Alvin Kass, a revered rabbi who was the youngest chaplain in New York City Police Department history and who went on to become its longest-serving, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 89.
His daughter, Sarah Kass, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of sepsis.
Rabbi Kass was the department’s chief chaplain and, after nearly 60 years, not just its longest-serving chaplain but also its longest-serving employee of any kind, Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.
He had intended to become a lawyer — he was just two weeks away from beginning his first year at Harvard Law School on a scholarship — when he decided to transfer to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He was ordained there as a Conservative rabbi in 1962.
“I decided to minister to people’s spiritual needs rather than legal ones,” he told the alumni magazine Columbia College Today in 2006.
Appointed to the Police Department in 1966, a week before his 31st birthday, Rabbi Kass became a counselor and a morale booster who lobbied to let Jewish officers take off on Saturdays and religious holidays, provided a shoulder to cry on, and reconciled law-enforcement work in the city’s mean streets with spiritual demands.
“He often said that policing exposed life in its rawest form — the moments of courage and the cruelty that most people never see,” Commissioner Tisch said in a eulogy she delivered on Friday at East Midwood Jewish Center in Brooklyn, where Rabbi Kass was rabbi emeritus. “But he also believed that when that work is guided by compassion, it becomes something sacred. He spent his life helping officers hold on to that belief when the world tried to rip it from them.”
Rabbi Kass ministered to the grieving families of the 23 police officers, two of them Jewish, who were killed in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He conducted Rosh Hashana services in a makeshift synagogue at LaGuardia Airport for emergency workers who had flown in from around the country to assist local police officers, firefighters and medical technicians. He attended the funerals of every police officer who died that day.
“We can’t comprehend what He’s doing very often, but presumably He knows what He is doing, and we submit,” Rabbi Kass wrote in the Jewish newspaper The Forward on the 20th anniversary of the attack. “We bow our head to what is often inscrutable and incomprehensible, and we accept it with a measure of faith and hope. That really is the essential message of Judaism, in the face of evil.”
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Alvin Kass was born on Dec. 23, 1935, in Paterson, N.J. His father, Joseph, was a furniture salesman. His mother, Ida (Abramowitz) Kass, was a Jewish immigrant from Poland.
After graduating from Columbia University in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in history, followed by a master’s degree from Columbia, a doctorate from New York University and a Doctor of Divinity degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary, he served as an Air Force chaplain.
Rabbi Kass presided at the Astoria Center of Israel in Long Island City, Queens, and served as chief rabbi at East Midwood Jewish Center in Brooklyn for 36 years, from 1978 until he retired in 2014. He was also an adjunct professor of philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
In 1963, he married Miryom Arnold, a teacher. She died in 2017. In addition to his daughter, Sara, he is survived by two sons, Dr. Lewis Kass and Dr. Daniel Kass, and three grandchildren.
As a child, Rabbi Kass had never played cops and robbers. He had never been inside a police station before he applied for the part-time job of chaplain at the urging of the New York Board of Rabbis. He agreed, in part, because he was inspired by the idealism of the John V. Lindsay administration, which had taken office in City Hall that same year, 1966.
Rabbi Kass was so savvy at the job interview that when he was asked about the counseling of cops, he said that a rabbi has to know when to go to a higher authority — by which, he made it clear, he meant the Almighty Commissioner, who was one of his interviewers.
He had arrived for the interview carrying a gym bag containing handball gear for a game he planned for later that day, prompting the chief of detectives, Albert Seedman, to say later, “I thought a rabbi who plays handball would be a good fit for the N.Y.P.D.”
Rabbi Kass served under Howard Safir, the city’s first Jewish police commissioner since the early 19th century; fought to persuade the Shomrim Society, the Jewish fraternal society he advised, to admit the often maligned anti-corruption whistle-blower David Durk; and championed the reputation of Asser Levy, the 17th-century New Amsterdam colonist who, because he was Jewish, was initially barred from joining the militia.
“I’m trying to make the case that being a cop is a job for a Jewish boy,” Rabbi Kass told The New York Times in 2004.
Serving under eight mayors, he was the first three-star chaplain. In 1996, he became the first Jewish chaplain of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
More than once, Rabbi Kass’s job intruded on his personal life. He was called away from his son’s bar mitzvah celebration to minister to an officer who had been shot, and he flew upstate between Friday night and Sabbath morning services to inform a family that their officer son had been murdered.
He was also famous for ending a hostage crisis with a pastrami sandwich — actually, two. In 1981, he was summoned to negotiate with a Jewish man who had taken his former girlfriend hostage.
“I talked to him all night to give up his gun,” Rabbi Kass recalled in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2012. “I was an utter failure. But by morning he was hungry.”
Hostage negotiators ordered two pastrami sandwiches from the Carnegie Deli, one for the hostage taker and one for the rabbi. Rabbi Kass persuaded the man to swap his sandwich for his gun. But it turned out that he had a second gun. Fortunately, the Carnegie deli didn’t keep kosher, so the rabbi hadn’t eaten the second sandwich. Instead, he traded it for the other gun and the police grabbed the unarmed kidnapper.
“To paraphrase ‘The Godfather,’” Commissioner Tisch said in her eulogy, “Leave the gun. Take the pastrami.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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