When Judith S. Lewis was being hired three years ago as rabbi of the Riverdale Temple in the Bronx, a board member in the temple’s Reform congregation made a prediction. The rabbi who led the Orthodox synagogue just a few blocks away, Joel I. Rosenblatt, would not deign to meet her.

The self-appointed Cassandra offered no specific reasons for his prophecy, and perhaps he assumed no explanation was even necessary. Doctrinal disagreements over such basic issues as interfaith marriage and female equality in worship had polarized the Reform and Orthodox movements for decades. Some Orthodox rabbis would refer to their Reform counterparts only by the studiously neutral noun “clergy.”

A week or so after being installed, Rabbi Lewis picked up her phone. It was Rabbi Rosenblatt, the first of Riverdale’s numerous rabbis to formally welcome her to the neighborhood. She couldn’t say she was entirely surprised. She knew something her board member didn’t: Rabbi Lewis’s husband, Otto Kucera, was a funeral director who had worked with Rabbi Rosenblatt many times over nearly 20 years.

“Anyone good enough for Otto to marry,” Rabbi Rosenblatt, 52, recalled in a recent interview, “was good enough for me to have as a colleague.”

So they met for coffee in the summer of 2006 at a kosher restaurant, the Corner Cafe, and they crossed paths again some months later at a Jewish Federation fund-raiser at the temple. Then they, like so many other busy New Yorkers, kept promising to get together again soon, and kept being too busy to do it.

So it remained until May 20, 2009, and the most unimaginable occasion for a reunion. That night, the New York police and F.B.I. agents arrested four men on charges of trying to bomb two Jewish buildings in Riverdale: Rabbi Lewis’s Riverdale Temple and Rabbi Rosenblatt’s Riverdale Jewish Center. To those suspects, described by law enforcement officials as jailhouse converts to Islam and jihadi wannabes, the distinctions between Reform and Orthodox were either irrelevant or invisible...


Click here for complete NY Times article by Samuel G. Freedman (On Religion)