Holy Blossom Rabbi Steps Down

A recently negotiated deal will see Rabbi John Moscowitz step down from his post as Chief Rabbi at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto next month, taking a fully-paid three-year sabbatical, before returning as rabbi emeritus in 2015, according to The Globe and Mail.

Moscowitz will officially retire in three years according to the terms of the settlement, which is reportedly worth over a million dollars, but will return this fall to lead High Holiday services.

Members of the synagogue were notified of the decision in a single-paragraph letter, signed by board chairman Mark Anshan, announcing the sabbatical. Anshan later sent out a second letter praising the rabbi’s leadership and approximately 25 years of service to the community.

“This has been a tremendous act of board mismanagement,” Senator Linda Frum, a member of the synagogue, told The Globe. She and her husband Howard Sokolowski have announced their intentions to leave the synagogue following Moscowitz’ departure.

“I am so upset about the way he has been treated. I feel so poisoned by the atmosphere created that it’s not a place that I could continue to feel comfortable. I know others who are leaving and others who are considering it.”

Some say that a group of old guard board members had been trying to remove Moscowitz for years, starting in 2005 when they tried to block his reappointment during his first contract-renewal negotiations.

In 2007, Moscowitz endorsed Toronto architect Jack Diamond’s $35-to-$50-million renovation proposal to shift the main sanctuary’s orientation, so that congregants would face east toward Jerusalem while praying, instead of the current orientation that sees them facing west.

“This fight has been going on for a long time and I think John just got tired of fighting,” Israeli writer and political commentator Yossi Klein Halevi, one of Moscowitz’s closest friends, told The Globe.

“I think what happened is that [board chair] Mark Anshan managed to galvanize the opposition to John, based on his political conservatism and religious traditionalism,” said Klein Halevi.

“Holy Blossom was classical Reform and John offended those sensibilities. He broke the mould by understanding the implications of the collapse of the Oslo Accords and by bringing in more Hebrew and greater respect for Halakha [Jewish law]. This was very painful for the old guard.”

Klein Halevi said that as a Jew, he was embarrassed to see Moscowitz treated this way.

“John’s treatment as a disgrace for the synagogue and the Jewish community,” he said. “We don’t have too many rabbis of John’s calibre. This is the worst kind of synagogue story I’ve ever encountered.”

Holy Blossom’s membership includes approximately 7,000 families. Senator Irving Gerstein, interim Liberal leader Bob Rae, federal cabinet minister Joe Oliver, former Canadian ambassador to Washington Alan Gotlieb, Onex founder and chairman Gerry Schwartz, and his wife, Indigo CEO Heather Reisman, investor and cultural philanthropist Joseph Rotman and former National Bank co-chairman Lawrence Bloomberg are all members of the synagogue, which was founded in 1856.