THE FIRST THING VISITORS TO RABBI PHILIP RABINOWITZ’S HOME NOTICED WAS THE BOOKS.
Ratty paperbacks and small pocket-sized prayerbooks and gorgeous leather tomes, with titles in English, Hebrew and Yiddish. They covered the walls, the desk in his study and the stairs. There wasn’t enough space for everything he wanted to learn. There wouldn’t be time, either.
On the morning of Feb. 29, 1984, the rabbi’s blood was splattered across the bookshelves and on top of a stack of papers on his desk. It covered a tan rug in the center of the study and a chair behind the desk. Nothing was out of place; the three-story townhouse had not been ransacked. Whoever had entered the home was not a thief — nothing of value was stolen.
Howard Smith didn’t notice any of this at first. All he saw when he walked through the open front door at 8:15 a.m. was a figure lying facedown on the floor. His first thought was that the 63-year-old rabbi had passed out and fallen unconscious. Smith hurried to the phone on the rabbi’s desk and dialed 911. He hoped the rabbi could still be saved, but the stillness of the scene signaled otherwise.
“This case remains under investigation, however, there are no active leads we are currently pursuing in this case. We have spoken with witnesses and actively investigated over the years,” MPD public affairs specialist Alaina Gertz told JI in an emailed statement in December. “What we do know is that the Rabbi was in good-standing and well-respected in the community, and appears to not have been involved in any crime-related activity that we’re aware of.”
WITHIN THE DECADE, Washington would gain a reputation as the nation’s “murder capital.” But in 1984, the city’s homicide count hadn’t yet begun to spike. Ambulances and police cruisers arrived swiftly, blue lights flashing and sirens blaring. Medics brought Rabinowitz’s body to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, near the city jail, by ambulance. They pronounced him dead at 11:30 a.m. Police officers later estimated he had died around 8 p.m. the night before.
Smith, the young astrophysicist who was a regular at Rabinowitz’s daily minyan that year, walked outside to the three other men from the synagogue who had accompanied him to Rabinowitz’s home. Their faces were ashen. They had heard him gasp.
“Go back to the shul,” Smith told them. “We have to tell people.”
Smith went with the police back to the station, where he filled out a police report and answered a few questions. He never heard from anyone at the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) again.
A spokesperson for MPD declined to make any department officials available for an interview about this case or about the department’s cold case investigations, and the department denied Jewish Insider’s Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the police investigation.
“This case remains under investigation, however, there are no active leads we are currently pursuing in this case. We have spoken with witnesses and actively investigated over the years,” MPD public affairs specialist Alaina Gertz told JI in an emailed statement in December. “What we do know is that the Rabbi was in good-standing and well-respected in the community, and appears to not have been involved in any crime-related activity that we’re aware of.”
THE MEN walked into Kesher Israel Congregation and headed to the social hall and small kitchen, where a group of women was preparing for a lunch the synagogue planned to host that afternoon for the chief rabbi of the Israeli army. Nancy James glanced up at the men.
Nancy James
She and her husband, Bruce, had met through the synagogue years earlier at a picnic on Lag BaOmer, a Jewish holiday celebrated in the spring with picnics and bonfires. Bruce, who was in law school when they met, performed as a magician in his spare time. He came to the picnic straight from a gig at a Chabad house in the suburbs and ended up doing magic at Kesher, too. (“I thought he was so weird coming to a picnic in a three-piece suit. I said, ‘This guy is a nut,’” Nancy recalled later.)
The couple married in 1982 and became one of Kesher’s most involved couples. They drafted the synagogue newsletter each week. Three days before Rabinowitz died, they brought him a draft to review, as they did every week. That day he said something unexpected.
“He sort of gave us a bracha,” Nancy recalled, using the Hebrew word for blessing. “He said, ‘You’re going to have a beautiful child with beautiful eyes.’” Nancy had been experiencing fertility problems, and she found out she was pregnant with their first and only child soon after Rabinowitz died.
On that February morning, Nancy eyed the men who had just arrived back at synagogue. They looked distraught.
“Did you find the rabbi?” she asked. The men nodded yes, unable to say anything else.
“Is everything alright?” They shook their heads no. They could not find the words to tell her that their beloved teacher was dead.
THE NEWS BEGAN TO SPREAD, rippling out through the Washington area, the country and across the globe. The small group at the synagogue took turns making phone calls to friends and congregants. Former students in New York and a synagogue board member visiting family in Ohio got calls. The board president, who was on a cross-country flight, arrived home to find notes stuffed under his door telling him to go straight to the synagogue. An octogenarian retiree named Sol Katz, who had accompanied Smith to the rabbi’s home that morning, called the rabbi’s son in New Jersey. Asher, the son, must have then called the rabbi’s daughter in Chicago and his brother in Israel.
