Interfaith Officiant Help
This message is actually from Jennifer A. but she was having computer problems.
This was in Sunday''s NY Times!! This is the Rabbi I was using for my interfaith wedding (along with a priest that he uses, which may be his butcher for all I know)!! My wedding is 4 months from this weekend and I need an officiant - ANY SUGGESTIONS???? Please post Rev. Joe''s number and all others that you may know of!!! Thanks!!!!!!
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.'
