Making the Cut

Raymond Cohen’s rags-to-riches story began in the East End of London in 1943. His parents, Morris and Sophie, both born in London, were the descendants of immigrants from Poland and Lithuania. His father, a tailor, did piecework, and then worked in a factory pressing garments, commuting an hour and a half by train back to London after the family moved to Brighton.

The crushing physical labor of Morris’s job, combined with the fumes of the chemicals used in the factory, took their toll on his health. At 56, he had a heart attack that resulted in his death ten days later. Raymond and his younger brother Stuart were orphaned in an era devoid of safety nets. Like many boys orphaned of their fathers in years past, the boys gave up on observance.

“Everybody in his neighborhood was poor, but my father’s family was especially poor,” Marc says. “His mother sometimes went without food to make sure her sons had enough to eat.”

Raymond was 12 years old when he left the Whittingehame, a cultural Jewish school, and enrolled in a vocational school’s six year program to train as a hairstylist. He dropped out after six months to become a hairdresser’s apprentice during the week, and took any available hustle on the side to support the family.

Raymond and his older cousin, “Red” Lesley, regularly bought canned goods on the docks of Brighton and peddled them in London’s street markets. The docks and marketplaces were rough areas, but Raymond was a tough guy. In those postwar years, neo-Nazism was popular in many circles, promoted by former MP Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. Mosley would lead marches down Petticoat Lane in the East End, provoking the Jews.

“But the Jews who had come back from the war weren’t having any of it,” says David, Raymond’s second son. (After the Holocaust, the senior Cohens learned that many of their relatives who had remained in Europe had been slaughtered by the Nazis, and Raymond carried a fierce hatred for neo-Nazis and all things German his entire life.) “The returning Jewish soldiers formed a group called the 43 Group, which later evolved into the 62 Group, which my dad joined, to stand up to the anti-Semites.”

Raymond also started a motorcycle gang called the Maccabees (although some of them were Chinese and one was Pakistani). With their steel-tipped boots and crowbars, they were vigilantes on the prowl for anyone harassing Jews. Years later, while living in New York, he joined the Jewish Defense League. He would go to KKK meetings to disperse the crowds, and only bowed out when the JDL became too public.

Tough guy Raymond eventually moved on from the markets of the East End, finding work in a decidedly non-tough-guy profession: hairdressing. At first, he went to work in a small salon in Brighton called John of Landsdale Road, which led to a much more prestigious opportunity to work at the Raymond Bessone Salon for the world famous “Raymond Teasie Weasie,” in the Mayfair neighborhood of London. He used a version of his Hebrew name, Raphael, to avoid confusion with his boss Raymond.

The clientele was wealthy and prestigious, and Raymond quickly absorbed upper-class modes of dressing and presenting himself. “He had a flair for fashion, and was always dressed like a prince, perfectly groomed,” David says. “He always cut hair in a suit and tie, with a pocket square in his breast pocket.”

In 1964, a Jewish woman from New York who was a friend of Raymond’s Aunt Betty offered to sponsor his immigration to the US, arranging the paperwork and finding him work. He grabbed the opportunity, but the job was a disappointment. “It wasn’t his scene — the salon was in Queens and he was doing beehive hairdos for old Jewish ladies,” Marc says. “He felt like an indentured servant because he felt too guilty to quit on her.”

Raymond was 21 when he had the good fortune to run into his old London friend Paul Mitchell while walking on Fifth Avenue. Paul, who was the style director at Henri Bendel, offered Raymond a job working in its high-end salon. It was just what he was looking for, and he promptly accepted.

By 1968 Raymond left Henri Bendel to open his own salon with a partner, a secular Shiite Iranian named Nassar Poufar. They started on 56th Street but soon moved to Madison Avenue between 64th and 65th, a prime location (it has since been home to Valentino and Boucheron). The business soon became the largest, most upscale salon in New York, with its own doorman and 65 people on staff, including manicurists, colorists, and skin and makeup professionals. Paul Mitchell worked there a few days a week while launching his eponymous line of beauty products.

