Rabbi Daniel Lapin, our hometown boy and Seattle talk radio connection to the broadening scandal around disgraced super lobbyist Jack Abramoff, keeps showing up in the media as the investigations unfold.
BlatherWatch has found that controversy and troubled financial dealings have long been hallmarks of this Seattle area ultra-orthodox rabbi striving to be Rasputin to those with hands on the levers of government power.
The silver-tongued former South African buys his own radio time Sunday evenings (7-10p) from Entercom’s local KTTH. His talk show is a folksy, didactic kulturkampf, interlaced with schmaltz, advice to the lovelorn and diatribing political monologues. Once syndicated, it proved too boring for mass consumption, so now it’s vanity radio paid for by Lapin's nonprofit, Toward Tradition.
Lapin, who NY Times columnist Frank Rich calls a “show rabbi” for the Christian right, actually introduced Abramoff to Delay, thus beginning the now notorious friendship between the born-again Christian up and coming in Republican leadership and the arch-orthodox Jew emerging as the go-to guy if you wanted to lobby the religious right after the Gingrich Gang took over Congress in 1994.
An ace self-promoter who used to be very accessible, Lapin isn’t returning blatherWatch’s calls nor any media inquiries these days as he keeps busting into national print and pixel counts across the blogosphere for his association with the notorious Abramoff.
Neocon talk-show host Michael Medved (KTTH m-f 12-3p) recently defended Abramoff to his syndicated talk-show audience, dismissing the controversy swirling around the embattled lobbyist. “He’s never been charged with anything,” he said, failing to mention that Abramoff is being investigated by the Senate, the House, the Justice Department, and a federal grand jury. Medved forgot to tell his audience about his own longtime friendship and association with the slimy Washington insider.
The latest layer is peeled back by veteran Seattle reporter Rick Anderson in next week’s Seattle Weekly. He details Lapin’s brother (LA business man/rabbi) David’s questionable involvement in the development of a sweatshop garment industry in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. protectorate west of Hawaii. Anderson writes: “Abramoff working for local political lobbying law firm Preston Gates helped stave off labor reforms threatened by the U.S. Congress.” Read Anderson’s “Meet the Lapin Brothers” here.
Abramoff is on the board of Lapin's Toward Tradition, as is Medved, who is a founder. TT purports to promote cooperation between fundamentalist Christians and Jews. (though more accurately, it seems to provide sectarian cover for Lapin’s political activities and tries to wrench the American Jewish majority from their traditional liberalism and realign them with Republicans as extremely conservative as Lapin and his political cohorts: James Dobson, Ralph Reed, Jack Kemp and Pat Robertson.
Newt Gingrich’s staff has described Lapin as “a longtime friend and informal adviser” to the powerful Republican rainmaker.
The rabbi is close friends with and sometimes does a dazzling guest
set on the Sunday morning stage of the notorious queer-baiting,
Microsoft-smashing, megachurched, hyper-Christian Rev. Ken Hutcherson.
Read a recent critical op-ed of the two by Reformed Rabbi Daniel Weiner
Then read their mutual rebuttal.
Lapin, who pays himself $165,000 a year according to a 2003 IRS filing, reassures Jews that Christian conservatives, who have been the source of some of the most persistent anti-Semitism and persecution in the past, are their natural allies. “Modern American liberalism,” he says, “is unquestionably at odds with everything the Judeo-Christianity stands for.”
“I do not fear a Christian America,” he likes to say, “I fear a post-Christian America.”
Anderson writes:
Through Abramoff's considerable GOP connections, Lapin has brokered alliances with congressional and Bush administration officials as well. They include tax-reform guru Grover Norquist and consultant Ralph Reed, both of whom have been subpoenaed to appear before Sen. John McCain's Senate Indian Affairs committee, which is looking into the extraordinary lobbying fees Abramoff charged tribes and casinos, work performed mostly after leaving Preston Gates.
