NEW YORK
The Jewish Link
BY PHIL JACOBS
Riverdale—Michael Stein had a particularly difficult and late night last Sunday.
The Riverdale Jewish Center board member and former assistant rabbi to Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblatt, the shul’s spiritual leader, was collecting some 40 signatures of former RJC rabbinic interns in support of their mentor.
All of Stein’s efforts were part of an effort to offset the impact of a New York Times story detailing Rabbi Rosenblatt’s use of a shvitz or sauna as a part of his rabbinic practice. There after a game of squash with a youth or adult, he’d be nude in the athletic facility’s open showers with congregation members, students, youth, young adults or others and then both would cover up with a towel in the sauna. That, according to Stein, was where a great deal of relationship building, counseling and bonding would take place.
“Never,” said Stein, who was also a rabbinic intern at RJC, “did it involve touch or anything that was sexual. That is and was never the intention of the rabbi.”
The synagogue has gone into damage control since the Times story was published.
Indeed, its executive committee released a letter Tuesday to its membership directed at the Times article.
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