By Shmuley Boteach, ALGEMEINER
The Jerusalem Post reported that the Obama administration is considering releasing Jonathan Pollard in an effort to save the Israeli-Arab peace talks. But why has the Jewish community left this man to languish in jail for nearly three decades when similar spying offenses carried sentences that were four to seven years? When Pollard plead guilty in 1987 for spying for Israel, he became the only person in history to receive a life sentence for spying on behalf of an American ally.
I recently met with Jacob Ostreicher, the orthodox Jewish businessman who was falsely accused of drug trafficking and left for dead in a Bolivian hell-hole. He was saved by actor Sean Penn who traveled to Bolivia, intervened with President Eva Morales, and whisked Ostreicher out of prison in circumstances that remain mysterious. In recognition of his heroism, our organization, This World: The Values Network, is honoring Sean, along with my former Oxford students Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer, as well as anti-genocide campaigner John Prendergast, as this year’s Champions of Jewish Values at our annual gala dinner in New York City on May 18th.
Some were curious. Sean Penn? Champion of Jewish Values? But what did all these complainers do to save Ostreicher? Penn risked his own safety to save a complete stranger and one of Judaism’s greatest mitzvot is releasing those held unjustly. And this is aside from the tens of thousands of lives that Sean has saved in Haiti.
The Jewish community is typically embarrassed by our prison population. We want Jewish names displayed on buildings at Harvard, not on wanted posters. Only a few humanitarian organizations, like Chabad’s Aleph Institute, give a damn about Jews who are incarcerated.
And here you have the reason why inmates like Jonathan Pollard and Sholom Rubashkin, amid their inexcusable crimes, can be given highly prejudicial and outrageously lengthy sentences. The Jewish community, embarrassed at Jewish wrongdoing, rarely raises its voice in unified protest against punishments which, in both cases, are widely viewed by legal experts as discriminatory and excessive.
A few years ago, after I visited Pollard at his maximum security prison in Butner, North Carolina, a Jewish leader told me that Pollard was not worth the expenditure of Jewish political capital. “Israel is a much bigger priority than a criminal who humiliated American Jewry.” But the real embarrassment is a community that is afraid of charges of dual loyalty and will allow a brother to rot in jail after having paid his debt to society and then some, in total contravention of respected norms of American justice. It was my friend David Suissa, the noted columnist for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, who pointed out that the continued incarceration of Pollard is not a Jewish but an American issue, making a mockery as it does of the American legal system.
In June 2010, after being acquitted of underage labor violations but found guilty of financial fraud, prosecutors unbelievably demanded a life sentence for Rubashkin but “compromised” for less. Rubashkin was a significant philanthropist and communal activist. He was the principal supplier of kosher meat to the American Jewish community. Driven by Chabad’s philosophy of increasing Jewish observance, he was more interested in people having a kosher home than becoming a millionaire and was noted for his fair and reasonable prices. Of course, none of this excuses the crimes he committed in an effort to save his business from going bankrupt, for which he deserved to be punished.
But take a moment to contemplate the unprecedented nature of Rubashkin’s sentencing with those of other white collar criminals. Rubashkin’s sentence is longer than Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former chief executive of Enron and L. Dennis Kozlowski, the former chief executive of Tyco. Mark Turkcan, the president of First Bank Mortgage of St. Louis, misapplied $35 million in loans and was sentenced to one year and a day in prison. Sholom Rubashkin, however, a first time offender, was sentenced to twenty-seven years, scheduled for release at the age of seventy-four in 2033.
In the fall of 2012 the Supreme Court – ignoring six amicus briefs urging the court to review the case, including 86 former federal judges and Department of Justice officials, two FBI directors, four Deputy Attorneys General and one Solicitor General – formally declined to hear Rubashkin’s appeal. The decision let stand a draconian prison term that could lock up the 53-year-old for the remainder of his life, leaving his wife and ten children impoverished and without a father.
Where was the outrage from the American Jewish community? Some speculate it has something to do with the fact that Rubashkin is an Orthodox Jew who sports a beard and black hat and his missteps at Agriprocessors highlighted what many consider the unsavory sight of Jewish ritual slaughter.
Madoff had yachts and vacation homes and robbed people of their retirement pensions. Rubashkin lived in a modest home and his family ran a soup kitchen.
Our community has to reevaluate its relationship with Jews who are in prison. Just because a man goes to jail does not mean that he has nothing left to contribute. Michael Milken is one of the greatest philanthropists and agents for positive change in our time. His Milken conference in Los Angeles is one of the most world’s most respected gatherings of global leaders.
A man is more than the sum total of mistakes he has made and is always endowed by his Creator with the capacity for good. A cornerstone of Judaism is repentance. All it takes is one mitzvah, one positive action, to start an even larger chain reaction of goodness.
The Jewish community should move beyond its embarrassment and hesitation to help Jewish prisoners and join as a chorus for Jonathan Pollard’s release. We should do the same in protesting the injustice of Sholom Rubashkin’s 27 years when similar offenders were given a fraction thereof.
It should not take a Hollywood superstar like Sean Penn to embarrass the Jewish community into action.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, whom Newsweek and The Washington Post calls “the most famous Rabbi in America,” is the only Rabbi to have won the London Times Preacher of the Year competition and is the international best-selling author of 30 books. In May he will publish “Kosher Lust: Love is Not the Answer. His website is www.shmuley.com. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.
Bingo. Right on the money.
