Rabbi Issues Appeal for Santorum
A Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi from Brooklyn sent out a mass e-mail Monday asking recipients to show support for embattled Senator Rick Santorum.
“At this moment, we need to show our support for Rick Santorum,” Rabbi Shea Hecht wrote in the missive. The rabbi asked recipients to urge the senator’s rival, Democrat Bob Casey Jr., to return donations from Moveon.org, a liberal organization that Republicans have accused of being supported by some anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activists.
In the e-mail, Hecht listed his official job title at the National Committee for the Furtherance of Jewish Education, a Chabad-linked nonprofit organization that is prohibited from partisan campaigning under Internal Revenue Service regulations.
According to Marc Stern, general counsel of the American Jewish Congress, the communication is problematic both because Hecht seems to endorse a political candidate and because he seems to be speaking in his official capacity as a Chabad rabbi.
“I think this letter is over the line, almost any way you look at it,” Stern told the Forward.
Hecht could not be reached for comment.
Barbara Ledeen, one of Santorum’s Senate staffers, forwarded Hecht’s appeal to Jewish contacts early Monday evening, using her personal e-mail account. Within hours, she sent a follow-up disclaimer.
“Please be advised that this note should not have been sent to you,” Ledeen wrote. “It is not an official communication from the Chabad of Pennsylvania and has not come from them. Our office has maintained and continues to maintain a correct and official relationship with the American Friends of Lubavitch.”
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
