H eadlines
Sermons Teshuvah
the first full day of the Jewish new
year, as they welcomed congre-
gants for the first High Holiday
service after the tragedy, rabbis
stepped up to their bimahs and
embraced their roles.

As Reform Rabbi Elliot Strom
explained it, American Jews had
watched news, political speeches
and geopolitical analysis all week
at that point. When Strom, now
retired, welcomed his members
at Shir Ami in Bucks County
that morning, he knew they were
turning to religion for something
else, something deeper.

“You needed to give it a spiri-
tual focus,” he said. “You needed
that ability that religion has to step
back and see the larger picture.”
In 2001, Rabbi Aaron
Gaber led Conservative Con-
gregation Beth Judah, now Shirat
Hayam, a Conservative and
Reform shul in Ventnor, New
Jersey. He titled his first High Holiday
sermon, “A Eulogy to the World
Trade Center.” Gaber started by
expressing the raw anger that
everybody felt, anger at all the
senseless deaths and what ifs.

But then he reminded
everyone that they were in this
together, and with those outside
the Jewish faith, like Christians
he’s going to make it very well.”
Jordan’s friend has dementia;
he’s the oldest of the men in
SCI-Phoenix’s Jewish congre-
gation, a group of 12-or-so
Jewish men who — under
non-pandemic circumstances
— come together to pray and
schmooze weekly.

Medical inconveniences and
confusions aren’t uncommon
in prisons, says Bob Lankin,
a lawyer-turned-financial
adviser and volunteer with
SCI-Phoenix’s congregation.

Another man in the
congregation was sent from
SCI-Phoenix to a hospital
in Altoona for a surgery.

According to Lankin, visitors
and family were not permitted
to visit — a prison policy to
curtail potential escapes.

The prison didn’t inform the
patient’s family of the surgery
time. “That’s wrong,” Lankin
said. As a lawyer, but moreover
as a Jewish person, Lankin said
he objects to aspects of the
carceral system.

The poor treatment of
those incarcerated persists in
many areas of prison culture,
Lankin said. State prisons
banned “solitary confinement”
and replaced it with “restric-
tive housing” or “disciplinary
custody,” which Lankin said
is virtually the same thing.

(Jordan still uneasily refers to it
as “the hole.”) The Department
of Justice reports that up to
20% of those incarcerated in
state and federal prisons are
kept in restrictive housing at
some point in their sentence.

Though Lankin has never
witnessed it firsthand, he’s
had men on the inside tell
him about times guards have
harassed or punched them.

But what Lankin takes
greatest issue with is the
sentencing lengths of those
incarcerated in the U.S.,
which surpasses those in all
of Western Europe. More
than 50,000 incarcerated
Continued from Page 1
18 SEPTEMBER 9, 2021
Continued from Page 1
Rabbi Elliot Strom, formerly of Shir Ami in Bucks
County. Courtesy of Elliot Strom
and Muslims. Finally, he
concluded by telling his congre-
gants that they would find the
strength to go on.

Gaber said the speech was not
difficult to rewrite. Like the rest of
the country, he was focusing on
and thinking about the tragedy
all week. And his message did not
have to be complicated.

“Those kinds of sermons
write themselves,” he said.

Rabbi Lance Sussman of
Reform Congregation Keneseth
Rabbi Yitzchok Leizerowski  Courtesy of Duskis Photo
Israel in Elkins Park lets his
speeches write themselves in the
moment, saying he prefers to
speak extemporaneously.

On 9/11, he was only a
month into his tenure at KI after
moving from a synagogue in
Binghamton, New York. But he
knew exactly what to say.

Jews had been through trage-
dies like this before, and had a
deep well of wisdom to draw
from. It was a moment of uncer-
tainty, and at such moments,
our people lean into sources of
strength, Sussman said.

“Faith is a source of strength.

Family is a source of strength.

Friendship is a source of
strength,” the rabbi said that day.

But not all temple leaders
were so comforting.

Rabbi Yitzchok Leizerowski
leads the Orthodox Congregation
Bais Medrash Harav B’nai Jacob in
Philadelphia. On the morning of
9/11, as he watched the towers fall
on TV, he had an unsettling reali-
zation about American power.

And then, on Rosh Hashanah
morning, he shared it with his
congregants. “God sent a great message
to us in America,” Leizerowski
said. “Things are not the way you
think they are.”
Leizerowski went on to say
JEWISH EXPONENT
that God does not punish us for
no reason.

“There’s room for improve-
ment,” he said.

Looking back, the Orthodox
rabbi believes he hit the mark.

Other rabbis, though, aren’t so
sure about their messages.

Strom said that, unless people
reach out after, it’s hard for rabbis
to ever really know if their words
resonate. But after 9/11, they at
least knew one thing: People
were listening.

On the day of the attacks,
Ohev Shalom in Richboro saw
more than 100 people show up
for its Tuesday evening service.