It is just and fair for a criminal to serve his/her time in jail. However, showing partiality in justice is unfair, immoral, and unacceptable in a civilized society. There were/are many individuals who have done great things after being released from prisons. I see so many sympathy for Pollard from individuals I have not even expected.
His case should be seen based on its own merit so that he could live with himself free of any guilt after being released.
the dynamics today are driven by the same drivers, nothing has changed: the christian supersessionist war against Jewish control of Israel and Jerusalem proceeds. The christian/EU/US supersessionists lead the battle of BDS and fund their hired assassins: the arab muslim throat slitters and head choppers.
And yet they are plagued with disaster and falling church rolls: their evil agenda returns evil unto them. The muslims they seek to plague the Jews with cut off their heads and infest their nations like termites. They are plagued with scandal of corruption, pedophilia and homosexualism. Yet they continue their libels and support of Jew killers.
here is todays absurdity:
http://news.yahoo.com/atlanta-archbishop-apologizes-over-2-2m-mansion-001953367.html
After having reconsidered everything about the Pollard case some months ago, I think he not only got shafted by the US government but is now being held mainly as a hostage to entice the government of Israel into giving up ancient rights of the Jewish nation to the heartland of Eretz-Yisrael. Even so, I would rather see Pollard die in prison than for Israel to give up any part of the lands of the Jewish nation, should it come to that. That, in fact, would be more merciful for Pollard than for him to come home to Israel with the certain knowledge that his freedom had been won at the expense of Jewish Shomron and Yeduda.
As for the Arab prisoners whose release the Fatah gang now demands, my policy for the future would be to avoid sentencing them to prison terms at all. What I would do with them is twofold. First, I would enough sodium pentathol or some similar truth cocktail in order to extract information useful to Israel’s secret services. Then I spread word to the Arab community that their heroes had ratted out Fatah. Then I would release them in expectation that their own people would kill them as traitors.
But for every serious incident of Arab terrorism, I would purposely plant a new Jewish community in their heartland, to be expanded as rapidly as possible. That, I think, is the ultimate victory for the Jewish nation and the ultimate defeat for the Arab enemies of the Jewish nation.
As for Rabushkin the former slaughterhousse king of Postville Iowa, I certainly would have jailed him for using violation of this country’s child labor laws and hiring of aliens residing in this country illegally. I think a 6-year jail term would have been in order, but certainly not 27 years. And I would give him a new trial based on strong evidence that the sentencing judge colluded with the prosecution. Which, but the way, was precisely what happened to Pollard.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I’ve posted in these comment sections and on other boards about the anti-semitism involved in the Pollard case particularly the fact that another Jewish lawyer, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, described an incident with the late Judge Aubrey Robinson going back to the 1970’s which convinced this person that Robinson was anti-semitic. Now that’s a decade before the Pollard case. I personally have read a number of cases in federal courts around the country–mostly Title VII discrimination cases involving Jews–and I’ve notice a strong reluctance on the part of federal judges to believe that Jews can be the victims of discrimination. I believe this is, in part due to anti-semitism. It’s an anti-semitism that sees Jews as already privileged and a strong skepticism that Jews might actually be the victims of prejudice or discrimination. There was a disturbing case about a decade ago involving a Jewish researcher at Tulane’s medical school; several disturbing cases in the federal courts in D.C. and a recent case involving a district court judge in, I believe, the federal district court in San Francisco who could not accept the fact that Jewish students at Berkeley were subject to a hostile environment even when they were being physically threatened. There very definitely IS a problem with federal agencies particularly a very hostile Justice Department (which has had a long history of antipathy toward Jews) and the federal judiciary (and where did these judges work earlier in their careers?)
The national Jewish organizations are oblivious, or even worse, share the discriminatory attitude that leads to skepticism that Jews can be discrimination victims. The bureaucrats running these Jewish organizations are so comfortable, affluent and invested in their own relative success materially that they seem to share the same attitudes. They don’t want to be bothered, they don’t want to believe that Jews are still targets.
The real game is in the upstart grassroots organizations. Years ago the ADL and the two AJC’s did the work well enough that there was no need and no opening for these organizations. Now they proliferate. I don’t know the names of all of them, but every once in a while I read about another organization that is doing great work advocating for Israel. Unfortunately, the Jewish community is changing so much that it seems that Israel is not the priority it once was. That’s why over 2/3 of the Jewish community votes for candidates and a party that are openly hostile to Jewish interests and survival. And most Jews don’t realize it.
The Rabushkin case is also complicated; I only started reading about it some weeks ago. It seems that there were some very strange things going on with the judge including a whole pattern of ex parte communications with the Justice Department attorneys. Why, and how, the Justice Department gets away with this kind of behavior–and I have seen it in other cases affecting Jews–I don’t know. I just think there is a degree of institutionalized anti-semitism in both the DOJ and parts of the federal judiciary and nobody has picked up on it. Besides Aubrey Robinson, who were two of the judges who did the most harm to Pollard and turned a blind eye to irregularities and misconduct by the DOJ and the judge? The two Jews, of course: Ruth Ginsburg and Larry Silberman. It was Stephen Williams who wrote a courageous dissent the first time Pollard’s case went up to the D.C. Circuit. The two Jews were only so happy to throw this guy to the curb and rid themselves of this embarrassment named Pollard.
You have given reasons why the Jewish community declined to help these men. The reasons are not justified. But then American Jews and their behavior are a quandary to the rest of the world’s Jewry. They seem to act or not act out of fear.
What are the reasons, the justifications, for the American “Justice” system to act in such an unjust, vindictive manner?
Can it be anything other than anti Semitism?
Mickey