Friedman sighed. The Jewish students at the University of Florida don’t have much Yiddishkeit either. “There’s so much alienation here. People don’t want to come even to your sweetest programs. They have no Jewish imagination, no Jewish knowledge or growth. They come to college knowing four Jewish songs, and they leave with the same four songs.

  “Look, can you call yourself a basketball player if you can’t play?” he said. “Jews down here settle for so little. The boy comes home with a girl and the mother says, ‘Thank God she’s Jewish.’ What’s that? What does it amount to?” Yossil leaned over and gave Dora a warm, un-self-conscious hug. “They should ask, ‘Does she sing like a Jew? Can she make love like a Jew?’ ”

  Dora giggled and ruffled her husband’s hair. Yossil seemed suddenly abashed, and he smiled like a little boy. “Don’t get excited, I got that last line out of a Marvel Comic,” he said, and broke into a Chasidic tune.

  “Conversion to Judaism in one day,” read the ad in The Miami Herald. “Six months of instruction in one eight-hour seminar. Join others in this spiritual adventure.” I was in Miami to meet the man behind the ad, Rabbi Dr. Emmet Allen Frank,* founder of the All People’s Synagogue of Miami Beach, the Crazy Eddie of American Judaism.

  I called the number listed in the paper and got a recorded announcement. It began with a lilting baritone voice (which turned out to be Emmet Frank’s) singing the opening line of “Oh What a Beautiful Morning.” The recording then invited me to leave my name and number, which I did.

  It took a couple of days, but Rabbi Frank eventually returned my call. I introduced myself and asked if he would be willing to explain his brand of Judaism to a puzzled Israeli. At first he was plainly unenthusiastic, a reticence I mistakenly attributed to a bad conscience. Later I learned that Frank had been having trouble with Meir Kahane’s toughs, and he was afraid I might be setting him up for a hit.

  Frank finally agreed to meet me at his synagogue, which was appropriately located over a branch of Citibank, on the corner of Collins Avenue and 75th, in Miami Beach. It is a Jewish corner, two blocks from the ocean, inhabited mostly by old, discouraged-looking people from New York. A kiosk carries the New York Post and The Jewish Press. There were challas and bagels for sale at Abraham’s Kosher Shomer Shabbat Bakery. At Goldstein and Sons Strictly Kosher Meat Market, butchers in “Kosher Treat” baseball caps cut cheap pieces of brisket and rump for the elderly customers. A station wagon with HEBREW HOME FOR THE AGED on its doors cruised the quiet street like a truant officer looking for delinquents. The midday silence was reproachful; the people on Collins Avenue have no energy to waste on idle noisemaking.

  On the door of the All People’s Synagogue was a multicolored modernistic mezuzah and a warning: VANDALIZING A CHURCH OR SYNAGOGUE IS PUNISHABLE BY FIVE YEARS IN JAIL AND A $5,000 FINE. I rang the doorbell and after a considerable interval, during which I was inspected through a peephole, I was admitted. Throughout America, Jewish offices and institutions are guarded by sophisticated security precautions—bulletproof screens, closed-circuit television, and rent-a-cop guards. Usually these measures are directed against the threat of Arab terrorism; but at the All People’s Synagogue, the danger was from other Jews.

  Emmet Frank did not look like the kind of man who lives behind locked doors. In his late fifties, he was a cheerful, open-faced fellow with ginger hair turning gray and a reddish beard. That day he was dressed in a pink, yellow, and blue argyle sweater, matching socks, saddle shoes, and a blue silk racer’s jacket. A huge diamond ring shaped like the Ten Commandments extended to the knuckle of his left index finger, and gold chains—one holding a small Chai, another a Star of David—were draped over his chest. The effect was splendid and eclectic, as if he had been dressed in shifts by Liberace, A. J. Foyt, and George Bush.

  Rabbi Frank greeted me suspiciously, but after a minute or two of small talk he broke down and took me on a tour of his synagogue—a suite of three spacious rooms linked by connecting doors. The room on the left was dominated by an exhibit of his paintings—large, skillfully rendered oils on Jewish themes, many of them featuring ornate Hebrew calligraphy. Frank’s artwork, according to a brochure he gave me, has hung in the Smithsonian Institute and in the lobby of the B’nai B’rith building in Washington. The brochure also listed his other accomplishments: “Artist, Violinist [with the Houston Symphony Orchestra], Singer, Writer [of an unpublished novel, I Am God’s Janitor], Photographer, Teacher, Minister of God.”