Donors to his charity, according to IRS tax filings, comprise the cream of the religious right, such as Lenore Broughton, the Carthage Foundation, and the Scaife Family Foundation. They have helped Lapin raise, on average, about $500,000 a year, based on filings from 1997 through 2003—money he uses to "educate the public through conventions, seminars, public speaking, and class studies on Judeo Christian values," he told the IRS.
Alerted by BlatherWatch readers, we got a copy of the massive cover piece (Jan. 31, 1996) on Lapin from the defunct Eastside Week, an alternative paper spun out of the Seattle Weekly in the ‘90’s. Veteran newsie Dominic Gates, now an aerospace reporter for the Seattle Times, dug in depth into the life of Rabbi Daniel Lapin.
God, business and politics, it seems, is a Lapin pattern that goes way back. In a controversial 1993 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, he used Bible verses proving that God is opposed to high taxes. He believes that democratic capitalism, rooted in Judeo-Christian tradition is a direct gift of God...but not for just anybody.
“The very concepts,” Gates writes, “of money, currency, and capital markets [are, according to Lapin] revelations granted by God to the Jews and passed on to Jewish-rooted Christendom.”
(Mixing business, conservative politics, and fundamentalist religion is nothing new on the right. Lapin’s friend, TV evangelist Pat Robertson has made millions colluding with the Liberian born-again Christian warlord/ex-president Charles Taylor. Indicted for war crimes, he’s now in exile in Nigeria. Defending the ruthless, greedy dictator as “a good Christian and a Baptist,” Robertson dealt him in on Freedom Gold Limited, his faith-based Liberian gold mining company registered in the Cayman Islands. Robertson also had a long friendship and business association with the late Congo kleptomaniac dictator Mobuto Sese Sekou who honored their friendship with Zairian diamond mining rights).
Lapin makes what Gates called “historically contentious”--we’d say outrageous--inferences that western scientific and technological superiority developed directly from Judeo-Christianity heritage. “Why didn’t the periodic table surface among the Eskimos?” Lapin asks. “It doesn’t make sense that Africa hadn’t figured out the wheel by the time England was at the end of the Industrial Revolution."
Whats the answer to that quesrtion according to the good rabbi? It's because they never had the words, ‘In the beginning, God created the heaven and earth.'”
(This surely can’t be racism--Lapin is a man of God. But this imperiousness coming from a white uber-conservative raised in white supremacist apartheid South Africa kinda makes you stop and wonder, dunnit?).
Lapin said, “The only question is whether human beings are more like God or more like dogs.” There’s no question which side of that equation Lapin puts folk that disagree with him. “America has been occupied by a different breed” he says, “by a type of person who rejects everything we believe in.” Gates writes: “Lapin’s sincere belief that secular liberalism represents the animalistic side of his argument makes the ‘culture war’ a Manicheaean struggle.”
Gates: “And so this man of God, who supports stable family life, faithfulness, and integrity, is also for property rights, sweeping budget cuts, low taxes, capital punishment, and ‘military solutions,’ where appropriate. He opposes promiscuity, abortion, homosexuality, and crime, and also has spoken out against environmental regulations, the ‘centralized charity’ of welfare, funding the arts, and gun control. The rabbi’s version of the Judeo-Christian tradition oddly resembles a right-wing Republican shopping list.”
BlatherWatch would add a few more to the list: like his firm stance against recycling. Or his denial that poverty exists in the U.S. Or that Living Wills are suicide notes. Or that Terri Schiavo’s death was "premeditated murder." Or that to love your pets is unbiblical. Or tattoos, birth control, piercing, abortions and assisted suicide are immorally equivalent. (Later, we’ll get to his quaint musings on the Holocaust).
In 1978, at the age of 31, he and film critic Michael Medved revitalized a graying synagogue on the Venice Beach boardwalk and changed its name to the Pacific Jewish Center.
As Venice spruced up and changed into a baby boomer neighborhood with more affluent younger couples and families, PJC, under the direction of Lapin, “...catered," according to Stephen Games, a British journalist writing for the Jewish Journal, "to the equivalent of ‘born again’ Christians--‘born again’ Jews from backgrounds that were not religious.”
