In 35 years of service as a chaplain for the New York City Police Department, the World Trade Center terrorist attack on September 11th dwarfed anything that Rabbi Alvin Kass (ED ’76) had ever experienced.
“The sight at Ground Zero was sickening,” he said. “It was a veritable war zone. Destruction was everywhere. It was incredible to think that those Twin Towers were no longer standing.
“I was called to Police Headquarters,” he continued, “where I worked with my colleagues in the police chaplaincy to offer strength and comfort to families of police officers who were unaccounted for, as I had done after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Even those police veterans who had seen every conceivable phenomenon were crying.”
Rabbi Kass, who, for the past 24 years has also been the spiritual leader of East Midwood Jewish Center, a conservative synagogue in Brooklyn, told his congregation “that the attack brought out the best and the worst in the human spirit. Those who executed this sordid scheme represent the most nefarious ingredient of the human personality. On the other hand, the heroism, courage, self-sacrifice, nobility and generosity evoked by the attack validate our profoundest beliefs in man’s redemptive potential.”
A participant in “A Prayer for America” held in Yankee Stadium on September 23, Rabbi Kass was nearly drowned out by applause, reported one broadcaster, when he said “what the victims want more than anything else, what they would tell us if they were here, is that we should continue to live for what they died for. A place where government by the people, for the people, and of the people will not perish.”
Remarking on the rabbi’s people skills, New York Times reporter Robert Lipsyte wrote that Kass “once persuaded a Jewish hostage-taker to give up his gun for a good pastrami sandwich. He was unable to share it with the man because it wasn’t kosher. ‘The great struggle,’ says Rabbi Kass, ‘is to make people good. Of course, if people were good, there would be no cops and no chaplains.’”
In addition to his duties as a police chaplain and responsibilities at the East Midwood Jewish Center, Rabbi Kass is also a proud NYU parent. His daughter Sara received an MA from the Tisch School of the Arts in 1990 and his son Daniel earned his MD from the School of Medicine in 1999.
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