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On Religion

Two Rabbis Find They’re Separated Only by Doctrine

When Judith S. Lewis was being hired three years ago as rabbi of the Riverdale Temple in the Bronx, a board member in the temple’s Reform congregation made a prediction. The rabbi who led the Orthodox synagogue just a few blocks away, Jonathan I. Rosenblatt, would not deign to meet her.

The self-appointed Cassandra offered no specific reasons for his prophecy, and perhaps he assumed no explanation was even necessary. Doctrinal disagreements over such basic issues as interfaith marriage and female equality in worship had polarized the Reform and Orthodox movements for decades. Some Orthodox rabbis would refer to their Reform counterparts only by the studiously neutral noun “clergy.”

A week or so after being installed, Rabbi Lewis picked up her phone. It was Rabbi Rosenblatt, the first of Riverdale’s numerous rabbis to formally welcome her to the neighborhood. She couldn’t say she was entirely surprised. She knew something her board member didn’t: Rabbi Lewis’s husband, Otto Kucera, was a funeral director who had worked with Rabbi Rosenblatt many times over nearly 20 years.

“Anyone good enough for Otto to marry,” Rabbi Rosenblatt, 52, recalled in a recent interview, “was good enough for me to have as a colleague.”

So they met for coffee in the summer of 2006 at a kosher restaurant, the Corner Cafe, and they crossed paths again some months later at a Jewish Federation fund-raiser at the temple. Then they, like so many other busy New Yorkers, kept promising to get together again soon, and kept being too busy to do it.

So it remained until May 20, 2009, and the most unimaginable occasion for a reunion. That night, the New York police and F.B.I. agents arrested four men on charges of trying to bomb two Jewish buildings in Riverdale: Rabbi Lewis’s Riverdale Temple and Rabbi Rosenblatt’s Riverdale Jewish Center. To those suspects, described by law enforcement officials as jailhouse converts to Islam and jihadi wannabes, the distinctions between Reform and Orthodox were either irrelevant or invisible.

Rabbi Lewis, 55, had been walking through the lobby of the temple about 8:15 that night when she spotted two people who turned out to be plainclothes police officers. They told her they were staking out an apartment across the street, looking for burglars. She joked that if they had to shoot, they should try not to break the temple’s new windows.

After she went into an administrative meeting, an S.U.V. pulled into the parking space reserved for the temple’s executive director. The building superintendent ordered the driver to move or get towed. The driver and several companions pulled around to the main entrance and, according to police accounts, planted what they believed to be bombs.

When Rabbi Lewis left for the night at 9:15, she found her route down Independence Avenue blocked by police officers and F.B.I. agents with helmets and machine guns. She was told cryptically, “Everything’s over.” Listening to the radio on her drive home to New Jersey, the rabbi heard that her temple had been a target of a terrorist attack.

Meanwhile, Rabbi Rosenblatt had just come home to Riverdale from visiting sick congregants at a hospital in Queens and then leading the evening prayer service at synagogue. He was just lifting his fork — the sort of detail that events have etched in his memory — when the phone rang with the community-liaison police officer for the neighborhood on the line.

“Rabbi, could you open the shul for a meeting?” Rabbi Rosenblatt recalls the officer asking.

“When?”

“Now,” the officer replied.

As the rabbi unlocked Riverdale Jewish Center 10 minutes later, a member showed him a printout from the Internet: terrorists trying to bomb two unnamed Riverdale synagogues. Moments later, when Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly arrived, Rabbi Rosenblatt found out that one was his.

“It was almost surreal,” he recalled the other day. “I almost felt the impulse to laugh. And not because of any humor. Because of the absurdity that we would be a target.”

In fact, over the last generation, several similar attacks had occurred in Riverdale. In 1989, someone firebombed the offices of The Riverdale Press, a weekly newspaper, after it published an editorial defending the writer Salman Rushdie, the subject of a fatwa ordering his death for his book “The Satanic Verses.”

On the eve of Yom Kippur in 2000, early in the second intifada, several Palestinian-American men tossed Molotov cocktails at a Conservative synagogue, Adath Israel. One of the men, Mazin Assi, was convicted of attempted arson, weapons charges and hate crimes, and is serving a 15-year prison sentence.

In the immediate maelstrom on May 20, Rabbi Lewis and Rabbi Rosenblatt reached first toward their own members. Rabbi Lewis had an entire contingent of parents, teachers and children showing up for the temple’s preschool early the next morning. Rabbi Rosenblatt had many Holocaust survivors in his congregation, and he knew that “the idea of a synagogue under attack would stir up terrible memories.”

By 11:30 that night, Rabbi Rosenblatt had placed auto-calls to all 750 households in his congregation. Rabbi Lewis drafted a letter of reassurance and resolve to her congregation. Each one made sure on May 21, the day after, to hold to some elements of normality — for Rabbi Rosenblatt the morning Shaharit service, for Rabbi Lewis a trip to the mikvah (ritual bath) with two candidates for conversion.

Only that afternoon, nearly 24 hours after the arrests, had enough calm returned for Rabbi Rosenblatt to call Rabbi Lewis on her cellphone, interrupting her dinner. “How are you?” he asked. “How you holding up?” she responded. And he couldn’t resist adding, “It’s really a shame we don’t get together for coffee more often.”

So they went again to the Corner Cafe last Wednesday. They chatted about the Israeli model of “steely determination” in the face of terror. They talked about plans for the Shavuot holiday. They expressed both concern for the children of the arrested men and worry about what kind of Islam is being propagated in prison. And then it was time to finish their respective seltzers and resume the rest of life.

“In the aftermath,” Rabbi Rosenblatt said, “the re-embrace of the prosaic is so sweet. Every regular service feels so nice. Even the nudniks who bother me — I love every one of those nudniks now.”

Rabbi Lewis nodded and chuckled as only another rabbi could.

A correction was made on 
June 2, 2009

The On Religion column on Saturday, about two rabbis whose buildings in the Bronx had been the target of a suspected bomb plot, misstated the given name of one rabbi. He is Rabbi Jonathan I. Rosenblatt, not Joel I. Rosenblatt.

How we handle corrections

E-mail: sgfreedman@nytimes.com

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