- Joined
- Oct 21, 2009
- Messages
- 58,116
- Reaction score
- 174,631
Very lengthy, rbbm.
By Gabby Deutch April 17, 2023
jewishinsider.com
RABINOWITZ lay face down on the floor of his study. Someone — likely someone he knew, police would later argue — had stabbed and bludgeoned him several times.
The rabbi and scholar was dead. He was 63.
No murder weapon would ever be found. The only item missing from the house, friends and family members would later notice, was the knife Rabinowitz used to perform ritual circumcisions. This struck them as more than a coincidence.
Rabinowitz was a man who had escaped antisemitic pogroms in Poland and lived a quiet, humble life in the face of unspeakable tragedies: his parents and siblings murdered by Nazis, the sudden death of his wife, Selma, at their daughter’s wedding six years before. Synagogue members came to view him as a tragic figure. Despite it all, Rabinowitz fought to keep traditional Judaism alive in the nation’s capital as most of Washington’s Jews moved en masse further from the heart of the city or to the suburbs. Even as the neighborhood around him changed, and crime rates in Washington rose, the rabbi never faltered in his conviction that helping others was the pinnacle of his Judaism, which saw that each person was created in God’s image. V’ahavta l’reacha kamocha — love your fellow man as yourself.
Did that biblical teaching, central to Rabinowitz’s worldview, lead the rabbi to his death?''
''A rabbi was killed in December 2019 when a man barged into a Hanukkah party in a private home in Monsey, N.Y., and stabbed five people. And in January 2022, a British Pakistani man armed with a pistol stormed into a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, and took four congregants, including its rabbi, hostage.
Those attacks have hit the American Jewish community hard, but the perpetrators’ antisemitic motivations offer something of an answer for their heinous crimes. But what about what appears to be a senseless act of urban violence like the one that befell Rabinowitz? No answer exists for congregants at Kesher Israel, even though there is speculation that the rabbi may have known his killer. The emotional wounds from the murder continue to cut deep at the congregation, nearly 40 years on. Writer Leon Wieseltier, a longtime congregant who joined the synagogue more than a decade after Rabinowitz’s murder, told JI, “It’s part of the ethos of the place.”
At just over 5-feet-2, the mustachioed Rabinowitz was not an imposing figure. He was not the kind of rabbi whose booming voice filled the far reaches of the sanctuary. He interspersed his long, sometimes rambling sermons with Yiddish.
“You could hardly see him over the bimah [pulpit], and he had such a strong accent. I didn’t understand a word of what he said,” said Howard Rosen, an economist who is now the unofficial leader of “Kesher East,” a group of synagogue alumni who live in Israel and gather annually to mark Rabinowitz’s passing at his gravesite.''
By Gabby Deutch April 17, 2023
Who Killed Kesher's Rabbi? Part 1: An Open Door
Nearly 40 years after the brazen murder of Rabbi Philip Rabinowitz, the cold case continues to haunt the D.C. congregation where he served.
jewishinsider.com
RABINOWITZ lay face down on the floor of his study. Someone — likely someone he knew, police would later argue — had stabbed and bludgeoned him several times.
The rabbi and scholar was dead. He was 63.
No murder weapon would ever be found. The only item missing from the house, friends and family members would later notice, was the knife Rabinowitz used to perform ritual circumcisions. This struck them as more than a coincidence.
Rabinowitz was a man who had escaped antisemitic pogroms in Poland and lived a quiet, humble life in the face of unspeakable tragedies: his parents and siblings murdered by Nazis, the sudden death of his wife, Selma, at their daughter’s wedding six years before. Synagogue members came to view him as a tragic figure. Despite it all, Rabinowitz fought to keep traditional Judaism alive in the nation’s capital as most of Washington’s Jews moved en masse further from the heart of the city or to the suburbs. Even as the neighborhood around him changed, and crime rates in Washington rose, the rabbi never faltered in his conviction that helping others was the pinnacle of his Judaism, which saw that each person was created in God’s image. V’ahavta l’reacha kamocha — love your fellow man as yourself.
Did that biblical teaching, central to Rabinowitz’s worldview, lead the rabbi to his death?''
''A rabbi was killed in December 2019 when a man barged into a Hanukkah party in a private home in Monsey, N.Y., and stabbed five people. And in January 2022, a British Pakistani man armed with a pistol stormed into a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, and took four congregants, including its rabbi, hostage.
Those attacks have hit the American Jewish community hard, but the perpetrators’ antisemitic motivations offer something of an answer for their heinous crimes. But what about what appears to be a senseless act of urban violence like the one that befell Rabinowitz? No answer exists for congregants at Kesher Israel, even though there is speculation that the rabbi may have known his killer. The emotional wounds from the murder continue to cut deep at the congregation, nearly 40 years on. Writer Leon Wieseltier, a longtime congregant who joined the synagogue more than a decade after Rabinowitz’s murder, told JI, “It’s part of the ethos of the place.”
At just over 5-feet-2, the mustachioed Rabinowitz was not an imposing figure. He was not the kind of rabbi whose booming voice filled the far reaches of the sanctuary. He interspersed his long, sometimes rambling sermons with Yiddish.
“You could hardly see him over the bimah [pulpit], and he had such a strong accent. I didn’t understand a word of what he said,” said Howard Rosen, an economist who is now the unofficial leader of “Kesher East,” a group of synagogue alumni who live in Israel and gather annually to mark Rabinowitz’s passing at his gravesite.''