Raymond poured his creativity and style into the business. He staged publicity stunts such as setting up his salon on an airport runway and creating a pop-up salon with furniture and generators at the fountain opposite the Plaza Hotel. He knew how to charm and pamper his celebrity clients, from picking them up at the airport in the salon’s limousine, to serving tea on bone china, to keeping a table under permanent reservation at the coveted restaurant Le Cirque so that his celebrity clients could dine there after appointments.

In the early 1980s, Raymond was spending his days giving haircuts for hundreds of dollars to the rich and famous, but at night, he could often be found in the Bronx, where he would sometimes sleep in the apartments of terrified Holocaust survivors and other elderly Jews, waiting to give a “nice warm welcome” to any thugs who dared break in. Often, they were the only Jews left in buildings filled with rough elements.

“He read that I was keeping up declining and unattended synagogues and defending elderly Jews in the Bronx, and he contacted me,” says his friend, activist and former police officer Gary Moskowitz. “He wanted to help. Other people would have written a check, but Raymond came down and would visit people in their apartments.”

Made in Heaven

While working for Henri Bendel, Raymond met a young lady at a chesed event for Jewish singles. Rachelle Haber, who had studied clothing design at FIT, came from an observant Syrian family. This wasn’t so foreign to Raymond, who had had Turkish and Moroccan Jewish friends in London. But he wasn’t religious, and when he took her to dinner on their first date, he brought her to a hip nonkosher restaurant where Rachelle couldn’t eat anything but cut fruit.

Rachelle’s family was not pleased. “You cannot date my daughter if you do not keep Shabbat and kashrut,” said Mr. Moe Haber, who had learned for ten years in Yeshivat Porat Yosef.

“I don’t want to date your daughter,” Raymond replied. “I want to marry her!”

David says that his mother’s father “saw that he had a good heart, so he verified his Jewish lineage with his family rabbi in Brighton and then sent him to a rabbi in Brooklyn to be mekarev him.”

“By the second week we dated, he was shomer Shabbat,” Rachelle says.

They married in 1967, and with no strong mesorah of his own, Raymond integrated completely into his wife’s community, even receiving a dispensation from Chacham Ovadiah to eat rice on Pesach. “I was reborn as a Halabi Jew,” Raymond later said.

The couple’s first years were the stuff of fairy tales: They honeymooned in Europe, lived in a townhouse in Manhattan, received extravagant gifts of crystal and china from Raymond’s wealthy clients, and were invited for visits to his friend Ronald Lauder’s Fire Island home.

Raymond and Rachelle lived in Manhattan for a few years, then Brooklyn. But Raymond didn’t like Brooklyn, so in 1973, they moved to Deal, New Jersey. “There wasn’t even a shul there when they arrived,” David says. “The minyan met on top of the police station.” Raymond joined in founding the Synagogue of Deal and Ohel Simha, a.k.a. the Park Avenue Shul, as well as the Red Schoolhouse shul in Oakhurst.

There, too, Raymond continued to be there for anyone who needed help. An elderly couple in nearby Eatontown was being harassed by anti-Semitic neighbors at all hours of the day and night until the desperate husband threatened them with a plastic gun. The thugs brought charges against him. Raymond moved into the elderly couple’s house to make them feel secure, but would venture out at 2 a.m. and bang on the neighbors’ door, saying, “Come on out! There’s a Jew here who wants to talk to you!” The bullies cowered inside.

When the elderly man stood trial, Raymond and his friends packed the courtroom, convinced the judge the case had no merit, and found ways to persuade those neighbors to move away.

