Boston-area Jewish leaders attacked APT for exposing a local rabbi’s decision to welcome terrorist-linked Muslims into his synagogue
The previous post in this series exposed Toba Spitzer, a Boston-area “rabbi” who uses her bimah to promote neo-Marxist, anti-Jewish ideology, including promulgating the idea that Jews have too much money.
Here, we tell the story of yet another Boston-area rabbi who invited terror-linked Muslims to promote their causes and then sought to raise funds from his congregation.
Again, the decision to expose this rabbi was not taken lightly, but our shock and horror that groups linked to Hamas jihadists were allowed by a rabbi to raise funds from Jews in Boston was too much to bear.
Yet, instead of taking responsibility and repenting for their mistake, Boston’s Jewish leaders chose to circle the wagons. Even worse, they went after the us — the messenger — for publicizing this shameful episode.
On July 25, 2017, Rabbi Howard Jaffe of Temple Isaiah in Lexington, Massachusetts, welcomed three Muslim community leaders into his synagogue for an “interfaith” event.
Under the auspices of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization’s “Out of Many, One” program, Rabbi Jaffe invited Nadeem Mazen, New England director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Stephanie Marzouk, founder of the Muslim Justice League (MJL), and Samer Naseredden, director of youth programming at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC), New England’s largest mosque, to speak.
What Jaffe neither knew nor told his congregation was that all three organizations had connections to Islamic terrorism, not least CAIR, which was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood as a Hamas money laundering operation. The ADL — of all things — had documented these facts years earlier, yet Rabbi Jaffe, who had easy access to such information, chose not to do even the most user-friendly of background checks.
Despite this, the rabbi allowed Mazen to pass out flyers soliciting money from the assembled Jews. “My project this year is I have to raise a million dollars,” Mazen announced. “Don’t send clothes, send money.”
When APT became aware of this scandalous event, we produced a hard-hitting video which called out the rabbi and exposed exactly who had spoken at the synagogue.
What did Boston’s Jewish leaders — rabbinate included — do upon learning of this? They attacked us.
In a joint press release written by the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis and Boston’s JCRC, these highly influential organizations condemned APT in the strongest possible terms for simply telling the truth.
“We, the Executive Committee of the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis (MBR) and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, condemn in the strongest terms the recent attacks on our colleague and former MBR President, Rabbi Howard Jaffe, by Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) and its director, Charles Jacobs,” they wrote. “This group, whose Orwellian name belies their relentless defamation of Boston-area Muslims along with respected leaders in the Greater Boston Jewish community, has used the most tendentious of arguments to suggest that Rabbi Jaffe is somehow linked to terrorism and Islamic extremism.”
They went on to say that “APT [is] the true face of extremism in our community: purveyors of hatred and division, they engage in outrageous attacks on communal institutions and individuals involved in the important work of building relationships among Boston-area Muslims and Jews.”
This can only be described as a kind of Jewish fatwa. Even more egregiously, this statement was a declaration of loyalty to the Islamic community at the (literal) expense of Jews.
The entire purpose of Jewish leadership is to prevent Jews from being hoodwinked, yet Boston’s MBR and JCRC gleefully participated in this potentially lethal game of self-deception.