The SY Empire (click to read the New York Times article)

I am writing this letter regarding the article that was published today in
the New York Times Magazine entitled, "SY Empire".

I would like to start with a simple and humble "Thank You" for the empathy
shown to me and my family from so many of our wonderful rabbis, leaders,
friends and family in what was an upsetting time for us. Your outreach is
greatly appreciated.

It is apparent that we have strangers among us who remain anonymous. I don't
understand why they are deliberately exposing everything that is wonderful
and sacred about our community in a worldwide publication.

In the article, my father, Sam Toussie A"H, was stated as being "ostracized"
from our community. To set the record straight Sam Toussie A"H was never
"ostracized" nor "expelled" from the Syrian Community. He was very much a
part of it. As so many who knew him would agree he was a wonderful, honest,
kind, happy and caring person who indeed loved life and everyone in it. He
was well educated, well mannered and was always eager to help a friend in
need. He admired and had the utmost respect for our blessed community.

19 years ago he was interviewed by New York Magazine for the sole purpose of
publicizing his business. He was unaware that the journalist was also
interested in writing a larger story focusing on our community. The
journalist tapped many other sources for the "inside information" he needed.
When the article was published, Sam Toussie A"H, was singularly blamed for
exposing the community. He felt deceived after realizing the article's
content and scope was not what he had expected. He took immediate action by
sending out an apology letter to everyone through a community mailing list.

Love, trust, friendliness and courage are some of the values he taught us
and are what we teach his grandchildren that never had the privilege of
knowing him.

Our community is one that should be united, love, comfort and cherish one
another wholeheartedly and selflessly. We need to be a community of
everlasting strength and peace and have faith in Hashem. Nobody should feel
like a stranger among us.

Sincerely,

Marie Toussie Torgueman

Post edited by: image, at: 2007/10/16 16:47<br><br>Post edited by: image, at: 2007/10/16 16:48

I am appalled but not surprised at what our community has come down to. What our community ceases to remember amongst all these Edicts and forbidden rules is that we are a religion of converts. Our much beloved King David was the son of Ruit a well known convert. Or even further down his great great grandmother Tamar a non - Jew. Most of the religious figures in our bible are descendents of non Jews/ converts. What started out for the right reasons has created an iron curtain amongst our people. The purpose of going according to the mother for verification of the Jewish identity was meant to accept the illegitimate children who were born to Jewish mothers who were raped. An edict was created that all children of mothers who were Jewish were automatically Jewish for the purpose of not ostracizing. Now we have taken that edict that united the people of Jewish faith and turned it into ethnocentric slicing machine. It disgusts me greatly that while our children are pushed away from our community and are met with open arms in the reform if not totally different religious communities. We must stop this indifference and find better alternatives to keeping the Jewish faith alive in our communities. I am thankful of this article for stating the obvious facts.

the edict has been around since the 1930's, it is not something just made up. any community member that decided to marry a non jew knew exactly what they were going against. if you can openly disobey the edict, and basically go against the community, then why on earth would you even want to live within it?

Dear Irene,
Thank you for reminding me of a pertinent fact that has been left out of the &quot;SY article&quot; and most blogs on the SY article.
PRECEDENCE!

Your Biblical source obviously has his own genealogical issues since he fed you the bit on rape re the origins of martilineal requirements and that the most famous Jews come from converts.

The funny thing is, he left out the best part...Mashiach is descended from our much beloved King David, so he will also be from converts (unless you are at odds with the main principle of the Jewish faith of believing in the coming of the the Mashiach).
Actually the best part is that KING DAVID WAS THE FIRST TO ENACT AN EDICT BANNING CONVERTS. This has been documented and mentioned multiple times in the Talmud. If you have issues with King David, you have bigger problems.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention...King Solomon (the wisest man to ever live) who actually went against his father King David and Samuel the Prophet and did the wrong thing, against HIS better judgment by converting hundreds of gentile women and then marrying them thinking he would make them all righteous converts.
Most of us with a basic yeshiva education know that the story continued with the wives leading the king to his spiritual downfall, but the reason your source left out that juicy piece of info out was because King Solomon then realized his folly and REINSTATED THE EDICT AGAINST ACCEPTING CONVERTS.

Please tell your source to turn to the next page in his Jewish history book and learn all his facts before he feeds the ignorant more misinformation.