One of the first people to hear about the rabbi was Toby Grauman, the lawyer who was also an ordained rabbi. Everyone at Kesher called him Tuvia, his Hebrew name. In the year and a half between the rabbi’s murder and the hiring of a new rabbi, Grauman would step in as an interim spiritual leader, tending to the community’s religious needs and shepherding them through a year of mourning.
Grauman got the call at his law office and immediately went to the crime scene, which had been cordoned off with police tape. The body had already been taken to the morgue, which concerned Grauman. He walked up to the first police officer he saw.
“Under Jewish law,” Grauman told the detective, “autopsies are forbidden.”
“Well,” the officer responded, “we’re going to have to do something, because it’s a homicide.” Washington law requires that an autopsy be conducted whenever there is a violent death. But Orthodox Jewish scholars interpret Jewish law as prohibiting autopsies except in the most extreme circumstances. Desecration of a dead body is forbidden because, the logic goes, humans are created in the image of God.
“They had to do what they had to do, but they did it in a very honorable sort of way. They appreciated what we needed and we understood what they needed,” Grauman said of the autopsy.
GRAUMAN went to the morgue and set up what he called a “triage” with an Orthodox pathologist at an area hospital and a rabbinic authority on the phone from New York. Grauman stood at a distance, watching as the medical examiner cut into the rabbi’s body.
The Jewish principle also holds that, as much as is possible, every part of the body must be buried together — including any blood that was lost in a violent death. The bloodstained portions of the carpet in Rabinowitz’s study were cut out to be saved, and Grauman gathered any blood that dripped onto the operating table during the autopsy. The surgical gloves and gowns of the doctors who performed the autopsy were also preserved and buried with the rabbi.
“They had to do what they had to do, but they did it in a very honorable sort of way. They appreciated what we needed and we understood what they needed,” Grauman said later.
The process was not entirely as smooth as Grauman remembered.
Four months after the murder, the deputy medical examiner, Douglas Dixon, resigned, citing undue political pressure on him in the position — including from the mayor’s assistant on religious affairs, who had mediated between Grauman and Dixon over how to conduct the autopsy. “There was a time during that day when I was prepared to take off my gloves and walk out, resigning not only as acting chief but as deputy medical examiner as well, in protest over what I consider to be an extremely dangerous meddling,” Dixon told The Washington Post when he resigned that July.
Dixon was able to conduct a partial autopsy, overseen by Grauman, but he did it grudgingly. Helene Karpa, the president of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington, wrote in a letter to the editor of The Post that Dixon’s remark was “shockingly callous.”
“While we did not wish to hamper the police investigation in any way, it was only appropriate to see to it that Rabbi Rabinowitz, a pious Orthodox Jew and rabbi of Kesher Israel in Georgetown, be treated in death by the principles that he lived in life,” Karpa wrote. “Jewish law and tradition regard the human body as the receptacle that holds the holiest of all things — a human life.”
MANY KESHERITES, as they call themselves, remember exactly where they were when they received the call that Rabinowitz was dead. They can pinpoint it with specificity, in the same way that others recall the moment they learned that hijacked planes flew into the Twin Towers.
Gerard Leval was in a conference room at a Baltimore law firm hammering out the details of a deal. Someone interrupted the meeting and asked him to come to the phone, where he learned the rabbi had died. He quickly wrapped up the meeting and got in his car to drive back to Washington.
Reuven Eliaz
Reuven Eliaz worked at the Israeli Embassy up Connecticut Avenue, and as soon as he heard the news, he took the embassy’s security officer to the crime scene. They were concerned it might have been terrorism. Eleven years earlier, the Israeli military attaché in Washington was shot to death in his driveway in Chevy Chase, Md. That crime also remains unsolved. But detectives investigating Rabinowitz’s death would quickly rule out antisemitism as a motivation when they reached the conclusion that the murderer was likely someone the rabbi knew.
Irving Haber
Others, like synagogue board vice president Irving Haber, have buried the memory over the years. “Unlike when Kennedy was killed, I don’t remember the moment. It was so traumatic. It was so personal that I don’t remember how I found out,” Irving told JI recently.
What everyone does remember is that, regardless of how they learned the news, they responded in the same way. They came to Kesher. All day long, people came. Over 150 people were at ma’ariv, the evening prayer service, which usually drew the bare minimum of 10 men.
