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.'