Sea Change

Raymond and Rachelle raised four children: Marc, an insurance professional who continues his father’s legacy of fundraising; David, a businessman who perpetuates his father’s dedication to the needs of the elderly; Rabbi Chaim Adam, who after 17 years in kollel is now a finance executive for a large community company and carries on his father’s devotion to Torah and mentoring by teaching high school students at Shaare Torah in the evenings; and Renee Schweky, a mother of a large Lakewood family and a renowned makeup artist who inherited her father’s talent for making people look and feel good.

The Cohen home was always open to guests, but Raymond’s chesed initiatives never overshadowed his devotion to his family. “Every child and grandchild felt like his favorite one,” says Renee. He raised his children with old world standards of proper behavior, dress, and respect for rabbis and elders, and an awareness of making a kiddush Hashem wherever they went.

Raymond was a person who always threw himself behind his principles, often to an extreme. During his entire adult life, he refused to buy any German products — to the point of sometimes making his family wait for hours on trips to Israel while he tried to locate a taxi that wasn’t a Mercedes. When the Pepsi company boycotted Israel, he took every bottle of Pepsi in the Deal shul and poured it into the sink. “It’s not kosher if they won’t sell it in Israel,” he said.

In the 1970s and 80s, when the Cohen children were growing up, the Deal community’s standard of observance wasn’t what it is today — many people more or less kept kosher at home and went to shul on Shabbat, but weren’t interested in or ready for more.

Things began to change in the 1980s as Rabbi Yitzchak Dwek and Rabbi Shmuel Choueka established kehillos and urged their congregants toward greater observance. But the biggest sea change in this beach town happened when Rabbi Shlomo Diamond opened a kollel in Deal. Eventually even Raymond, who had not had a formal yeshivah education, began learning Torah. “He was late to the game, but he got on the train,” quipped Rabbi Shlomo Farhi, rav of the Edmond Safra Synagogue in New York and a popular speaker.

Not everyone jumped on board. But Raymond’s daughter-in-law says that is what’s so beautiful in the Syrian community — family ties ensure unity between people who are more religious and those who are not. “The ones who are less religious respect the ones who are. They don’t reject it — there’s no Reform. Instead, the attitude is, ‘I’m not there yet.’ ”

By now the Syrian community has come a long way religiously from those days in the ’70s and ’80s, establishing yeshivah families in Lakewood, Flatbush, and Deal.

In the days before the Syrian community could boast its own infrastructure, Raymond was a self-appointed, one-man chesed organization. Known for his ironclad principles and ceaseless advocacy, he became an icon in his community. Raymond taught his children, “Nobody rides for free in a community! Find your unique way to help people and make your contribution.”

He commuted to Manhattan daily on the bus that shuttled community members between Deal and New York, and would stand in the front, take the microphone, and announce that he was collecting money for various causes. “In his British accent, he would tell people, ‘It behooves you to contribute to such-and-such cause,’ ” Marc says.

When Rabbi Choueka told him about a family that had no money to make a wedding, Raymond raised $12,000 in an afternoon. Then he joined forces with Rabbi Choueka to start a formal marriage fund, which has funded over a thousand weddings.

Full Stop

Raymond was 44 and business was booming, when a stern comment from Rabbi Dwek made it collapse like a house of cards. “Your business is not a place for your teenaged boys to work in when they graduate high school,” he said. “You cannot have them work in a beauty salon!”

Raymond revered rabbanim, and never did anything halfway. The very next day, he told his partner he was leaving the business.

He didn’t even take buyout money; he just walked away. “There are not many people who could say they ran a very strong, successful, and frankly very cool business and decide, ‘That’s not the element I want to be around,’ ” said Rabbi Joey Haber at Raymond’s arayat (the Sephardic one-year eulogies). “He made a bold, strong, courageous, unbelievably memorable decision to change his life midway and make sure his life was about the right ideals and the right values.”

Raymond and Rachelle were less interested in upward mobility than doing what was right. Having gobs of money? Hobnobbing with the rich and famous? They’d been there, done that. It had been fun, but they had other, more meaningful priorities now.