Though the Center was strictly observant, it was abuzz with families and community activities with schools and apartment buildings within walking distance of the synagogue. With Medved’s Hollywood connections and Lapin’s charisma, PJC grew into a “glamorous and intense place,” according to Gates. Barbra Streisand was involved for a while, and donated money for a school that bore her late father’s name.
It was evangelical Judaism. PJC changed people’s lives. “He was selling a conservative version of Judaism, but interpreting it with a literal pizazz much more vital than the mainstream,” said Games.
But there was another side to PJC that many ex-congregants refused to speak of on the record to Gates. Lapin ruled, according to the EW piece, with a “rod of iron,” and those who were lukewarm or otherwise resistant to the program or Lapin’s ideas could be “frozen out.” It was exclusive, one source said, “like a private club.”
A little resistance might have been inspired by such Lapin stances like his advice on how to be ”real men” as given in 1995 at The Citadel, then an all-male military college. He told cadets that real manhood is achieved “by providing for the needs of their women,” and that “in return, a woman can bestow upon her man the great gift of feeling needed.”
At the time of Gates’ writing, long after Lapin had left Los Angeles, many PJC members, still considered him as the greatest spiritual inspiration of their lives. But dissent, bitter divisiveness and controversy followed him thoughout and even after his tenure.
Another huge circumstance causing bitterness and strife--Gates calls it a watershed--was Lapin’s business failure and personal bankruptcy.
With his personal charm, rhetorical powers and philosophy of religious and cultural Manifest Destiny, it’s not hard to understand how Lapin’s PJC financial patrons might have thought Commonwealth Loan Co., (CLC) his investment company, might well be invincible, what with God, Daniel Lapin and the whole of Judeo-Christian civilization behind it.
Unfortunately, the Almighty scattered His Providence elsewhere. CLC, whose business was buying and selling investment loans secured by California real estate went down like a cheap date as the California real estate market precipitously went south in the late ‘80’s.
The company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 1992.
A year earlier, (April 1991) Lapin had announced in a letter to his congregation that they were doing “major reconstruction” on his LA home, stating, “we plan to enjoy that home for many years.”
But six months before the bankruptcy was declared, in September 1992, Lapin bought a 300k home --a high-price in those days--on Mercer Island, a well-to-do lakeside suburb near Seattle.
Gates writes that Lapin in February 1992, two months before the bankruptcy, wrote to CLC investors acknowledging serious problems. He described his move to Mercer Island as a necessary cost-cutting move to “a less expensive area.”
Besides, the Pacific Northwest was where Lapin, an avid sailor, loved to sail (he’d owned a 44-foot yacht, the Paragon, in LA).
Plus, there was the added attraction of living where he wouldn’t have to look his creditors in the eye as he bankrupted on them.
Before the family moved north, he did extensive remodeling on the Mercer Island house including a Jacuzzi in a new master bedroom suite, a kosher kitchen (3 sinks, 2 dishwashers) and a schoolroom for his 7 home schooled children. Cost: $125,000.
The rabbi told Dominic Gates he bought the Mercer Island house partly as an investment, not knowing his company would collapse. But Gates reported there had been significant signs of trouble. Early in 1991, a nervous investor sensing oncoming risk, arbitrated to take his money out of the company, but never received either of the two promised $25,000 payments. In July 1991, City National Bank filed for foreclosure on CLC’s building, forcing them move to cheaper digs. In a letter to investors, CLC characterized it as cutting overhead but failed to mention the foreclosure.
In the end, Lapin’s personal loss and that of his investors, totaled more than $3.5 million. Lapin lost $350k of his own money. Since he’d signed personal guarantees on much of the company’s debt, in July 1994, he filed for personal bankruptcy in a Seattle federal court for $3 million.
It’s fun to note that Bush’s new anti-bankruptcy laws recently passed by the GOP Congress prohibits citizens like you and me to declare bankruptcy on chump change bank credit card debt, but would let someone like the high-rolling Daniel Lapin free himself from accountability for his broken personal financial promises.
