| Leonid Feldman is a big Prager fan. He wrote positive
comments about DP to the LA JEWISH JOURNAL which were reprinted in
DP's newsletter and are on this web site (page on homosexuality).
Rabbi Feldman was also the scholar in residence at Stephen S Wise
temple a couple of months ago.
The author of the following piece, Ari Goldman, is an orthodox
Jew who wrote the book THE SEARCH FOR GOD AT HARVARD.
COMMENCEMENTS: JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY; FROM SOVIET PRISONER
TO NEW RABBI
By ARI L. GOLDMAN
05/15/87
The New York Times
Late City Final Edition
Pg. 4, Col. 4
c. 1987 New York Times Company
Eleven years ago, Leonid Feldman was sitting in rags on the cold
stone floor of a Soviet prison with his hair shaven and belly swollen.
His crime was conducting an illegal hunger strike as part of an
effort to persuade Soviet authorities to let him leave for Israel.
Yesterday, the 34-year-old former prisoner, wearing an academic
cap over a full head of blond hair, was ordained as a rabbi at the
Jewish Theological Seminary of America on Morningside Heights. Americans
working on behalf of Soviet Jewry said they believed Rabbi Feldman
was the first former Soviet dissident to become a rabbi in the United
States.
Rabbi Feldman was one of 23 men and women ordained yesterday at
commencement exercises at the school, the academic and spiritual
center of Conservative Judaism. Eighty-five other degrees were also
awarded - including, for the first time, two cantorial diplomas
to women.
The odyssey that culminated with the ordination of Rabbi Feldman
represented more than a geographical journey. It was an intellectual
process that took him from being a teacher of ''scientific atheism''
in his native Kishinev to serving as a soldier in the Israeli army,
to being a relief worker in Rome, to working as a butler in upstate
New York and to studying Judaism in Los Angeles.
Target of Ethnic Slur
''I was a good Soviet child,'' the tall and articulate Rabbi Feldman
said in an interview this week in a classroom at the seminary, at
Broadway and 122d Street. ''I was a member of the Young Communist
League and an idealist who believed that Communism would make a
better world. But, ultimately, Judaism proved more powerful.''
He was brought up not knowing he was Jewish. ''I was playing soccer
when I was 7 years old, and a kid in my neighborhood called me 'Zhid,'
'' a slur. ''I smiled and later asked my father what it meant. He
just said, 'Don't play with that boy.' ''
But Soviet society kept reminding him of his Jewishness. It was
stamped in his passport and, he said, that meant that he could not
attend the university he wanted to in Moscow or compete in the chess
playoffs in Leningrad, even though he was the regional chess champion.
He went to college in Kishinev, excelling in physics, and got a
job teaching high school science and ''scientific atheism,'' a discipline,
he said, ''that sought to prove that there is no God and that those
who believe in God are mentally ill.''
Effect of 'Exodus'
Mr. Feldman's curiosity was piqued when a boyfriend of his sister
was arrested for reading a book on Judaism. ''My country, the most
powerful nation in the world, is afraid of a book?'' he wondered.
Late one night in a quiet Kishinev park, a friend handed him a
small battered book and told him to return it before daybreak. ''I
read through the night,'' he said. ''I was excited and scared. I
knew I was making a major move in my life.'' It was a Russian-language
edition of Leon Uris's novel ''Exodus.''
''I was 21,'' Rabbi Feldman recalled, ''and it was the first time
I found out that Jews had been around for 3,000 years, that we have
a language called Hebrew and a country called Israel. For the first
time in my life, I saw a solution. That night I became a passionate
Zionist.''
He immediately applied for an exit visa, but was told after three
months of waiting that his application was rejected. Mr. Feldman,
denied the right to emigrate, became a pariah, losing his job and
apartment, and he was snubbed by friends. He decided to conduct
a hunger strike at the municipal building in Kishinev after sending
telegrams of protest to the Soviet leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev, and
President Jimmy Carter.
In Israel 3 Years
The protest led to his arrest and imprisonment in 1976. Mr. Feldman
said he did not know it at the time, but dissidents in Moscow operating
through journalists and tourists got his story out to the West,
where protests were held on his behalf.
After a month, Mr. Feldman was told that a mistake had been made
on his application and that he would be permitted to leave for Israel.