Still, Raymond’s decision presented a huge financial challenge. The man who was accustomed to wearing $3,000 suits now scrambled to find something else to do, with no credit to even lease a car (a friend had to cosign for him). “He wasn’t proud,” Marc says. “He would do whatever it took to bring in money, even selling shmatteh closeouts from the back of a station wagon at the flea market.

“He would try anything to support his family, and give the shirt off his back to his kids,” says daughter Renee. “I remember that as a child I never wanted to ask him for anything, especially when finances were tight, because I knew he would never say no.”

It took Raymond ten years to get back on track financially. Rachelle went to work as a travel agent and in a jewelry store, while Raymond eventually brought in some money selling the cosmetics line he launched on the QVC television shopping network. He then sold men’s suits and eventually worked in wholesale apparel, well-served by his personal charm and ability to cultivate relationships.

He also did some haircutting for men, but that eventually turned into a chesed operation. Everybody Sephardi knew that if you were coming out of sheloshim, you went to Raymond to get a $500 haircut and shave for the charge of one dollar (which he put in tzedakah). Raymond would check aveilim listings in order to offer his free haircutting services, and on special occasions, cut the hair of chattanim and did upsherens for his friends’ grandchildren.

To this day his children are identified as the offspring of “Raymond the Barber.” At his funeral, David spoke for himself and the entire community when he plaintively cried, “Thirty days from now, who’s going to cut my hair?”

Champion of the Elderly

After Raymond married, he was determined to bring his “Mum” over from England to the US so she wouldn’t be alone. True to his word, he invited her to live with him and his wife in their two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment.

“Who does that?” Marc says. “What young married couple today would agree to live in such close quarters with a parent?” But Raymond was determined, and Rachelle was on board.

Sophie moved with them when they left Brooklyn for Deal, and spent 26 years in their home. “Our children are different people because they grew up with the experience of caring for their grandmother,” Rachelle says. “It made menschen of them. It taught them that it’s not all about you.”

As time went by and the Cohen children left the house, Sophie began having health problems, including the first signs of dementia. Rachelle did all she could, but she worked outside the home, and her mother-in-law’s medical condition became too much for her to handle. Alone in the house during the day, Sophie became depressed and would wander off. Rabbi Diamond finally convinced Raymond she needed to be in a nursing home. “It was the safest thing for her,” Rachelle says.

Raymond threw himself into researching facilities that would be appropriate for his mother. Ultimately, he decided the best option was the Sephardic Home on Cropsey Avenue in Brooklyn, originally founded by Greek and Turkish Jews. “I feel comfortable letting my mother live here, on one condition,” Raymond said to the home’s administrator. “I need to be able to bring her home every week for Shabbat.”

“That was completely against their policy,” David says. “But he charmed them, and he convinced them.”

Grandma Sophie thrived under the care she received at the Sephardic Home, with Raymond’s careful supervision. The attendants called her “the Queen,” as — like her son — she had a plummy British accent, called everyone “love,” and liked to be impeccably groomed (which she started to do again herself after participating in on-site classes for Alzheimer’s patients). She lived another six years there, enjoying a newfound social life and constant visits from family.

When Raymond visited, he would circulate among the residents to ask how he could improve their situations. He was constantly offering ideas for how to better the facility, raising millions of dollars for the not-for-profit home. In turn, he was invited to sit on the board. When the owners decided to sell the Home in 2015, they used the funds to establish the Sephardic Foundation on Aging. Raymond served on that board, too, and with their help, was able to direct significant amounts of the money to causes such as Chayim Aruchim, Chesed 24/7, Ahi Ezer senior housing, Sephardic Bikur Holim, and the Menorah nursing home in Manhattan Beach.