Barry Abramson, a former congregant, was really pissed about Lapin’s declaring personal bankruptcy and accused the rabbi of fraud, claiming Lapin abused his position as spiritual advisor to convince him to invest all of his inheritance from his grandmother--some $100,000--in CLC.
Lapin was exonerated in 1996. A federal bankruptcy judge in Seattle ruled that Abramson had “failed to state a claim for any kind of fraud.” The allegation was definitively dismissed just two months before Lapin addressed the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego.
At the end of all this, Lapin was free and clear to embark on a
political career. His vision, according to the EW piece was to help
lead Jews and Moslems, Hindus, Mormons, Hare Krishnas, Rastafarians, Atheists, Buddhists, Breatharians, Agnostics, Unitarians, Wiccans, Christians into a Nirvana utopia
heaven on earth where men are real men, markets are free, genders know
their roles, sex is within the same species, opposite genders, and
post-marital.
Besides politics, Lapin told Gates he had the financial backing to build a $10 million retreat center along the shores of Puget Sound for corporate managers to come and soak up the business brilliance that the rabbi was hoping to become known for. This was never built, but despite his colossal business failures, Lapin speaks and leads business seminars all over the country, according to his website.
In 1995, Lapin spoke in Tacoma at a convention of Human Life International, a Catholic anti-choice, anti-sex organization who’d been labeled anti-Semitic and racist by a Seattle civil rights group. At the last minute, Lapin was invited to speak in a PR effort to deflect some of the bad juju from the pre-publicity.
Dominic Gates covered the conference, interviewing HLI founder Father Paul Marx who confided some doubts about the Holocaust: “Some say,” he said, “good Germans say it was, it may well have been, impossible to have killed that many in so short a period of time.”
Holocaust mitigation is considered by many to be close to Holocaust denial, that keystone of white supremacist doctrine. In the ensuing kerfuffle, Lapin generated his own bad juju and not a little Jewish outrage by jumping right in to defend Marx’s statements. He’d not back away from Marx’s perhaps revealing choice of words. “That is not anti-Semitic...I think de facto questioning the numbers should not be construed as anti-Semitic.”
Lapin hasn’t changed his mind about what the significance of the Holocaust should be in today’s world. According to Rabbi Weiner, Lapin compared this summer’s international gathering of gays and lesbians in Jerusalem with the Nazi march in Skokie, Ill.
He said recently to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough: “I do believe that we in the Jewish community need to stop being so prickly about [the Holocaust]...Right now, serious Catholicism and serious Judaism faces secularism, rampant secular fundamentalism. And so, it’s enough looking backwards. It’s enough already with the apologies and the Holocaust and the past.”
Though David Lapin may have to answer for some of his government business dealings, there’s no evidence that Daniel Lapin has gained anything from his friendship with Jack Abramoff other than the mutually beneficial advantage of the two rubbing influence off and on each other. What’s rubbing off of Abramoff nowadays, of course, is not so gainful and Lapin has been trying to get as little of iton him as possible.
But the odors around the jolly country rabbi aren’t so sweet either. He’s been exonerated in courts of law, but he’s been followed all his adult life by controversy, law suits, bitterness, ill will, and troubling financial dealings.
Lapin is a divisive character who hangs out with some of the meanest, self-serving, extreme and zealous religious conservatives in America--like Rev. Ken Hutcherson, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, James Dobson. Except for that annoying Lord Jesus part, he’s in lock step with them. He’s their show rabbi, a political activist, and no more a benign sectarian clergyman than Jesse Jackson.
Too extreme, outspoken, and tainted to be in the forefront, Lapin is a faith-based insider and religious right rainmaker to the politicians who have risen to the top and are making policy in the Southern-based neocon Republican Party. He’s creating his own kind of power base under the cover of religiosity.
It’s best we keep our eye on him.
My first visit here...and I'll be coming back often if this is the established standard.
What an informative and well written piece.
