Members of the Tribe (21 page)

A few weeks earlier, in Jacksonville, Florida, I had met a young Reform rabbi named Michael Matuson, who claimed to detect a new spiritual hunger among his congregants. “People here have everything,” he told me. “Materially they can’t even think of things to want anymore. But a lot of them are desperate for awe. At services on Friday nights I invite them up to the Torah. I tell them, ‘If you’ve had an experience during the week that needs spiritual transformation, touch the Torah and meditate on it.’ You’d be surprised how many people are moved by it.

“The people in a congregation like this want to believe in a
myth,” Matuson said. “The problem is, most of them don’t believe in God. And to tell you the truth, most rabbis don’t believe in God, either—at least not the second grade notion of some old man sitting on a cloud.”

Rabbi Ben Levi and his congregation believe. Their God can balance your checkbook, cares what you eat for dinner, rewards the righteous and punishes the sinner. It is a primitive kind of religion, close to the roots of Judaism. “American Jews don’t feel comfortable with verbal affirmations of God’s glory,” Ben Waldman, Pat Robertson’s advisor, had told me in Washington. “We’re a more subtle religion than that.” But in synagogues filled with poor people, God is more than just an abstraction. The Jews of Beth Elohim reminded me of people I had seen at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, slipping prayers between the cracks with tears in their eyes.

After his sermon, Rabbi Ben Levi introduced me as a visitor from Israel and invited me to say a few words. I stood facing the congregation, which had grown to about sixty during the service, and was greeted by shouts of “Praise God!” and “Jerusalem!” For a brief, adrenaline-crazed moment I was tempted to launch into an imitation of Prophet Jones, a holiness preacher who was a boyhood idol of mine in Detroit. Instead, I told them how comfortable I felt in their synagogue and mentioned that I was writing a book about American Jews that would certainly include them. Several people shouted “Praise God,” but Rabbi Ben Levi seemed a bit disconcerted. “You are very welcome among us,” he intoned, and then somewhat cryptically added, “my life is an open book.”

Cantor Davis ended the service with a chillingly beautiful rendition of “Yerushalaim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold),” an anthem of the Six-Day War. In Israel the song is a cliché, the kind of thing small children sing in talent shows; but Davis’s version—half Yossele Rosenblatt, half Sam Cooke—had the whole synagogue swaying and clapping.

After services one of the women I had seen when I first came in approached me. “You’re from Israel,” she said, “maybe you know my son Shlomo? He’s at the Tel Aviv University.” I told her I didn’t, but promised to call and say hello when I got back
home. The lady smiled, took my hand in hers, fingers curved as if she were holding a golf club, and pumped my arm. “Shabbat shalom to you,” she said. A few handshakes later I realized that the grip is part of the Beth Elohim ritual.

I wanted to talk to some of the members of the congregation, but although they were uniformly friendly, shaking my hand until it hurt and wishing me “Shabbat shalom,” none was willing to be interviewed. “You better ask Rabbi about that,” was the standard answer, and Rabbi Ben Levi didn’t want to talk.

“I’d like to have a discussion, but I can’t do it on the Shabbat. I restrict myself to holy thoughts on the Shabbat,” he said as we stood on the street in front of the synagogue, surrounded by a small knot of worshippers. He told me to call him at his office for an appointment (I did, but he never returned my calls), gave me a Beth Elohim handshake, and headed down Linden Boulevard.

Rabbi Ben Levi’s departure left me standing on the sidewalk with Marshall and Gladys, a mixed couple. Gladys comes from a Jewish family in Kew Gardens and teaches Hebrew school at Beth Elohim. Her husband works for the city in a capacity he declined to specify. A light-skinned man with serious eyes and an earnest manner, he had appeared, in the synagogue, to be elegantly dressed. Now, in the sunlight of Linden Boulevard, I saw that his overcoat was threadbare and his shoes were slightly cracked. He wore a porkpie hat, and he noticed I was bareheaded.

“Ah, excuse my question, but you from Israel. That means you a Jew, right?” I acknowledged that I was. “Well, not meaning any disrespect, why is it that your head is uncovered?”

It seemed a strange question—there are hundreds of thousands of bare-headed Jews in New York. Maybe, I thought, they don’t look Jewish to Marshall.

“I’m a secular Jew,” I told him. “I’m not religious.”