His work with the sick and elderly led to his connection with Chayim Aruchim. “He reached out to me and Rabbi Zischa Ausch [a dayan at Chayim Aruchim] and connected us with the Sephardic Foundation,” Rabbi Menachem Horowitz says. “He served as a bridge between the Sephardim and Chayim Aruchim. Every time he called with someone who had a family member in need of Chayim Aruchim’s end-of-life medical and halachic advice, he’d say, ‘I have my very close friend on the phone’ or ‘I have my brother on the phone.’ We eventually realized there was no way he had so many brothers! He was so grateful for our help that he used to call both of us every Erev Shabbos to say thank you and good Shabbos.

“When his people would give us pushback, he’d reprimand them. He’d say, ‘Don’t argue with the rabbi!’ He was a very spiritual person, and always managed to convince people to do the right thing.”

It was through Chayim Aruchim that Raymond met Pinny Most in 2014, today the owner of Most Care Options, which helps set up home care for the sick and elderly. “Raymond loved the idea of home care. When I told him that dialysis and ventilator patients could be cared for at home, he was so excited he hugged me. ‘That’s a game changer!’ he said. He helped me start my own business and connected me to Ralph Tawil, who was one of the biggest philanthropists in the Syrian community in the 1980s and 90s. I took care of Ralph until he passed away.

“Raymond was so genuine, and so insistent about the dignity of patients. I sat in many meetings with him with nursing home owners. He was a gentleman and a diplomat, but he could fight like a tiger. If he didn’t like something he’d say, ‘I will not tolerate this!’ He dreamed big and never let the nitty-gritty bog him down.”

Raymond dreamed of building a high-quality nursing home for the Flatbush community. In 2016, he approached businessman Michael Haddad to propose it. “Raymond was my mentor. He lit me up about this project,” says Mr. Haddad. “Everything froze during Covid, but now we have a property near Pomegranate in Flatbush, and we’re just waiting for approvals from the Department of Health.”

Since Raymond’s petirah, the baton for elder care has been passed to David, who is working with Haddad and Moshe Adelman to realize his father’s dream, a project estimated to cost 100 million dollars. “Many nursing homes do not provide an adequate standard of care,” David maintains. “Unfortunately, you often see people who were once great rabbis or askanim — people who built the infrastructure we take for granted today — lying in beds, neglected by apathetic workers. That isn’t acceptable.” They are determined to create a five-star facility within walking distance of community members, with a positive ambiance, creative innovations, and kosher food.

David and the team have many creative ideas to enhance the facility, such as setting up a food court comprised of branches of local restaurants, offering food compatible with dietary restrictions, so that patients and visitors can eat together. The plans also feature an on-premises store that sells adaptive clothing for patients. “There’s no reason patients always have to be in hospital gowns. They can be dressed in a manner that has more dignity,” he says. “We can make regular shirts that open in the back or clothing with magnetic buttons. There are sensors that can alert staff if a patient needs personal care and trackers for shoes so that Alzheimer’s patients can’t run off.”

Raymond’s eldercare advocacy wasn’t limited to the living, nor restricted to his own lifetime. When Raymond’s former colleague Harold, Paul Mitchell’s right-hand man and the inventor of the eponymous blow dryer diffuser, passed away three days before Raymond, David jumped into action, like his father would have, to ensure Harold had a Jewish burial. Fearing his estranged, atheist son would opt for cremation, David contacted a Chabad rabbi who lived near the niftar. The niftar’s son told the rabbi he would only agree to a burial if they bought a plot for his late father and plot for his mother for when the time would come. On the day of Raymond’s funeral, David raised $15,000 for both plots at Minchah at the shivah house. Harold was interred with a beautiful kosher funeral exactly 24 hours after his longtime mate Raymond.

Raymond advocated for the elderly literally until his last moments, and his phone would ring at all hours of the day and night. While being wheeled into surgery in tremendous pain for what would be his last operation and last weeks in the ICU, he took a call: It was someone needing help for an elderly relative. The family found out after Raymond’s passing that that person on the other line was Raymond Kassin, the father of the future chassan of Raymond’s granddaughter Rachelle, who was married in November of this year. When the name of Raymond Cohen’s granddaughter came up for their son Maurice, they knew it was a shidduch made in heaven.