I got here after enjoying the text of the lunch Hans Riemer served Michael Medved re Medved's misplaced denial that Pres. Bush ever favored SS "Privatization". That was detailed at over at Media Matters.
Many thanks to the commenter there who linked to this piece.
Lapin is a frightening figure, even moreso than Medved. Against RECYCLING?!!
An hilarious whacko...except for that "huge following" part. Sad to see such a charlatan taking so many for a ride...but articles like this one are a tonic.
Thanks again!
Posted by: Michael Merrill | May 13, 2005 at 10:23 AM
Thank you for keeping up with this character. Rabbi Lapin is an embarassment to us Jews in particular, who prefer to be known for being progressive and open-minded. This Rabbi without portfolio (or a synagogue) is an abomination.
Posted by: David | May 13, 2005 at 10:52 AM
We need to keep getting the word out. If we are going to fight back this takeover by right-wing Christians, we need to go after guys like Lapin. I'm so tired of people like him turning America into Jesus-land.
Stay vigilant!
Posted by: Bush Lies | May 13, 2005 at 02:10 PM
Heh. I don't suppose you've seen the Penn and Teller show "Bullshit!" on Showtime? You should see what they prove about recycling. Guess what? It's BULLSHIT!
Posted by: Kook | May 25, 2005 at 08:18 AM
It's amazing how biased this and all the rest of the lapin articles are.
1. Do your own research instead of copying and pasting other biased material.
2. You obviosly have a democratic agenda in attacking strong republican supporters such as Lapin. Although everything you report seems substantial. It is not. Anything he says, he supports with not only religion, but logic as well.
But your readers only read "half the stories". You make him seem like a psycho, by not reporting his reasoning. This is extremely biased and quite honestly, sick. You reporting is like a joke without a punchline. You do not complete the story in any way shape or form.
3. I strongly urge you to review your reporting technique. From actual text to your horrible research. Good luck. You'll need it.
Posted by: BiasedDems | November 15, 2005 at 06:08 PM
Shortly after Lapin moved to my home town of Mercer Island, he took an unusual position on our local "racial profiling" scandal.
Allegations had been published that our small-town police practiced racial profiling. About half the letters to our local paper (the Mercer Island Reporter) said that it was impossible for our cops to have racially profiled. About half said that is was possible, and should be investigated because it would be bad if they had.
Lapin, alone, said that it would be a good thing if police used racial profiling. He expressed concern that this place would become like cities in Southern California.
This sort of tells you all you need to know about the guy.
It's nice to learn in the news today that he is just a common bagman.
Posted by: rewinn | January 09, 2006 at 08:54 AM
From this morning's Seattle Times front page:
Abramoff used area foundation as conduit for money
By David Postman and Hal Bernton
Seattle Times staff reporters
Lobbyist Jack Abramoff funneled money through a Mercer Island religious foundation as he tried to influence a top aide to Republican congressional leader Tom DeLay, according to his guilty plea last week to corruption charges.
Rabbi Daniel Lapin confirmed Sunday it was his foundation, Toward Tradition, that took $50,000 from two Abramoff clients and, at Abramoff's suggestion, used it to hire the aide's wife to organize a conference for the group.
Lapin said he and his board had no idea the money was part of Abramoff's vast scheme to influence Congress and, in this case, stop bills to raise postal rates and ban online lotteries.
The business interests that paid the money in 2000 and 2001 said they didn't know it would be used to hire the aide's wife.
The foundation is a conservative Judeo-Christian group where Abramoff once served as chairman of the board. It's referred to only as a "non-profit entity" in Abramoff's plea agreement.
Lapin, in an interview Sunday and in a memo he sent to board members, said Lisa Rudy, wife of former DeLay aide Tony Rudy, was hired to organize a Washington, D.C., conference for Toward Tradition.
Lapin said others had been hired to do similar work in the past and Rudy did a good job setting up the fall 2000 event.
"We were innocently hiring someone to do a job and not being aware that it was part of something else," Lapin said.
He said the FBI interviewed him and Toward Tradition employees last year. The group gave documents to the government. And Lapin said he was told neither he nor his organization was a target of any investigation.
