Members of the Tribe (33 page)

“What happened?” I asked.

Friedman smiled, knotting his tie and slipping on a dark suit coat. “I didn’t become one. I became a Hillel director. Come on, let’s go to services. It’s Shabbes.” On the way to the car, Friedman, dressed in a suit, took an imaginary jump shot at the basket in his neighbor’s driveway.

There were more than a hundred people at the Hillel House when we arrived. Friedman threw a tallis over his shoulders with practiced ease and began to chant a Chasidic tune. The congregation of students and faculty joined in and within seconds the sanctuary was full of music. Friedman sang with his eyes closed and a dreamy half smile on his face.

As the service progressed, someone handed me a mimeographed sheet. It had the words to a couple of Chasidic tunes, and several short Chasidic parables that all began, typically, with variations of “One day Reb Moshe was walking in the woods near Vilna …” In America, Jewish stories usually take place someplace else.

When the prayers were over, Friedman invited the congregation to the roast chicken and kreplach soup dinner that his wife had prepared. The food was delicious and Dora, a curly-headed, vivacious woman, raced around the room to make sure everyone had enough. Every few minutes, Friedman burst into a melodic chant, keeping time on the table by banging his knife and fork. He seemed almost unaware that he was singing, but people looked over at him and smiled fondly. “Yossil’s still a Chasid at heart,” Dora said to me as she sailed by with a tray of dark meat and baked potatoes.

After dinner I talked about Israeli politics. It was a speech I had given before, and it seemed to go over well enough. But later that night, after we got back to his house, Friedman took me aside and gently protested.

“You were very good, very
informative
,” he said, making the word a pejorative. “But on Shabbes, a Jew needs more than information. A Jew needs something for the ‘neshama,’ the soul. You can’t talk to Jews about Eretz Yisrael and just give them
information. To a Jew, Eretz Yisrael is a sweet place, not just another country.”

I was stung by the criticism and began to argue that information—and not schmaltz—is exactly what Jews need to hear about Israel. Friedman cut me off gently, putting his hand on my arm. “Listen, I might be right, I might be wrong. Think about it, that’s all I’m saying. To another person I might not mention it at all, but I feel I know you. I know more about you than you think. After all, we played ball together.”

Dora came in, after supervising the cleanup effort at the Hillel. She is a warm, articulate woman who came to the States as a girl after World War II and was raised in an Orthodox home in Philadelphia. She gave Yossil an affectionate hug, went into the kitchen, and emerged a minute later with three cups of tea.

We sat in the Friedmans’ living room, talking quietly about Akiva’s upcoming bar mitzvah. Yossil had just received a letter, in Yiddish, from an aunt in Brooklyn, imploring him to make sure that the affair would be kosher. He was amused by the letter—it never would have occurred to him not to have a kosher party—and dismayed that his family has so little confidence in him.

“It must have been hard for you to get out of that world,” I said, thinking of Mendel and the
chopsim
patrol of Williamsburg. Yossil laughed and looked at Dora. “It wasn’t easy. In those days I lived a schizophrenic existence. By day I was a yeshiva boy, by night I used to get into regular clothes and hang out in the Village. That place was like magic for me back then, all the coffeehouses and the clubs. And then one summer I worked as a bellhop in the Catskills. That was the beginning of the end. I went to the Concord and drank a daiquiri and watched people dancing the cha-cha-cha. I promised myself I’d learn to dance, and when I got back to the city I began to hang around Killer Joe Piro. I got so good that I wound up as a Latin dance instructor at the Dale Institute in Manhattan.”

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 charismatic 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.