Giving Back

A little over a year ago, after many months of feeling unusually tired and plagued by undiagnosable pain, Raymond was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Things declined rapidly, and as things got very bad, a group of his friends from the community decided to purchase a sefer Torah as a zechut for his refuah. “Marc got a phone call with the news, and his jaw dropped — it was such a beautiful gesture,” Rachelle relates.

“That was a Tuesday, and on Thursday they brought over the sefer Torah. On Thursday morning, as David walked over to the sefer Torah dedication, listening to Rabbi Mansour’s Daily Mitzvah podcast, he heard Rabbi Mansour announce that the final, 613th mitzvah is that every person should write a sefer Torah in his lifetime.”

Raymond was lying in the den in Marc’s house, which had been converted in to a hospital room, while the Torah was completed at his bedside. His pain management doctor adjusted his meds so he would be awake to watch the proceedings, and his family sat him up in bed wearing a tie and a modified Charles Tyrwhitt shirt cut in the back.

“He was able to do the final 613th mitzvah. And the following Tuesday he passed away.”

With no Gemara background, about five years ago Raymond decided to do Daf Yomi. He wanted to finish Shas. About a year before he passed, he stopped the Daf due to his constant pain. Before he was diagnosed, he said he wanted to start again, but unfortunately finishing Shas was not meant to be — or was it? Raymond, who beat the odds of assimilation, is surely happy on high knowing that the yeshivish family he founded made a siyum haShas in his memory on the one-year anniversary of his passing.

Raymond wore his Hebrew name well: As Rafael, he aided the sick, and as Aryeh, he defended Jews like a lion. “Going to this funeral was like going to a series of classes to learn what it is to live a life of selflessness in this world,” Rabbi Shlomo Farhi remarked. “He cared not just for everybody, but for ‘nobody’ — for a person everyone forgot about, an old person, a sick person….

“Rabbi Yaakov Hillel said that Raymond Cohen was a gadol hador of chesed. Maybe he did not have the merit to study in yeshivah for fifty years like Chacham Ovadiah, or the merit to have a Jewish education. It doesn’t mean you can’t become an irreplaceable part of the Jewish people, an irreplaceable leader.”

Chacham Ovadiah’s Attendant

Raymond met many distinguished rabbis, such as Chacham Ovadiah Yosef, Rabbi Nissim Yagen, and Rabbi Yaakov Hillel, during his glory days at the salon, when he would be asked for support for their institutions. He later connected more personally to Chacham Ovadiah through Rabbi Yitzchak Dwek, jumpstarting an enduring relationship. When Marc and later Adam had their bar mitzvahs in Jerusalem, Chacham Ovadiah attended all the festivities.

“I remember when he first came to our house in Deal — I was eight years old,” Rabbi Adam Cohen remembers. “My name was Adam Chaim, but he told my parents to change it to Chaim Adam. He said that, based on the Chida, a person should not have the name of someone who lived before Avraham Avinu.”

Given Raymond’s ease among the high echelons of society, as well as his reputation as a man you don’t mess with, he was drafted to accompany Chacham Ovadiah Yosef as a sort of private security and protocol officer when the Chacham came to visit the White House in 1983 to give President Ronald Reagan a brachah. When he met Chacham Ovadiah, Raymond respectfully commented that the gadol’s beard could use a trim before meeting President Reagan. “You can trim the beard if Rabbi Dwek recommends you,” Chacham Ovadiah replied.

