NYPD Chaplain Dr. Rabbi Alvin Kass Remembered

There’s this thing about observant Jews and dying. You’re here, like 89-year-old NYPD Chaplain Dr. Rabbi Alvin Kass, one day and then you’re not. A couple of days after that, you’re in a pine box being lowered into the dirt. While the Jewish period of mourning, called shiva, lasts for seven days after burial, many people have missed many funerals for Jewish loved ones because they couldn’t get there in time.

Wallace Markfield’s classic 1964 novel To an Early Grave (later a Sidney Lumet movie titled Bye Bye Braverman) concerns this dilemma, and, were Rabbi Kass alive, this reporter would ask him about it.

Rabbi Kass died early on Sunday, Oct. 29, 2025, but, as if he really didn’t want to leave, the longest-serving, highest-ranking chaplain in NYPD history stuck around for another five days, until his funeral on Friday, Nov. 5. After 59 years on the job, maybe the three-star chief wanted one more pastrami sandwich. Who knows?

Why pastrami? Because that was the sandwich—from the famed Carnegie Deli at 854 Seventh Avenue within the confines of the Midtown North Precinct—behind one of the classic Rabbi Kass stories.

It was 1981 and there was a hostage situation between estranged romantic partners in a Midtown office building. When cops ascertained the hostage taker was Jewish, they called Rabbi Kass. Negotiation through the night proved fruitless, but by morning the hostage taker was hungry, so cops raced to get two pastrami sandwiches from Carnegie.

When they returned, Kass traded one sandwich for the hostage taker’s gun. But the hostage taker had another gun, and—though Carnegie sandwiches were huge—he was still hungry. Kass, who hadn’t eaten his pastrami because it wasn’t kosher, traded that sandwich for the second gun, after which the cops rushed in.

Search as this deli and appetizing writer might, he hasn’t found any original reporting on the incident, which isn’t to suggest it’s apocryphal. Rather, it highlights a truth of police work: Cops can do a thousand things right without public attention or praise. A cop can allegedly do one thing wrong, and it’s a citywide scandal.

Another Rabbi Kass story that was reported but not retold occurred in September 1975, when a 33-year-old man, James Speller, knocked down a World Trade Center security guard and climbed onto a ledge of the South Tower, 110 stories up. Though largely incommunicative, Speller did say he’d talk to a rabbi. Enter Alvin Kass, who talked, and prayed, the would-be jumper down.

A Paterson Boy

Alvin Kass was born in Paterson, NJ, on Dec. 23, 1935, to Joseph, a furniture salesman, and Ida, a Jewish immigrant from Poland. Glimpses of young Kass’s achievements appear often in the Paterson Morning Call newspaper, including his education at that city’s Free Hebrew School and Eastside High School. Notable Eastside alumni include poet Allen Ginsberg, FBI agent Joseph Pistone of Donnie Brasco renown, New York Knick Rory Sparrow, and NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik.

Kass attended college at Columbia University, majoring in political science and American history, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1957. Though he’d received a scholarship to Harvard Law School, Kass instead attended the Jewish Theological Seminary in Morningside Heights, graduating rabbinical school in 1962. Afterward, he served in the Air Force for two years.

Kass later earned a master’s degree from Columbia and a PhD from NYU, and taught at numerous area colleges.

In 1964, Kass became rabbi of the Astoria Center of Israel in Queens, leading that congregation until 1978. Kass next served as rabbi of the East Midwood Jewish Center in Brooklyn, where he remained until his retirement in 2014.

In 1966, the New York Board of Rabbis asked Kass to interview for an NYPD chaplain’s job, to succeed the recently deceased Cantor Isidore Frank. Despite having little prior experience with police, Kass got the job, impressing cops by coming to the interview with his gym bag, because the athletic rabbi was going to play handball afterward.

Later, Kass’s education would reveal itself in a 1973 anthology he co-edited, Eyewitnesses to Jewish History: From 586 B.C.E.. to 1967, and in some of the most striking quotes ever to come from cop or rabbi.

Asked about the rise of antisemitic attacks, Kass referenced one of his Columbia mentors, Richard Hofstadter, and his highly influential essay. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

Speaking to Columbia College Today, Kass recalled his English professor, Mark Van Doren, who “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.”

The influence of Van Doren—who was the editor a 1945 Viking Portable Library anthology of Walt Whitman—revealed itself in the worst way possible in March 1999. Two auxiliary police officers, Todd Nicholas Pekaro, 28, and Eugene Marshalik, 19, were shot to death by a Greenwich Village gunman, who was in turn shot and killed by NYPD.

“I hear America singing, I hear America singing,” said Rabbi Kass, referencing Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, at Marshalik’s funeral. “But the last three days since we heard about the tragic and untimely passing of two outstanding auxiliary police officers, New York City has been crying a bitter and anguished lament because two such special people have been taken from our midst.”

Kass didn’t minister only to Jews. He tended to any person in need, and often quipped that he’d probably attended more Catholic masses, including those following 9/11, than any rabbi in history.

A 2023 interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, when Rabbi Kass was 87, captures man and mind still fully engaged.

His favorite book about New York was Chief! by Albert Seedman and Peter Hellman (Seedman was the first, and to date only, NYPD Jewish chief of detectives). His favorite Jewish restaurant was Jerusalem Steak House in Brooklyn.

“I am a proud father of three and grandfather of three,” he added. “Until her death in 2017, I was married for 54 years to Miryom Kass, who taught music and mathematics at the Rabbi Harry Halpern Day School in Brooklyn. Additionally, I am an avid Yankees fan.”

A Brief Goodbye Rabbi Joke

Speaking to the New York Police & Fire Widows’ & Children’s Benefit Fund Gala at the Waldorf-Astoria in 2014, Rabbi Kass told the story of “Three clergymen considering how each would like to be remembered by people visiting their graves.

“The priest said: ‘I hope they will say I was a good man who tried to bring his flock closer to God.’ The minister said: ‘I hope they say I tended to the needs of my congregation.’ The rabbi said: ‘I hope one will say to the others I think he’s moving!’ ”

May his memory be a blessing—that moves!