Usually, according to Perlstein,
only 12-15 members attended
evening services.

Two nights later, Ohev hosted
an impromptu service for congre-
gants to come together after the
tragedy. More than 600 people
walked through the doors.

On the first anniversary of
9/11, Sussman organized a
memorial gathering at KI. More
than 3,000 people came, filling
both the sanctuary and the
hallways. “The entire community came
together,” Sussman said. l
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H eadlines
Laurie Jubelirer is a criminal
justice and civil rights lawyer.

Courtesy of Laurie Jubelirer
Bob Lankin is a lawyer-turned-
financial adviser who volunteers
with the SCI-Phoenix Jewish
congregation. Courtesy of Bob Lankin
Rilka Spieler disagrees. She
is a member of Matir Asurim,
a new Philadelphia-based
network of chaplains, activists
and those “directly impacted
by incarceration,” working
to provide resources to those
incarcerated. Spieler doesn’t believe
that prisons serve to reform
a population at all. Following
the words of political activist
and abolitionist Angela Davis,
Spieler believes that “prisons
disappear people.”
“If you put somebody in
a prison, especially far away
from their family, or away
from their community, that’s
You don’t need to have a sentence that long to discourage people
from committing crimes. After a while, it’s just plain punishment, and
excessive punishment is against the Jewish religion.”
BOB LANKIN
people in the U.S. are serving
life sentences without parole;
Jordan is one of them.

Lankin is among a group
of lawyers and activists that
believes these long sentences
become retribution.

“You don’t need to have
a sentence that long to
discourage people from
committing crimes,” Lankin
said. “After a while, it’s just
plain punishment, and exces-
sive punishment is against the
Jewish religion.”
Criminal defense and civil
rights lawyer Laurie Jubelirer,
who is Jewish, agrees; she
believes that those incarcerated
deserve second chances.

“We’re all human beings,”
Jubelirer said. “Why should
we be defined by our worst
behavior?” Like other rabbis who work
with those incarcerated, Rabbi
Moishe Mayir Vogel posits
that these long sentences are
inconsistent with the Jewish
New Year’s promise of new
beginnings. JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
“As human beings, we
make mistakes,” Vogel said.

“We know that we continue to
grow.” Vogel is the executive
director at the Northeast
Regional Headquarters of the
Aleph Institute, an organiza-
tion that provides resources
for incarcerated Jews and
Jews readjusting to life on
the outside. He points out the
double standard of punishing
some individuals, while all
individuals err.

“Those in the prison system
— they suffer tremendously;
some of their wrongdoings
are exposed,” he said. “We,
as human beings, we all have
skeletons in our closet.”
Lankin and Vogel both
affirm the necessity of prisons.

However Vogel agrees with
Lankin that incarceration can
move into the slippery slope
of retribution: Those incarcer-
ated should be treated “as a
child who is punished by their
parents,” but never punished
out of anger.

it,” Spieler said.

Mirroring the thoughts
of Rabbis David Bauer and
Elyse Wechterman — both
chaplains at SCI-Phoenix —
Spieler thinks that removing
an individual from their
community denies them the
opportunity to apologize to
those they’ve hurt.

“The way to have people
atone is to actually be in
community and be in relation-
ship with the people they’re
working to make amends
with,” Spieler said. “If you
remove people from their
community, then they aren’t
given that opportunity.”
Jubelirer and Lankin
advocate for restorative justice,
the coming together of the
victim and perpetrator to share
their experiences and come
away with a deeper mutual
understanding, as a systemic
change to isolating those
who’ve committed a crime in
prisons. Though
Jordan did
not speak
about the
JEWISH EXPONENT
circumstances that led to his
arrest and conviction, he was
certain about being given the
opportunity to meet with
those he hurt: “I would still
apologize to those people, if
given the choice, for hurting
them, their loved ones and
their family.”
Restorative justice is just
the beginning of imagining
a world where prisons could
be obsolete, Spieler said.

Whatever changes are made
to the system, Spieler believes
there needs to be a dialogue
between the perpetrator and
those they’ve harmed — a
major tenet of teshuvah.

For those on the inside,
however, who have been denied
these opportunities, complete
teshuvah can still be done and
has been done, Wechterman
said. “The way that we seek
forgiveness is by recognizing
that what we’ve done is wrong;
owning our responsibility for it;
learning how we can do better,”
Wechterman said. “And then,
when given the opportunity
and confronted with the same
choices, not doing the same
thing — making better choices.”
Last week, Jordan was
playing cards with another
man in the day room area
of his unit. Jordan said the
man said something to disre-
spect him, and Jordan started
to raise his voice a little. But
he didn’t cause a scene and
chose not to pick a fight. The
two of them laughed it off and
continued playing cards a few
minutes later.

“I can be a mean person if I
choose,” Jordan said, but said
he makes the choice not to be.

“It’s not worth it in here,”
Jordan said. “It’s not worth it
out there, either.” l
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