By then, the autopsy was completed and Rabinowitz’s body had been moved to the funeral home. A group of men went there after ma’ariv to keep shmirah.
According to Jewish tradition, Jews must keep shmirah, or guard, over the dead — it’s a crucial step in shepherding a person’s soul from this life to the world to come, as well as a sign of respect for the person and their family. Usually, this task involves sitting next to the coffin and reading psalms. Observant Jews hold a funeral as quickly as they can, sometimes just hours after a person dies. In the event a funeral must fall the next day, the shomrim, or guards, stay with the body all through the day and night.
“We were supposed to read tehillim [psalms], and I couldn’t. I just stumbled,” Eliaz said recently. It was too hard.
“When I came to Georgetown the shul was at a low point in its fortunes, and there is no question that Rabbi Rabinowitz’s determination kept it alive, and that he led it to its present remarkable renaissance,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Herman Wouk wrote in a remembrance. “For me he will always be the rabbi.”
THE NEXT MORNING, many congregants again gathered at the synagogue, a three-story brown-brick edifice on a residential corner in Georgetown, located between a pale-green townhouse and a white one, which now houses the synagogue’s offices. The bay windows are filled with a green stained glass that looks almost like tie-dye, which one Kesher member says was likely less an aesthetic choice than a financial one: It was less expensive than the elaborate stained-glass artwork now common at American synagogues. A mold of the Twin Tablets with the Ten Commandments sits above the windows on the side of the building.
It’s important to know what Kesher looks like from the outside because for many people who came to honor the rabbi, it’s all they saw that morning. Inside was standing room only, and anyone who was not a synagogue member was asked to stand outdoors. The rabbi’s students, friends and admirers snaked onto the redbrick sidewalks. Loudspeakers were set up so that the outside crowds could hear the service and the eulogies. Hundreds of people attended the funeral.
“We were all like siblings, all mishpocha [family], huddling together,” said Sara Averick, who was a young Kesher member at the time.
Inside, the coffin had been brought to the upstairs balcony. The funeral started early to ensure that Rabinowitz’s body would arrive at Dulles International Airport in time for a noon flight to New York, and then a flight to Israel, where he would be buried next to his wife. (Two hundred people, mostly former students, attended the burial at Eretz Hachaim Cemetery in Beit Shemesh, Israel.) When the hearse left the synagogue, mourners ran alongside it for two blocks.
Prominent local rabbis shared heartfelt, painful eulogies. An assistant to President Ronald Reagan brought condolences from the White House. Israeli Ambassador Meir Rosenne spoke; two years earlier, Kesher had been Rosenne’s very first stop when he arrived in Washington. Upon landing, the diplomat went straight to the synagogue from the airport to say Kaddish for a yahrzeit, the anniversary of the death of a loved one.
Rabbi Gedaliah Anemer, a close friend of Rabinowitz and a fellow Orthodox rabbi, stood just outside the synagogue’s main doors, which were left open. As a Kohen, a descendant of the Jewish priests, Anemer could not be in the same room as the body. (Jewish law says that Kohanim cannot have contact with corpses.) So he delivered his eulogy via a public address system. “He gave of himself; he gave of his soul; he gave of his essence,” Anemer said of Rabinowitz.
Remembrances poured in for weeks, published in synagogue bulletins and shared at Shabbat services.
“When I came to Georgetown the shul was at a low point in its fortunes, and there is no question that Rabbi Rabinowitz’s determination kept it alive, and that he led it to its present remarkable renaissance,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Herman Wouk wrote in a remembrance. “For me he will always be the rabbi.”
Grauman, the congregant who handled the autopsy, gave the final eulogy. He used his remarks to tell the hundreds of people in the room — the largest crowd ever at Kesher — that the matter is in God’s hands, and not in the domain of man, even as a police investigation was already underway.
“For those who understood it, I think it really helped them understand that we may be powerless, we may have no control over the situation, and that will be frustrating,” Grauman said later. “There will not be closure here. That’s the word that everybody was using: closure. There won’t be closure, because we will not be able to close it. But Hashem Yinakem Damo.” God will avenge his blood.
This was one day after Rabinowitz was murdered, and though emotional closure could never come, the hundreds of people gathered at Kesher that day still had hope the police would bring a suspect to justice. In conversations with Kesher congregants, police confidently insisted they would swiftly apprehend the suspect.
In fact, several people left the funeral feeling that the killer had been among them that day.
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