Lapin and Abramoff are friends, both Orthodox Jews whose lives intersected in the world of politics and religion.
The rabbi is a well-known voice among conservatives in Washington, D.C., and Seattle, where he hosts a weekly radio show on KTTH-AM. In many ways Lapin has become, as The Washington Post called him in a story this summer, "The Republicans' Rabbi-in-Arms."
He's also friendly with DeLay. Although he has been reported to have been the man to introduce DeLay to Abramoff, Lapin said Sunday he doesn't recall that.
There are other ties between Lapin and Abramoff, who worked for the Seattle-based law and lobbying firm Preston Gates from 1994 to 2000. Abramoff served on the board of Toward Tradition, including a stint as chairman, and donated the $10,000 or so a year expected from board members, Lapin said.
One year Abramoff met that commitment by sending a check from the Capital Athletic Foundation, an organization he controlled that has become a key piece of the corruption investigation.
Lapin confirmed he urged supporters of President George W. Bush's re-election to give campaign donations through Abramoff, which helped the lobbyist gain Bush "Pioneer" status among top presidential fundraisers.
Abramoff also had dealings with Lapin's brother, David, a Los Angeles-based rabbi and business consultant.
During Senate hearings last year on the Abramoff scandal, e-mails between Daniel Lapin and Abramoff were read detailing the lobbyist's request that the rabbi help phony-up some awards for him.
Abramoff said he wanted something to help burnish his application to join a fancy D.C. club. Lapin responded that he could oblige, saying, "I just need to know what needs to be produced ... letters? plaques? Neither?"
Lapin says he was only joking about the awards and he assumes Abramoff wasn't serious either.
But National Public Radio reported in July that Abramoff at least one time listed on his biography awards from Toward Tradition and another Lapin organization — awards the rabbi said were never given.
"Stark indicator"
Lapin has been reluctant to criticize Abramoff as details have emerged about the lobbyist's dealings in D.C.
Last week's plea bargain changed that some.
"Obviously his formal admission to some of these things is a sort of stark indicator that he was engaged in a lot of things that a lot of his friends didn't know anything about," Lapin said.
"We almost never discussed his business dealings. Whenever we spoke it was about our families. It was about Jewish/Christian relations. It was about Toward Tradition, about friends we had in common."
Some Toward Tradition board members are harder on Abramoff.
"He touched so many established good people and brought out the bad in them," said Carl Pearlston, a board member from California. "I really am apprehensive about how the Abramoff affair is going to tar Toward Tradition. It can't help but do that to some extent."
Toward Tradition is led by Lapin, a South African-born Orthodox rabbi who moved from Los Angeles to Washington state in 1991, then launched the foundation.
The foundation is dedicated to advancing "traditional Judeo-Christian values that defined America's creation and became the blueprint for her greatness," the foundation's mission statement says. In the recent holiday season, for example, Lapin and the foundation joined in the campaign to fight what it saw as secularists' attack on Christmas.
In a November speech headlined "Merry Christmas is NOT Offensive," Lapin urged Jewish people to protect religious freedom for everyone.
Payments to Rudy
The government's interest in Toward Tradition has apparently focused on the payments to Lisa Rudy.
Lapin said her name was first raised in the summer of 2000 when Abramoff asked whether anyone had been hired to organize that fall's conference in D.C.
Lapin said Abramoff told him, "I know someone who is available to do the job and what's more I could get her salary covered." Lapin told him, "OK, terrific."
Lisa Rudy is the wife of Tony Rudy, at the time a senior aide to DeLay, who was then majority whip in Congress. Tony Rudy later went to work as a lobbyist for Abramoff, according to The Washington Post.
Lisa Rudy couldn't be reach for comment.
At the time he approached Lapin about hiring Lisa Rudy, Abramoff was working in the D.C. office of Seattle's Preston Gates.
