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ALUMNI UPDATES

Alvin Kass ’57 Tends to Spiritual Needs of NYC’s Finest

By Shira Boss-Bicak ’93, ’97J, ’98 SIPA

Rabbi Alvin Kass.

Rabbi Alvin Kass ’57 (center), NYPD chief chaplain, was honored for 40 years of service to the chaplain unit at its 100th Anniversary Ceremony on February 8. Here, he celebrates with Mayor Michael Bloomberg (left) and NYPD Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly (right).

Photo: Office of the Mayor

On February 8, the New York Police Department held a ceremony marking 100 years of the department’s chaplain service unit and honoring Rabbi Alvin Kass ’57, who has been a department chaplain for 40 years and chief chaplain since 2002. “It’s been absolutely fascinating,” Kass says. “I’ve loved every minute of it. Although it’s often agonizing: You’re with the police officers through the good times and the bad times.”

Several alumni attended to support Kass, including Ed Weinstein ’57, Marty Fisher ’57 and Bob Lipsyte ’57. Weinstein noted that in front of the largely Catholic crowd, Kass received a standing ovation. “That’s how admired and respected and loved he is in the department,” Weinstein says.

According to Kass, the NYPD has about 38,000 uniformed officers (along with about 12,000 civilian members), 85 percent of whom are Catholic. Of the department’s seven chaplains, four are Catholic and two are Protestant, in addition to Kass, who is the third Jewish chaplain to serve the department. (The first Muslim chaplain, appointed during the Giuliani administration, recently resigned.)

“A lot of my work entails working with people of other faiths and transcending faith lines,” Kass says. He jokes that if Guinness World Records tracked the rabbi who has attended the most Catholic Masses, he would hold the record.

Raised in Paterson, N.J., Kass had a different career in mind when he was at the College. He accepted a scholarship to Harvard Law School and was two weeks away from attending when he changed his mind. “I decided to minister to people’s spiritual needs rather than legal ones,” Kass says. He went to Jewish Theological Seminary and was ordained a rabbi.

After serving as an Air Force chaplain, Kass headed a small congregation in Astoria, Queens, starting in 1964. Two years later, he received a call from the New York Board of Rabbis telling him that a Jewish chaplain of the NYPD had died and asking him to interview as a replacement.

Not until Kass arrived at NYPD headquarters did he realize that 30 or 40 rabbis had been called to interview. Later that day, however, Kass was offered the position. “It was similar to the work I’d done in the Air Force: responding to emergencies, making death notifications and comforting the family, offering strength and support, being there for counseling,” Kass says.

Kass started work with the NYPD a week before his 31st birthday, becoming the youngest chaplain ever in the department. Meanwhile, he continued his leadership of the Queens congregation until 1978, when he moved to the East Midwood Jewish Center in Brooklyn. With about 500 families, the center is one of the city’s largest conservative synagogues.

A gifted orator, Kass doesn’t use notes and has a reputation for never repeating himself. “He’s brilliant,” Weinstein says. “He has an encyclopedic memory.”

Kass’ work with the NYPD has included significant challenges. In 1978, he was called to the World Trade Center where a man was threatening to jump. Kass helped to talk him out of it. In 1981, he responded to a hostage situation, where a disgruntled Jewish man had taken his ex-lover hostage in an office building. Kass spent all night talking to the armed man through a partition trying to get him to give up the hostage. By morning, both men were hungry, and the hostage-taker requested a pastrami sandwich. Two sandwiches were brought, and Kass negotiated the exchange of the man’s gun for one of the sandwiches. It turned out, however, that the man had a second gun. Fortunately, the man wasn’t sated, and Kass, who hadn’t eaten his sandwich because it wasn’t kosher, bartered it for the second gun and the end of the crisis.

September 11 was a turning point for the NYPD’s chaplain services, which became much more in demand and more prominent within and outside the NYPD. In addition to their counseling duties, the chaplains often are asked to speak to groups in the department and beyond.

“Before 9-11, there was a certain stigma to seeing a chaplain,” Kass says. “Some people are macho and it’s hard to go for help. After 9-11, everyone needed help. People sought meaning amongst the meaningless. Suddenly, the importance of spiritual administrators became apparent to everyone.”

Since one of the department’s chaplains is on call 24 hours a day, the work can cut into chaplains’ personal lives. Kass son, Daniel ’95, tells of returning home to his bar mitzvah celebration in 1986 only to have his father get a call that an officer had been shot and a police car was on its way to pick him up. “I had to leave my family,” Kass says. “That’s something Danny remembers.”

Even so, Kass, whose daughter, Sarah ’87, is a CCT class correspondent, manages to find time for his family and Columbia. He chaired his class’ 45th reunion and is co-chairing the 50th reunion to be celebrated next year. He has been married to Miryom for 42 years.

Kass guesses that not a day passes when he does not think of something he learned at the College. “Mark Van Doren said that an individual human life is very short, but as a result of literature and history, you can be an intimate of Aristotle, Napo­leon, Dostoevsky, Julius Caesar and everyone else who ever lived,” Kass says.

“Columbia opened to us this enormous treasure trove of human beings.”


Shira Boss-Bicak ’93, ’97J, ’98 SIPA is a freelance writer in New York City. Her book, Green With Envy: Why keeping up with the Joneses is keeping us in debt, is being published by Warner in May.

 

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