Lower than every week after speeding to Floor Zero as a police chaplain on 9/11, Rabbi Alvin Kass led Rosh Hashanah providers — not just for his Brooklyn congregation however at a makeshift synagogue at LaGuardia Airport for emergency responders who had flooded into New York Metropolis after the terrorist assaults.
“It was,” he would later say, “probably the most significant non secular service in my profession.”
Kass died early on Oct. 26 at 89 because the longest-serving chaplain within the New York Police Division, with a profession that included responses to international terrorism, native violence and the intimate wants of law enforcement officials — in addition to a hostage disaster that he famously resolved with a non-kosher pastrami sandwich.
He had labored till weeks earlier than his loss of life and, days earlier, had tuned in from his hospital room to a ceremony honoring him for 60 years of service inside the NYPD.
“As our longtime non secular director, he anchored Shomrim in Torah values and repair, guiding us by way of milestones, line-of-duty tragedies, and on a regular basis selections alike,” the Shomrim Society, a fraternal group for Jewish law enforcement officials, mentioned in an announcement. “His counsel formed our traditions, his presence steadied our hearts, and his instance set the usual for what it means to be a Shomrim chief.”
Born and raised in New Jersey, Kass attended Camp Ramah earlier than enrolling at Columbia College in 1953. His freshman-year roommates there have been Robert Alter, who would turn out to be a preeminent translator of the Bible, and Shalom Schwartz, later a number one psychologist in Israel.
After graduating from school, he earned each a doctorate from New York College and ordination as a Conservative rabbi from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America earlier than becoming a member of the U.S. Air Power as a chaplain. Returning stateside, he took a pulpit in Queens earlier than being urged to hitch town’s police division as a chaplain.
On the time, he was solely the third Jewish chaplain to work for the NYPD. He would turn out to be its longest-serving and the primary three-star chaplain, working underneath eight mayors and 21 police chiefs.
On the similar time, Kass spent many years in congregations, helming the East Midwood Jewish Heart, a Conservative synagogue in Brooklyn, for 36 years till his retirement in 2014.
“He was only a very type and unassuming individual — and a dream to work with,” mentioned Rabbi Sam Levine, the synagogue’s present rabbi who additionally served as cantor throughout Kass’ tenure. “His presents allowed him to guide this group by way of some very troublesome occasions, significantly over a battle over egalitarianism, which he was extraordinarily dedicated to.”
Kass had been exempted from programs supposed to show rabbis-to-be the way to ship sermons, Levine mentioned, as a result of he was so gifted a speaker, delivering advanced feedback extemporaneously to nice impact. “It was like watching a magician in a method,” he mentioned.
The NYC Benevolent Affiliation known as Kass “a real pillar of the NYPD” in a Fb submit mourning him. “Each time we bowed our heads for one among his prayers, we appreciated his deep religion, his old-school wit and his unshakable devotion to the women and men who defend NYC,” the group mentioned. “He was a champion of all that’s good and noble about our occupation. Might his reminiscence be a blessing.”
NYPD Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who’s Jewish, mourned Kass in an announcement following his loss of life. She famous that he was the youngest chaplain within the division’s historical past when he got here on at age 30.
“Practically six many years later, he remained its non secular coronary heart — a supply of energy, steerage, and religion for generations of law enforcement officials and their households,” Tisch mentioned, including, “His loss is immeasurable. His instance is eternal.”
Inside the NYPD, Kass was liable for the non secular care of all officers however particularly the hundreds who’re Jewish. Kass efficiently advocated for the best of Jewish law enforcement officials to not work on Shabbat and main Jewish holidays whereas additionally serving as the first Jewish determine for Jewish officers who had been in any other case unaffiliated with Jewish communities.
“The primary duty for a non secular chief is to deliver all folks nearer collectively, together with these of your personal religion,” he advised the New York Jewish Week when he was honored as one among “36 to Watch” in 2024. “I really feel significantly proud that the Shomrim Society embraces Jews of all backgrounds and factors of view. The group is a paragon of the unity that should bind all Jews collectively.”
After the terrorist assaults in Decrease Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, Kass reported to Floor Zero, the place he encountered a police officer he described as “crying like a child” in addition to the households of officers who had been unaccounted for. Later, he attended the funerals of ever police officer who was killed that day, together with two who had been Jewish.
“I advised their households that you just’re alleged to say ‘Baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu melech ha’olam, dayan ha emet’: Blessed is the Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who’s a decide of fact, or truthful decide. This implies, primarily, that He is aware of what He’s doing. We don’t,” Kass wrote in an essay for The Ahead on the twentieth anniversary of the assault.
“We will’t comprehend what He’s doing fairly often, however presumably He is aware of what he’s doing, and we submit. We bow our head to what’s typically inscrutable and incomprehensible, and we settle for it with a measure of religion and hope,” he continued. “That actually is the important message of Judaism, within the face of evil.”
Kass would later say that 9/11 marked a transition within the function of the chaplain inside the NYPD, peeling again a few of the stigma that had been related to searching for non secular care in a division the place machismo was lengthy the forex.
Kass’ personal encounters on the job ranged from lofty to the low-brow. He was pulled away from his son’s bar mitzvah celebration to are likely to an officer who had been shot, in keeping with a 2006 profile within the Columbia alumni journal. On one other event he flew upstate between Friday night time providers and Shabbat morning providers to tell a household that their officer son had been murdered.
One in every of Kass’s extra well-known escapades got here in 1981 when he was known as in to barter with a Jewish man who had taken a girl hostage.
“I talked to him all night time to surrender his gun,” Kass recalled in a 2012 interview with the Wall Road Journal, neither the primary nor final time he would recount the incident. “I used to be an utter failure. However by morning he was hungry.”
The hostage staff ordered pastrami sandwiches from the (non-kosher) Carnegie Deli for the hostage-taker and for Kass. Kass traded one overstuffed sandwich for the person’s gun — but it surely turned out he had one other. Kass, who ate solely kosher meat, had not touched his sandwich and persuaded the person to simply accept it in alternate for the opposite gun. The police swooped in and ended the disaster.
The NYPD commissioner famous the incident when selling Kass to three-star chief in 2016, saying, “In a feat that has turn out to be legendary, you had been capable of commerce two pastrami sandwiches for the person’s two weapons.”
However for Kass, whose small stature added to a widespread impression of modesty, the true feat got here not in his skill to disarm the hostage-taker however within the man’s urge for food. “Have you ever seen the sandwiches from the Carnegie Deli?” he recalled. “They’re big.”
Kass is survived by his three kids and three grandchildren. He was married for 54 years to Miryom Kass, an educator, till her loss of life in 2017. Talking on the 2016 ceremony marking 50 years with the NYPD, Kass mentioned about Miryom, “She has been by confidant, my associate, my co-worker, she’s been my inspiration, she’s been my chaplain.”
For more information, go to JTA.org.