Toward Tradition's board approved hiring Lisa Rudy in 2000 and soon after Abramoff sent a $25,000 check from a firm called eLottery. It came with instructions that Rudy was to be paid $5,000 a month.
eLottery is a Connecticut company that provides states with online lotteries. The company hired Abramoff to help stop the federal Internet Gambling Prohibition Act.
Lapin said other checks came from another Abramoff client, the Magazine Publishers of America. Those checks, too, came with directions to keep paying Rudy.
Abramoff was lobbying for the association and, according to his plea agreement, was trying to stop a bill that would have raised postal rates.
A total of $50,000 was paid to Rudy. Abramoff's plea agreement says the money was obtained from clients that benefited from the aide's "official actions regarding the legislation on Internet gambling or opposing postal rate increases."
Lapin said it is not unusual for board members to solicit donations from corporations and others for Toward Tradition. It's also not unusual for donors to ask that the money to be used for a specific purpose.
In an October Washington Post article, Robert Daum, a former eLottery official, said that all the money spent by the company at Abramoff's direction was for the purpose of defeating the Internet gambling bill in Congress.
"We were willing to pursue all legitimate means to ensure that outcome, as people do all the time in Washington," Daum told The Post.
Reached Sunday by The Seattle Times and asked about the $25,000 contribution from eLottery to Toward Tradition, Daum said, "Anything I have said prior, stands." He declined further comment.
Lapin said Toward Tradition did no lobbying and had no involvement with the legislation mentioned in Abramoff's plea bargain.
He told board members that he has negative views about gambling in general and particularly about government-sanctioned gambling.
"So why did eLottery give us $25,000 when we were never viewed as a friend of the gambling industry? Now we are told it was at Jack Abramoff's direction and that he had purposes that went way beyond helping Toward Tradition," Lapin wrote to board members.
The same is true about money from the Magazine Publishers of America.
Howard Rubenstein, a spokesman for the magazine publishers, said the $25,000 to Toward Tradition was given at the direction of an employee of Preston Gates but not Abramoff. He could not recall the name of the person.
The magazine publishing group had "no idea that it would be used the way it was used," Rubenstein said Sunday.
Stanley Ellberger, a Toward Tradition board member from New Jersey, said he had been briefed about hiring Lisa Rudy and was told she did a good job in setting up the Washington conference.
"The bottom line for us was that she actually performed the services that we paid her for," Ellberger said.
Ellberger said he had faith that Lapin has always acted ethically. "I wouldn't doubt that even for a nanosecond. He would not do anything that would not be kosher," Ellberger said.
Michael Medved, the Seattle-based nationally syndicated radio host and movie critic, sits on the Toward Tradition board and has been critical of Abramoff during his broadcasts.
In an interview Sunday, Medved said he has met Abramoff only a few times, shared three meals with him, and added, "Jack's not a part of my life, thank God."
Medved and Lapin are long-time friends and co-founded the Pacific Jewish Center in Venice Beach, Calif.
"I certainly do wish I had never met Jack and Jack had never met any friends of mine," Medved said.
For his part, Lapin was philosophical when asked what he wishes he might have done differently in his dealings with Abramoff.
"I'm sure I'm not that different from most people when I say I have a long list of regrets in my life," he said. "And I just find it easier and less painful not to spend too much time delving into that list and prioritizing it. The more one lives the more regrets one has for turns taken and directions taken and things done and things not done."
Posted by: sparky | January 09, 2006 at 09:49 AM
well, poo...next time I will just post the link.
Sorry about that.
Posted by: sparky | January 09, 2006 at 09:52 AM
When I was being successfully treated for bipolar illness, Rabbi Lapin's assistant rabbi told my doctor that I was not permitted to participate in any public events the shul held. I had relatives who were members there, but they withdrew contact from me for a good while, and suggested I attend another shul.
I was ashamed about this until I met a respected attorney who only laughed and said "join the cherem club." That is, you are not the only one who has been excommunicated from that shul.
In contrast, when I was doing poorly with my mental illness, I had encouraging visits and calls from rabbis who had the time to care about what would happen to one of their congregants or students.
Posted by: MichelleInLJ | April 29, 2007 at 06:48 PM