(JEWISH GROUP) Rabbi Alvin Kass, longest-serving NYPD chaplain famed for 9/11 response, dies at 89
Less than a week after rushing to Ground Zero as a police chaplain on 9/11, Rabbi Alvin Kass led Rosh Hashanah services — not only for his Brooklyn congregation but at a makeshift synagogue at LaGuardia Airport for emergency responders who had flooded into New York City after the terrorist attacks.
“It was,” he would later say, “the most meaningful religious service in my career.”
Kass died Tuesday at 89 as the longest-serving chaplain in the New York Police Department, with a career that included responses to global terrorism, local violence and the intimate needs of police officers — as well as a hostage crisis that he famously resolved with a non-kosher pastrami sandwich.
Born and raised in New Jersey, Kass attended Camp Ramah before enrolling at Columbia University in 1953. His freshman-year roommates there were Robert Alter, who would become a preeminent translator of the Bible, and Shalom Schwartz, later a leading psychologist in Israel.
After graduating from college, he earned both a doctorate from New York University and ordination as a Conservative rabbi from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America before joining the U.S. Air Force as a chaplain. Returning stateside, he took a pulpit in Queens before being urged to join the city’s police department as a chaplain.
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