My wife conducted groups for the girls at the synagogue and presented an annual play that was a smash hit. Jackie was enormously talented and creative, and everyone loved her – something no rabbi can ever achieve.
Rabbi Alexander Gross, the principal of the Hebrew Academy, asked me to teach a Chumash class for half an hour a day to the seventh- and eighth-grade boys. The school couldn’t pay me, yet I readily agreed, for by now (in my third year as a rabbi in Miami Beach) Rabbi Gross and I were not only colleagues but friends. All our children were close friends too. This half-hour class was enormously successful, and I have devoted friends and students today – almost a half-century later – who became more observant as a result and later built their own generations of loyal and knowledgeable Jews. Some became leading rabbis and Torah scholars in America and Israel, while others undertook lay leadership of Jewish communities throughout the world.
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My primary interest was in providing for my community, both spiritually and physically. The young rabbis in the Miami area had organized a Council of Orthodox Rabbis. We tried to set up acceptable kashrut standards in order to provide the basic stores necessary for an observant community – a bakery and a butcher shop. We found it difficult to find Sabbath-observant Jews to own and operate such stores. But we devised inspection systems and schedules to safeguard the kashrut of these two fledgling enterprises. There was many a hiccup along the way.
Before coming to Florida, when I learned I would be the rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel, I spent several weeks in the back of a kosher butcher shop owned by a former yeshiva classmate of mine in Chicago. So I had practical experience regarding the deveining of blood vessels and the removal of non-kosher fat in the forequarters of beef.
Now that I was in Miami Beach, this knowledge was put to the test. For our local butcher shop, all the meat was to be imported from a well-known chassidic wholesaler in Brooklyn. He would ship meat to Miami completely kashered, so our butcher would only have to cut and package the final product. On one of my regular visits to the meat cooler, I noticed a number of forequarters that hadn’t been deveined, and from which the non-kosher fat hadn’t been removed.
Since the meat had already been soaked and salted, there was no way to salvage it for the kosher market. I called the Brooklyn wholesaler and told him that somehow a mistake had been made. He answered me derisively: “I thought that you Litvaks didn’t care about such matters.” I informed him that he would never again sell meat in Miami Beach to the hotels whose kashrut was certified by the OU (the Union of Orthodox Congregations of the United States and Canada, better known as the Orthodox Union), and certainly not to this butcher shop. I kept my promise as long as I was in Miami Beach.
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One of the most significant blessings of being a rabbi in Miami Beach was that many of the foremost leaders of the Jewish people passed through to escape the cold northern winter and raise funds for their institutions. I had the privilege of knowing truly great people simply by being in the right place at the right time, i.e., Miami Beach in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, the Ponivezher Rav, enlisted me to be his driver a few mornings a week when he came to Miami to raise funds for his yeshiva in Israel. Just being in his company was an honor and a joy. He loved all Jews (no easy task), and they loved him back.