Rabbi Dwek did so, with a caveat. “If you don’t do a perfect job, I won’t forgive you!” Raymond proceeded to trim the beard, careful to catch every holy hair so that it shouldn’t fall on the floor. As Rabbi Dwek later related in A Life of Bitachon (ArtScroll), Raymond treated the hair with the same care many Jews use to prevent afikomen crumbs from falling on the floor. When he came home, his wife said, “Did you go swimming in your suit?” The man who had easily given haircuts to celebrities was drenched in sweat after trimming the gadol’s beard.

Upon arriving in Washington, Raymond went ahead to inspect the hotel room the Chacham had been assigned. It was not, to his mind, worthy of a dignitary like Chacham Yosef. He accosted the hotel manager. “Would you give this room to the Queen of England?” he said. “This is His Excellency, the chief rabbi of the world!” The manager reassigned the Chacham to the Ambassador Suite. Raymond also requested and received a private elevator and private security detail outside the suite.

On the way home from the White House, Chacham Yosef complained of stomach pain, and Raymond drove at top speed to bring him to a doctor back in Deal. The limo was pulled over for speeding. Without thinking, he got out of the car and put his hands over his head, walking toward the officer.

The policeman drew his gun, but Raymond had a ready response. “Would you pull over the Queen of England for speeding?” he said. “I am escorting His Excellency, the chief rabbi of the world, on his way back from giving President Reagan a blessing at the White House!”

Not only was all forgiven, but the officer ordered a police escort for them all the way back to Deal.

Belz and (Police)Whistles

Although Raymond gave up on religion when his father passed away, he reconnected through a twist of fate with his chassidic lineage.

He was leaving work late one night in August of 1987 with a steel, leather-covered attaché case filled with 40,000 dollars of payroll, on his way to visit his friend Sam (Shmiel) Harkavi, the chassidic owner of Il Makiage. Suddenly, a man stepped out of the shadows to rob him at knifepoint.

“He didn’t know who he was dealing with,” Marc says with a chuckle. “My father slammed the briefcase down on his head hard. He left him lying in a pool of blood.”

While he’d simply been defending himself, Raymond was deeply shaken. What if he’d killed the man? He ran to Shmiel’s office, and Shmiel took him to the Belzer beis medrash in Williamsburg, where he hid till the morning, just in case the police were looking for him.

“He came home, but he was afraid to go back to work for a while,” Marc remembers. “He didn’t think anyone saw the incident, but it turned out that two weeks later, the man died of his wounds in the hospital.”

Raymond finally approached the Manhattan district attorney, a client of his, and confessed what had happened. She advised him to turn himself into the police and tell them he had acted in self-defense. “He went to the precinct to make a report, but nothing ever came of it,” Marc says. “The DA squashed the whole thing. But he always felt guilty. Even though he was a Kohein, he would only duchen on the floor level, and not on the stage, because he felt he had taken a life, even though halachically he was allowed to.”

The incident passed, but Raymond’s connection to Belz endured. “He raised a lot of money for Belz,” Marc says. They honored Raymond twice at Belzer dinners, and once with Rabbi Elimelech Firer, the famous medical adviser and founder of Ezra LeMarpeh, who became one of Raymond’s go-to people when he was trying to help others with very complicated medical issues.”

“For the Belzer Rebbe, Sephardim were low-hanging fruit for kiruv, so there are a lot of Sephardim who were brought back to their Sephardic religious roots thanks to Belz,” David says. “Chacham Ovadiah loved the Belzer rebbe. I believe the connection came about when they both learned Kabbalah from Rav Mordechai Sharabi ztz”l. The Rebbe was a visionary who founded vocational schools for people not suited for long-term learning, started Hidabroot to be mekarev secular Israelis through the media, and funded many schools for kiruv.”

The Belzer Rebbe returned Raymond’s love. “My father would go to the Rebbe in Israel and his chassidim would seat Raymond next to the Rebbe,” Adam says with a grin. “It would be a sea of 2,500 shtreimels and black kapotas, and my father would be the only one there in a pinstriped suit, red socks, and a pocket square.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1057)