Members of the Tribe (19 page)

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 all 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.”

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 who 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.