  The room on the right was the rabbi’s study, its walls festooned with plaques and awards. Back in the 1950s, Emmet Frank was considered a talented, promising young rabbi, a political liberal and something of a cha
rismatic figure in the Reform movement. His walls bore witness to his period of respectability: a rabbinical ordination degree and doctor of divinity diploma from the Hebrew Union College, a certificate of appreciation from the Mid-Atlantic Council of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, a plaque from Israel Bonds, and an award from the American Jewish Congress lauding his achievements as a civil rights pioneer in the state of Virginia.

  The pinnacle of his career came in the early 1960s, when Frank served as the rabbi of a large temple in Alexandria, Virginia. Although he was happy there, he decided to go to Seattle, to an even larger pulpit. The move ended in disaster—he couldn’t get along with the congregation and was fired.

  Emmet Frank moved back East, to a small temple in Pennsylvania. But he didn’t last long there, either. Like a former big league ballplayer on the way down, he drifted from one tank town to another, eventually winding up—unemployed—in Miami Beach. “I believe it was God’s plan for me to come here. There are thousands of Jewish people who need my help and my services, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I found this place,” he told me with a faraway look in his clear blue eyes.

  The center room of Frank’s synagogue was a miniature chapel with stained glass windows, blond wood pews, a small organ, and an ark covered with what appeared to be a Danish tapestry. The sanctuary resembled a tasteful Las Vegas marriage parlor—the right decor for a rabbi prepared, in his own words, “to marry anybody to anybody, anytime and anyplace.”

  “I advertise interfaith marriages,” he said proudly, displaying his listing in the Greater Miami Yellow Pages: “Intermarriage, conversion, bris, bar mitzvah.” There is a rabbi in New Jersey who publishes a kind of tout sheet of colleagues who will perform intermarriages, and under what conditions. Most of them demand that the non-Jewish partner study Judaism, or at least promise to raise the children as Jews. Frank was proud of the fact that he was the only rabbi on the list who has no conditions at all.

  “I’ll do a wedding in a Catholic or Protestant church, co-officiate with a minister or priest, whatever the couple wants. I sing, I chant, I have a beautiful robe. Believe me, nobody does a wedding like I do,” he said. Frank’s matrimonial services included a chauffeured ride to the chapel in the rabbi’s $90,000 Silver Spirit Rolls Royce, driven by his son and disciple, Loring.

  “Rabbis think that by not doing interfaith marriages they’re saving Judaism. I suppose they think that if a couple can’t find a rabbi, they won’t get married,” Frank told me, shaking his head at the innocence of his colleagues. “Actually, I’m saving Judaism, not harming it. I increase the number of Jews. If you chase Jews away, all you do is make them non-Jews. Besides, I’m not that different from a lot of other rabbis. They do interfaith marriages in the closet. I advertise, that’s all.”

  It was the advertising that got Emmet Frank thrown out of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional body of the Reform rabbinate. Although Frank had been an embarrassment for years, there were no grounds for his dismissal from membership. But advertising—unlike eight-hour conversions or performing weddings in a church—is a violation of Reform rabbinical ethics and his colleagues used it as an excuse for booting him out.

  Rabbi Frank responded with a wounded defiance, stepping up his advertising campaign and sniping at his fellow rabbis on local talk shows. He also founded his own rabbinical association, FAIR (the Free Assembly of Independent Rabbis). Emmet Frank was its only member, but he hoped to attract followers. “Someday I may even open my own rabbinical school,” he said grandly.

  Emmet Frank was born and raised in the South and educated in Classical Reform congregations. His classmates at the Hebrew Union College remember him as an engaging young man, but an indifferent student. “There are still a lot of things about Judaism I don’t know,” he admitted. “But really, I don’t need to know all that much. I’m a life cycle rabbi.”

  A life cycle rabbi, according to Emmet Frank, offers services to people who couldn’t otherwise get them. Frank himself had no formal congregation—his experiences in Seattle and Harrisburg turned him against organized religion—but he claimed to have several thousand followers in Miami. He led Passover Seders for them at hotels or country clubs, conducts bar mitzvah ceremonies in backyards or on the beach. But most of his life cycle business came from performing weddings, more than one hundred a year, sometimes for couples who have traveled thousands of miles to be married by a rabbi.

  The far-flung nature of Frank’s ministry and the publicity surrounding it aroused considerable controversy and opposition. One of Frank’s most vocal critics was Jewish Defense League chief Meir Kahane, who visited the All People’s Synagogue a few months before.

