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The changing face of Manhattan's Jewish Lower East Side
THERE WAS MORE THAN ONE CORPSE IN THE SANCTUARY OF THE Bialystoker Synagogue on the day that Heshy Jacob died.
The July 23 funeral for the Lower East Side's last Jewish power broker drew rabbis, politicians and real estate developers to the imposing stone building just off Grand Street that serves as an anchor for what's left of the neighborhood's Orthodox community.
The afternoon funeral filled the sanctuary, and onlookers crowded the closed street outside. One son of the great Lower East Side sage Rabbi Moshe Feinstein spoke; another was in attendance. "I do not believe that the Lower East Side will ever again be the same," eulogized Marvin Jacob, Heshy Jacob's brother.
There was a feeling of finality to the proceedings as the crowd spilled out into the street to follow a parade of Hatzalah ambulances slowly carrying Jacob's body down the block out of the neighborhood. It was one last show of power for a man who relished his role as an old-fashioned neighborhood boss. "We put in time and effort for the people," he once told the Forward. "It's not that we simply are despots."
The sense that afternoon that Jacob's death marked something weightier for the city than the passing of one man was spurred, in part, by the two specters who haunted the proceedings; cronies of the deceased who continue to walk the Lower East Side, despite their political lives being definitively over.
Sheldon Silver, the former speaker of the New York State Assembly currently appealing his corruption conviction, was spotted climbing into one of the ambulances that made up Jacob's funeral procession. And William Rapfogel, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to stealing from the Jewish charity he ran for decades, was seen on the steps of the sanctuary with his wife, Judy Rapfogel, formerly Silver's chief of staff.
In their day, Heshy, Willie, and Shelly - as they were known in the neighborhood - dominated politics on the Lower East Side. With Silver ruling Albany, Rapfogel cultivating city officials as head of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, and Jacob holding down the neighborhood, the trio fought to preserve the Jewish community where they grew up. For decades...