Marshall gazed at me in frank appraisal. “Now, when you say you not religious, you keep the laws of kashrut, don’t you? Don’t be telling me you eat pork products in Jerusalem?”

It sounded pretty bad when he put it that way and suddenly I felt defensive. “I do sometimes, yes. It’s not all that easy to find them, of course, and usually I don’t, but …”

As I talked I saw the expression on Marshall’s face change from friendly curiosity to alarm. It was there in his eyes: This man
don’t
eat
right, which means he don’t
think
right, and he probably don’t
do
right. He cast a nervous glance at his teenage daughters.

I wanted to reassure him, tell him there are plenty of good Jews in the world who do right even though they don’t keep every commandment or even believe in God. I had examples; it’s an old argument. But I left it alone. Marshall and the other members of Beth Elohim aren’t interested in Jewish sociology. They are poor people, Jews with the blues. God is a necessity, not a debating point. So I gave Marshall the secret handshake, wished him and his wife a Shabbat shalom, and headed toward the subway and Manhattan.

A
few days after my visit to Beth Elohim I took a train down to the Lower East Side of Manhattan to see Warren Feierstein again. I had been on the road for months by now, and had met a bewildering array of Jews—crawfish eaters and politicians, yuppies and welfare cases—all the way from the Succah in the Sky to the lesbian Havdalah hot tub. They had only one thing in common—they seemed like Jewish Americans. Now I wanted to meet American Jews, the hard core who still cling to the old Eastern European attitudes and traditions. Feierstein, who grew up on the Lower East Side, suggested I start in his neighborhood.

When I found him in his office at the Metropolitan Council on Poverty, his desk was stacked high with official-looking papers, and a walkie-talkie crackled from a shelf. Feierstein gestured at the receiver. “I’m a member of Hatzollah,” he said proudly. “And we’re always on duty.”

If you have the misfortune to need an ambulance in New York City, it could take as much as forty-five minutes for one to reach you. But if you are Jewish and live on the Lower East Side or in
certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx, you can do a lot better than that. Call the right number, ask for help—in Yiddish, Hebrew, or English—and Hatzollah, the Jewish volunteer ambulance corps, will be at your door within ten minutes. “We’re like the Red Magen David,” Warren said, naming Israel’s national emergency first aid service. “Except, with all due respect, I think we’re a little more efficient.”

Hatzollah was not established only for the sake of efficiency, however. “There are a lot of people in our community who don’t know English well, and they have a hard time communicating with paramedics,” Feierstein explained. “And let’s face it, a lot of them, when they need help, they want to see a Jewish face, to feel like they’re with their own people.”

This is the essence of the Lower East Side mentality. There are about thirty thousand Jews left in the neighborhood—shopkeepers and blue collar workers, teachers and social workers, gentle Hebraists and karate-chopping Jewish Defense League militants—and they are indivisibly Jewish. They don’t need trips to Israel or UJA sensitivity sessions to tell them they are different from their fellow Americans. To them assimilation is a dirty word and the opportunities of the United States a mixed blessing.

Warren strapped on his walkie-talkie and took me out for a tour of his neighborhood. We walked along East Broadway, a street lined with kosher restaurants, religious bookstores, and more synagogues per capita than any other place in America. On one block, between Clinton and Montgomery, I counted twenty shuls and yeshivot—all of them Orthodox. Feierstein told me there isn’t a single Reform or Conservative congregation in the neighborhood, a claim not even the Chasidic strongholds of Borough Park and Crown Heights can make.

By far the most influential religious institution on the block is the Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem Yeshiva, which was the home base of the late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. Reb Moshe was the most respected rabbi of his generation, and on the Lower East Side his word was law. It was he, for example, who protected kosher butchers by outlawing self-service meat markets, and although he died a few years ago, the edict has survived. There aren’t many spiritual leaders in America of any denomination with that kind of posthumous clout.

Not even Reb Moshe was able to preserve the ethnic homogeneity of the Lower East Side, however. The
Forvitz
Building, once the home of America’s most influential Yiddish newspaper, is now the Ling Liang Building. Israel’s Bank Leumi’s sign is written in Hebrew and Mandarin. Not long ago, a small shul on the corner of Clinton and East Broadway was prevented by rabbinical court decree from selling out to a Buddhist shrine. But despite these incursions, the Lower East Side remains Jewish turf, an island of grass roots tradition and community.