  “I invited him in and we talked for a while,” Frank recalled. “He was actually quite pleasant. But then I heard a lot of noise downstairs. I looked out the window and saw a bunch of his supporters demonstrating. They were carrying signs that said EMMET FRANK WOULD MARRY A GOAT TO A SHEEP. You know, they actually had a goat down there, with a yarmulke on its head and a tallis on its back, and they yelled up at me to marry it to a sheep. I hated that. I’m the chaplain for the local humane society, and I felt terribly sorry for the goat.”

  Frank called the police, and Kahane finally left, but the demonstration marked the beginning of a campaign to harass the spiritual leader of the All People’s Synagogue. “I got abusive phone calls in the middle of the night, they put ads in the paper offering free phone sex and listed my home number. I got sent doo-wop records C.O.D. They made my life miserable. That’s why I was afraid to meet you. I thought you might be one of them,” he said in an apologetic tone.

  Naturally Rabbi Frank never married a goat to a sheep. The closest he had come was a wedding he performed for a Jewish elephant trainer with the improbable name of O’Brien and his tightrope-walker bride. The ceremony was carried out in the elephant tent, a venue that allowed the groom’s closest friends—three elephants with whom he worked—to take part by holding poles of the bridal canopy in their trunks. The fourth pole was held by a clown in whiteface. Frank showed me pictures of the groom and his extravagantly tattooed bride under the canopy. It was, he said, perhaps his finest hour as a life cycle rabbi.

  The wedding business had its satisfactions, but it was in the area of conversions to Judaism that Frank was a pioneer. “I convert people in one day, and that’s controversial,” he said, “but let’s be honest. How long do other rabbis take? Six months? A year at the most. Okay, so let’s say a rabbi does a conversion in six months, one hour a week. And during that time, the student is sick once or twice, the rabbi can’t make it once or twice, maybe they meet twenty times, something like that. That’s, what, twenty hours? Thirty hours at the most. Mine takes eight hours. Now, what’s the difference? You know, a lot depends on what kind of a teacher you are.

  “I cover all the major holidays, teach them the symbols, the whole life cycle,” he said. “I give a special emphasis to the Sabbath blessings. Then we finish up with a ritual baptism, right here.” He pointed out the window in the direction of the beach. “I tell them, ‘When you step into the ocean, you’re stepping into God.’ ”

  Frank estimated he had converted several hundred people since the seminars began. “Look, they don’t remember everything. But I tell them, ‘If you forget something, just give me a call.’ ” It was the only conversion program in the country that came with its own warranty.

  There was a knock on the door. Rabbi Frank was immediately wary, afraid perhaps that it was more doo-wop records. He looked through the peephole before opening the door and welcoming his son, Loring, who joined us in the rabbi’s study.

  Loring Frank, a thin, nervous man in his late thirties with the credulous manner of a teenager, introduced himself as a marketing consultant; but his main job was serving as his father’s acolyte. Like the sons of other successful men, he was being groomed to take over the family business.

  “I’m training Loring to be a rabbi,” Frank sa
id blandly. “He’s only been at this about six months, but someday I want him to take over my synagogue and FAIR.” Loring nodded his enthusiastic approval of this master plan. I asked him if he had much Jewish background before entering upon his rabbinical training.

  “Well, I believe in lighting candles on Friday night, and I go to temple once in a while, but I don’t say a prayer after going to the bathroom or just go around praying all the time like the Orthodox, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “And my dad has taught me a lot. But you don’t need to know everything. I mean, let’s say that somebody wants to know about kosher. Then I’d send him to another rabbi who knows those rules. Personally, I’m macrobiotic, that’s my style, but I can respect other people’s beliefs, too. I’m just not worried about tiny details.”

  Loring acquired his knowledge of the big picture by accompanying his father on his rabbinical rounds—getting hands-on experience, like a plumber’s apprentice. “We do brises, weddings, everything. I still haven’t taught bar mitzvah training yet, but I will soon, won’t I, Dad?”

  Rabbi Frank nodded, a proud father. “I didn’t push my son to become a rabbi. The Lord did.”

  “Hey, Dad, who was that guy who became a rabbi when he was about my age?” Loring asked.

  “That was Rabbi Akiva, son,” Frank said, clearly pleased with the boy’s erudition. Loring slapped his knee. “Right, well, it’s never too late. You know, I don’t know why these Orthodox attack us. I mean, we don’t attack them for doing their thing. What we want to do is to cater to the people, give them what they want. We don’t necessarily expect them to change their whole lives just to be Jewish.”