Brooklyn Sephardic community rocked by detention of leading rabbi

NEW YORK - "Don't talk to him," the woman shouted as she pulled at the lapels of a yeshiva student's jacket. "Can't you see he's a journalist?" She then chased the student away from a man standing before the synagogue of Shaare Zion, the Brooklyn Syrian Sephardic community's central and most prestigious synagogue. The woman's reaction hinted, perhaps without her realizing, at the injury and insult prevalent in the community ever since last week's arrest of several prominent Syrian Sephardic rabbis on money laundering charges.

Bernie Madoff, dubbed the "biggest ever crook" by the U.S. media, was an alien to the Brooklyn Jews - a millionaire in a penthouse somewhere on faraway Park Avenue. But the pictures flickering across TV screens and staring from newspaper pages since last Thursday and Friday have rocked this large, well-to-do community to the core. Images of an elderly rabbi being helped into his coat by an FBI agent, an enlarged passport picture of a Hasid, and the headline "Nothing is Holy" - all these will not be soon forgotten.

Among the detained are rabbis from Williamsburg and Borough Park, two Brooklyn neighborhoods that are home to a large number of orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews, hundreds of synagogues, and dozens of yeshivas and Hasidic courts. The insult was most bitter among the Syrian Sephardic community, a general term for Jews with roots in Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey. The Syrian Jews are considered one of the elites of Brooklyn, something they will always make sure to remind visitors of. It's also a closed community, many members of which have done extremely well in the export and import businesses. Children of Syrian Jews are normally only married to those whose Syrian ancestry is beyond reproach; many years ago, a chief rabbi of the community had ruled its members could not wed Ashkenazi Jews.

The shock was even greater when it transpired that one of those being questioned by the FBI is Rabbi Saul J. Kassin, the chief rabbi of the community and of the Shaare Zion synagogue. The general reaction to the news was one of disbelief. "The suspicions against the rabbi are completely false," said a young man in a black skullcap who identified himself as a relative of the Kassin family. "When it gets to court, everyone will see they were unfounded."

New York assemblyman Dov Hikind, who represents Borough Park, told Haaretz he thought the charges against Kassin were ridiculous. "One of his sons is a multimillionaire," he said.

Others, however, were less certain. "If the charges against the rabbis are proved to have been correct," one veteran Brooklyn rabbi said, "it'll be the worst and most terrible blasphemy that will ever be remembered about the New York Jews."