He lived in Israel three years, attended Hebrew University, served
in the army and taught chess to gifted children, but continued with
his conviction that ''there was no God.''
His first religious experience occurred when he moved to Rome to
work for the American Joint Distribution Committee in helping prepare
newly arrived Soviet Jews for life in the West. Mr. Feldman was
peppered with questions about Jewish life and found himself taking
a group to synagogue on Yom Kippur.
''I was an atheist, but I had to be a rabbi,'' he recalled. ''They
came to me with their tsuriss and naches and their questions about
Judaism.''
At California Institute
After a year in Rome, he arrived in New York with the hope of earning
a degree in higher education, but found limited opportunities because
he was an Israeli citizen. He obtained a job as a butler in the
home of a wealthy couple who, he recalled, ''never had to work a
day in their lives.''
After several months, he left to visit a friend in Los Angeles,
where he found a job teaching science in a Jewish high school. He
also came under the influence of Joseph Telushkin and Dennis Prager
, two educators who ran a Jewish studies institute in California.
''For the first time I understood Judaism on an intellectual level,''
Rabbi Feldman said.
He enrolled in the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, the West
Coast branch of the Jewish Theological Seminary. After three years,
he transferred to the New York school and completed the six-year
rabbinical program.
His journey, he said, has taken him from a Communist system that
does not work to a Jewish system that does. And he remains an idealist.
''Judaism is a beautiful system that can make the world better,''
the new rabbi said. ''Because of the kosher laws, we don't become
hunters. Because of kiddush over wine on Friday night, we don't
become alcoholics. Because of Shabbos, we become good husbands and
have a day to sit with our wives and say, 'I love you.' ''
The
New Rabbi: A Congregation Searches for Its Leader
This is a great book by former Philadelphia Magazine editor Stephen
Fried. Terrific dish on how one synagogue really operates. Fills
a gaping hole in Jewish Journalism, which tends to be lackluster.
Just pick up the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, for example.
And there's a fascinating description of Conservative Rabbi Leonid
Feldman, who, before he was married, tore through the girls at the
Jewish Theological Seminary.
Fried writes: Leonid Feldman was a rabbi other rabbis gossiped
about even before he decked his synagogue president. A tall, striking
emigre often referred to as a "rock star rabbi," he was
the first Soviet Jew to be ordained by the Conservative movement.
He worked the national lecture circuit during the eighties, and
then accepted the pulpit at Emanu-El, a sleepy little congregation
in [Palm Beach]. He reportedly told the synagogue's board during
negotiations, "I want to be a role model for yours ons and
daughters, granddaughters and grandsons. Therefore, I'm going to
drive a nice car; I'm going to wear nice clothes; I'm going to ask
for a very nice salary. When some of your brilliant children and
grandchildren are sitting in the sanctuary looking up at me, I want
them to think, 'I could be a doctor, I could be a broker, I could
be a lawyer, but I want to be a rabbi, just like Rabbi Feldman.'"
He was not afraid of being bombastic and confrontational. He told
The Palm Beach Post that "if you don't give 10 percent of your
earnings to charity, you're a bastard." Many of his rabbinic
colleagues regarded him with suspicion, believing some of his best
refusenik sagas to be possibly apocryphal. But while some chided
him for providing nothing more than what one congregant called "religious
entertainment," they had to admit that he could fill seats
and raise money.
[Feldman] also put down roots in the community, marrying the daughter
of the synagogue's treasurer. But as the synagogue grew, along with
Feldman's cult of personality, splits emerged. ...Others complained
that Feldman had too many outside interests that took him away from
his primary obligations to the synagogue: lectures, TV appearances.
Last November [1999], just before snowbird season bega, [synagogue
president Stephen] Levin called a meeting of the ten-member executive
committee of Emanu-El with the rabbi. The meeting went on for an
hour, with members openly criticizing Feldman's commitment to the
synagogue and the time he spent away from the congregation. Then
Levin demanded a detailed schedule of where Feldman planned to be.
When Feldman noted he had already provided them a schedule of his
upcoming travel, a copy of which was sitting on the glass coffee
table, Levin looked at it, crumpled it into a ball and threw it
toward the rabbi.
Whereupon Feldman stood up and clocked Levin, who was sitting on
an ottoman next to the table. Levin crumpled onto the unforgiving
granite floor. The rabbi apologized...
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