Supporters rally to accused rabbi’s side

BROOKLYN, N.Y. (RNS) In the sweltering July rain, a white-bearded rabbi emerged from the federal courthouse in Newark, N.J., and shuffled through a gantlet of news cameras. Rabbi Saul J. Kassin, charged with money laundering in a wide-ranging federal sting, is the 88-year old leader of the nation’s largest Syrian Sephardic Jewish congregation. He has […]

BROOKLYN, N.Y. (RNS) In the sweltering July rain, a white-bearded rabbi emerged from the federal courthouse in Newark, N.J., and shuffled through a gantlet of news cameras.

Rabbi Saul J. Kassin, charged with money laundering in a wide-ranging federal sting, is the 88-year old leader of the nation’s largest Syrian Sephardic Jewish congregation. He has met with presidents, presided over countless weddings and hails from a rabbinical line dating to 15th-century Spain. His father, Jacob S. Kassin, was for generations the spiritual leader of all Syrian Jews in Brooklyn.


“Everyone who knows about Syrian Jews knows the name Kassin,” said Jonathan Sarna, an American Jewish history professor at Brandeis University.

Supporters have written hundreds of letters on Kassin’s behalf, some hand-written in Hebrew, describing the rabbi as a soft-spoken cleric with a gentle handshake who walks to his Brooklyn synagogue, Shaare Zion, each morning before dawn. They tell of him dancing at weddings, visiting the sick, tending a vegetable garden and intervening in family and neighborly disputes.

“When this story broke it was like, `What? Rabbi Kassin?’ This whole thing was just a huge shock to people who knew him,” Dov Hikind, a New York state assemblyman from Brooklyn, said in an interview.

Four months have passed since Kassin and scores of others were charged in the sting; Kassin is accused of using his religious charity to hide criminal proceeds. A Syrian rabbi’s son began wearing a wire for the FBI after being charged with bank fraud. Seven of those defendants have pleaded guilty to corruption charges. But there have been no public developments on the money-laundering end of the investigation.

The charges against Kassin stem from his massive charity, Magen Israel Society, which he runs from the dimly lit dining room of his modest brick and stucco house.

In his most recent filing with the Internal Revenue Service, the rabbi claimed raising nearly $26 million between 2004 and 2008. His lawyer, Gerald L. Shargel, said most of that money went toward educational grants, often to Israel. But the attorney said he was unable to name specific recipients.

Kassin, who kept records by hand, is the only officer listed for Magen Israel with the IRS. His accountant, Charles R. Harary, declined to be interviewed but defended the rabbi in a brief written statement.


“I believe that every penny or dollar that was ever contributed was given out to hospitals, families, synagogues,” Harary wrote.

Prosecutors say some of those contributions to Magen Israel did not go to charity. They accuse Kassin of laundering $200,000 for the informant, Solomon Dwek, in exchange for a 10 percent cut for Magen Israel.

“Kassin is the best,” Rabbi Edmund Nahum allegedly told Dwek as he described their purported money-laundering network, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court. Nahum has also been charged.

Shargel disputes the allegations, saying Kassin used Magen Israel only for philanthropic means. “Rabbi Kassin’s charitable endeavors have been well known for decades,” he said.

In the letters and in interviews, the rabbi’s supporters emphatically insisted he would never consciously break the law. Some described him as naive and, perhaps, gullible. Others said he must have been tricked.

“He could never imagine that someone would set him up like this,” said Sarina Roff, a journalist and genealogist who has researched the Kassin family. “He is very trusting. … He would never intentionally have done something wrong.”


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With more than 75,000 people, Brooklyn’s Syrian Jewish community is based along Ocean Parkway, in a neighborhood where merchants sell spiced olives from buckets and the smell of fresh pita wafts from Middle Eastern bakeries. Families tend to be large and tight-knit.

That family cohesiveness stems, in part, from a 1935 edict issued by Kassin’s father and four other rabbis that bans marrying non-Jews and, with a few exceptions, converts. The punishment is exile. Even one of Saul Kassin’s eight children, Anna Kassin, was banished after marrying a gentile; she lives now in California and declined to comment.

Kassin, who is free on $200,000 bail while he awaits trial, remains a familiar presence on the streets of Brooklyn, walking each morning in his black felt hat and foot-long beard blowing in the wind.

The rabbi’s supporters, who include politicians in both New York and Israel, describe him as a simple and thrifty man, who stubbornly refuses to throw away old lamps and broken chairs.

Like most Sephardic Jews, the Kassin family traces its history to Spain. After being expelled in 1492, many of the Sephardi fled to North Africa, Italy and the Middle East. In 1540, a wealthy Spanish merchant named Shlomo Kassin arrived in Aleppo, Syria, where he became head of the Jewish community, according to Roff, the genealogist. Shlomo Kassin’s grandson, Yomtob Kassin, became the head of the city’s rabbinical court.

For the next several centuries, scores of Kassins were rabbis in Aleppo and what is now Israel. Saul Kassin was born in 1921 in Jerusalem. Twelve years later, his father was invited to lead the congregation in New York.


After becoming a rabbi, Saul Kassin taught at a Brooklyn yeshiva, wrote books in both English and Hebrew and worked as his father’s chief assistant. Before dying in 1994, Jacob Kassin named his son as his successor.

(Joe Ryan writes for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.)

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