If the rabbis hold the religious reins in the neighborhood, its corporeal power center is the Harry S. Truman Regular Democratic Club on East Broadway. Fittingly, its clubhouse is located in the basement of a Talmudic academy. At sundown the round-shouldered yeshiva boys go home and the little building is taken over by a more worldly group of men.

The leader of the HST Regulars is Whitey Warnetsky, a pink-faced fellow of indeterminate middle age. Whitey is central casting’s notion of a Lower East Side politico, from his flashing diamond pinky ring to his aromatic J&R alternative Honduran corona. He has been district leader since the early 1970s, and in the most recent election he had been returned to office unanimously. It takes a pretty good politician to run uncontested anyplace west of Rumania and I figured that he would have some interesting insights into the nature of power in a district of eight thousand mostly Orthodox Jewish voters.

On the way to the HST clubhouse it began to snow heavily. Given the inclement weather and Warnetsky’s recent landslide, I wondered if he would show up. But reliability is one of the leader’s secrets; when I arrived I found him and two associates seated behind a cheesecloth-covered card table on heraldic chairs that looked like they came from the set of
Camelot
. The three men were there to receive members of the voting public, a twice-weekly ritual that keeps Warnetsky in touch with the people of his district.

Warnetsky welcomed me warmly and introduced me to his colleagues—fellow cigar-smoker Dave Weinberger, a powerfully built young man in a yarmulke who serves as the HST sergeant-at-arms
(“I throw people out if they need it,” he explained genially); and treasurer Harry Tuerack, a Kent smoker with the worried expression of a man who handles audited money. The public, less intrepid than its servants, had stayed home that night, and so I had the three statesmen all to myself.

“We have problems down here that other districts don’t encounter—Jewish problems, if you see what I mean,” Warnetsky said, puffing easily on his corona. “For example, let’s say with the traffic department. People who can’t drive on the Sabbath have a problem with alternate side parking.” He lowered his voice and adopted a tone of utmost piety. “This isn’t a parking issue, it’s a spiritual issue. We have some extremely religious people in this district. And, luckily, we’ve been able to help them out.”

Whitey regards himself as a big brother to his constituents. “I’ve helped many a young person down here get a position in life, but I never remind them of it. I don’t say, ‘Hey, look what I’ve done for you.’ Why not? I’ll be truthful with you, it doesn’t do any good. People aren’t grateful—that’s human nature.”

Harry the treasurer shook his head sorrowfully, contemplating the ingratitude. “You gotta have a strong stomach, some of the things you gotta put up with in this business,” he said.

Warnetsky and his fellow HST Regulars are careful to keep their beneficence on a strictly nonpartisan and nonsectarian basis. “I live by our law, the law of the Talmud,” he said. “People are hungry, feed them—that’s not hard to remember, know what I mean?” The HST organization passes out Passover bundles every year and distributes food and goodies before other Jewish holidays. “And that’s without reference to religion, race, or party affiliation,” said Dave Weinberger reverently.

There are quite a few gentiles on the Lower East Side, but it is not so easy to find Republicans. In Milwaukee, the boys at A.B. Data had said that Jews are genetically Democrats; and that certainly seems true in the cradle of American Jewry. According to Whitey, in the 1986 election, Democratic Assemblyman Sheldon Silver, a former yeshiva basketball star, carried the district ten to one. “We got a pretty smooth working organization down here,” Warnetsky said with modest understatement.

The leader has a couple of simple principles that enable him to
keep things functioning on an even keel. “First, as it is written, do your good deeds in private. Our sage, Rabbi Maimonides, taught that.” Hallmark greeting cards provide the other pillar of his philosophy: “Second, it’s nice to be important, but it’s important to be nice. Those two things, in a nutshell, are what I believe,” said Whitey.

But politics on the Lower East Side aren’t all philosophy. Whitey is a practical man, and he has some more mundane rules for success. For one thing, he never discusses his work with his wife. And he is careful to respect other people’s privacy. “Let’s say you’re having dinner with a guy in a restaurant, and another guy comes over to the table. In that situation, I always get up and go to the bathroom. See, he might be offering the other guy something, see what I mean? And this is something I might be better off not knowing. So I walk away. It helps your longevity in my profession.”