Ivanka’s Rabbi ‘Deeply Troubled’ By Trump’s Charlottesville Remarks
Image by YouTube
By Aiden Pink August 16, 2017
Rabbis from one of one of the most prominent synagogues in Manhattan — including the rabbi who oversaw Ivanka Trump’s conversion to Judaism — condemned President Trump’s remarks in response to last week’s white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, Va. and the ensuing death of a counter-protestor.
“While we always avoid politics, we are deeply troubled by the moral equivalency and equivocation President Trump has offered in his response to this act of violence,” rabbis Chaim Steinmetz, Elie Weinstock, and Haskel Lookstein wrote in a letter on Wednesday to members of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun and its affiliated Ramaz School. Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner were members of Kehilath Jeshurun, and Lookstein oversaw Trump’s conversion.
“We pray that our country heeds the voices of tolerance, and stays true to its vision of human rights and civil rights,” the letter continued. It also contained condemnations of the anti-Semitism and racism expressed by the Charlottesville marchers and referred congregants to a similar letter issued earlier that day by the Rabbinical Council of America, the nation’s largest body of Orthodox rabbis.
Lookstein had been invited by Ivanka Trump to deliver a prayer at the Republican National Convention last year, but dropped out after being criticized by Ramaz students and alumni.
(h/t New York magazine)
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
