FYI - BEWARE of so called 'RABBI' Jerry Heller

Many of us on this board have hired (and now fired) this guy - please be warned. This article appeared this past Sunday's NY Times - front page Metro section. All suggestions are welcome as I search for new interfaith officiants!!! February 3, 2002 OUR TOWNS Oh, Such a Voice! But, Rabbi, About Those Jewish Jokes . . . By DAVID M. HALBFINGER ORT JERVIS, N.Y. -- He blew into this river city like a Jewish Music Man. The devoted congregants of Temple Beth El, the only synagogue for miles around, had been left in the lurch last fall when their longtime part-time rabbi, bereaved over his mother''s death, resigned suddenly just weeks before the High Holy Days. Who would lead the Rosh Hashana services? Who would sing the haunting plea for forgiveness on Yom Kippur Eve? It was Ed Saul who found the Rabbi With the Golden Voice, they say, through a talent agency for cantors. And what a talent. 'His voice was gorgeous,' said Charlotte Gorman, who is too frail to drive but still catches a ride to shul every Friday night. 'He got everybody to singing.' A godsend, this Jerry H. Heller was. So they hired him year round, at $35,000, nearly double the previous rabbi''s salary. Port Jervis, an old railroad town on a bend in the Delaware where New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania meet, doesn''t see too many celebrities nowadays. And its tiny Jewish community - retired merchants who had moved up from Brooklyn and the Bronx after the war, a few of them Holocaust survivors, plus some recent transplants from the closer-in suburbs - had never met anyone like Mr. Heller. The sanctuary shook when he let forth with 'Adon Olam.' And mouths dropped when Mr. Heller, 69, told of studying at Juilliard, singing at the Metropolitan, starring in opera productions and vaudeville shows from Boston''s Symphony Hall to the borscht belt. He even offered to get his show-biz friends to give a benefit concert for the temple. But eyebrows arched when the rabbi kept slipping up. Forgetting to put on a prayer shawl when even a bar mitzvah boy would have known to. Skipping the blessing before cutting the challah. Mangling the Hebrew when it was spoken instead of sung. Then one night he ditched the sermon altogether and instead read from a book of self-deprecating Jewish jokes - and on a night when a group of non-Jews had been invited to come hear the Rabbi With the Golden Voice. 'Terribly inappropriate,' said Eva Friedman. Worshipers squirmed. VERN LAZAROFF was appalled. A local bankruptcy lawyer - his business is booming, as the empty storefronts attest - had seen fraud before. He had opposed hiring the rabbi, but the elders of the synagogue, entertaining visions of overflowing pews, ignored him. When he carried on for weeks, they told him to shut up. Last month, they wrote him a letter threatening to toss him and his family out. Mr. Lazaroff, undeterred, hired an investigator. Rabbi Heller, it turned out, had been charged with criminal impersonation, a misdemeanor, after illegally obtaining another man''s credit history to use in renting a property. He completed 50 hours of community service in 1997, delivering Meals on Wheels with a song. Mr. Lazaroff also checked out the rabbi''s credentials with Jewish experts in New York and Israel. He found out that the rabbi almost certainly was not a rabbi at all. Yes, he had worked as a cantor for years, at synagogues from Long Island to Rockland County. But the ordination certificate he produced, supposedly from a rabbinical school in Tel Aviv, was 'an obvious forgery,' Mr. Lazaroff said. Mr. Heller said he''d been ordained in 1958. But the certificate, printed in Hebrew and English, was dated 1998 in the Hebrew copy. It even misspelled 'Tel Aviv.' There were other glaring errors. Not to mention it looked as if it had been printed by a late- model word processor. Mr. Heller had also been fired from his last job, as cantor at a temple in New City, N.Y., for moral turpitude, Mr. Lazaroff learned. He had been caught cheating on his wife with another woman in the congregation. On Monday, the Port Jervis synagogue president asked Mr. Heller to defend himself. Instead, he quit. 'I don''t need this kind of aggravation,' Mr. Heller said on Friday. He sat in his living room in Nanuet, N.Y., as the Sabbath approached, the 'other woman' - now his wife, Fran - beside him. He insisted the certificate was legitimate, but in less-than- convincing terms. 'To the best of my knowledge, this is not fake,' he said. Then he showed a scrapbook of clippings from his singing days, covering the time he should have been in Israel. In any case, it''s clear Mr. Heller does not need the aggravation. He and his wife have a thriving business, Tri-State Wedding Service. Mr. Heller - Rabbi Heller, according to his many clients'' wedding notices - conducts, alone or with a priest or minister, weddings of Jews to non-Jews, no questions asked. His uncommonly lax approach to intermarriage has a price: from $500 on up, depending. 'If it''s at the Essex House,' Fran Heller said, 'it''s a lot more.'

JenDavid and any other Rabbi Heller people

I am just wondering what everyone else who planned to use Rabbi Heller is doing and if anyone got a refund from him. I posted the other day about this and got no reply. I hate to dwell but I am so annoyed by this situation and want our $600.00 deposit back, preferably without going to court! I would appreciate any insight on this situation.