Hopefully your relative will do teshuva, divorce his spouse and come back to the fold. I am happy that he had the sense not to come back to the Community with his new family AND IDEAS. I only wish he went to a local college or no college at all and continued working for his father...then none of this may have happened.

All the best,
Steve

PS: The divorce rate amongst intermarrieds is about 70%, so there is hope it will happen on it's own. Just let him know we will welcome him with open arms.

While the article is full of inaccuracies and is built on hearsay, it certainly points to some reality based facts on the ground. The excommunication of individuals off and on is a cultural charachter that has nothing to do with religious edicts. Community members that live outside the community main geographic locations whether for work, education, or becuase of life are treated differently with a pointed finger toward their choosing a different location. Where a person lives is a personal choice and not a communal choice. Desiring different things is a natural reflection of each of our lives. Our differences strengthen us and make us more colorful. We are not all exactly identical and that is OK.

Mazal tov!
Syrian Jews have made it in America, thanks to a Sunday Times magazine article by Zev Chafets, another of the newspaper’s pseudo-experts on American Jewish life, and no less than in an issue devoted to money and wealth in New York City. Though talented, Mr. Chafets is lazy, apparently taking at face value what is fed to him by informants, without determining whether the information given to him is credible or accurate.

He is notably vulnerable to misinformation about statistics. The opening sentence on Syrian Jews reports that in Brooklyn, this community “is 75,000 strong and growing fast.” This is way off the mark, as he would have determined had he examined day school enrollment – nearly all Syrian children attend a Jewish day school – or analyzed census tract data. There is a familiar syndrome of ethnics exaggerating their number, at times by a great deal. Mr. Chafets should learn to take with a grain of salt some of the claims presented to him.

That didn’t happen in his previous article for the magazine on Lev Leviev, the billionaire Bukharian Jewish businessman and philanthropist who among a multitude of good deeds established the Gymnasia, a tuition-free Jewish school in Queens that primarily serves Bukharians. He wrote that Mr. Leviev provides the school with $18,000 per year per student, which is approximately three times the true figure. In the Syrian Jewish article we read that “an SY [Syrian Jew] in good standing can expect free K-12 parochial education and summer camps for the kids,” which is absurd and certainly news to the thousands of parents who are charged substantial fees for these services. Mr. Chafets took down what he was told and fed the information to Times readers who doubtlessly regard the misinformation as accurate because, after all, the Times would never publish something that is false.

I wonder why Syrian Jews were selected for inclusion in a theme issue devoted to money and wealth. No other ethnic group is given attention, although there is obviously enormous wealth in other ethnic quarters. Did the magazine’s editors decide that they could not publish a money issue without an article on Jews? Or was the topic Chafets’s idea? Whatever the explanation, the newspaper that we have come to love and hate – both for good reasons – demonstrated once more that it is afflicted with a serious case of Jew-phobia.

Whether the Syrian Jews are all that wealthy is an interesting question that is scarcely explored in the article which opens with a full-page aeriel photo of a nondescript neighborhood. If Syrian wealth is to be judged by housing, the inescapable conclusion is that they are upper middle class but far from wealthy. The article includes four small snapshots of private homes, two of them quite modest. In dozens of communities in the New York metropolitan area, there are thousands of homes that comfortably outstrip in luxuriousness and elegance what Syrian Jews have in Brooklyn. For reference, see Sotheby’s display ad in the same issue.

Syrian Jewish wealth is no more than a secondary concern for Chafets. The main story is the community’s strong opposition to intermarriage. As in the Noah Feldman piece that is still fresh in our memory, Orthodox Jews come out badly. Chafets rambles on about “the Edict,” it being the official communal decree proscribing marrying out. Eleven paragraphs – several of them zaftig – are devoted to the tale of a lawyer who violated this norm.

It may be that the Times or the editors of the magazine are on a pro-intermarriage crusade. Chafets has married out, which isn’t disclosed in the article. I do not believe that an intermarried Jew cannot write about the phenomenon with the requisite sociological or reportorial detachment. However, when intermarriage is not the normal outcome of background and upbringing but a transformative experience for the writer – something that has engendered inner turmoil – it is questionable whether he or she can deal with the subject in a fair manner. Feldman was writing about his own experience and he is entitled to do so. Chafets is writing about other people and his career includes fascinating zigzags, one of which was serving in the Israeli government as a top advisor to Menachem Begin.

It is a fair question whether Chafets’ personal transformation transformed an article on Syrian Jewish wealth into an article on Syrian Jewish attitudes toward intermarriage.

In the article’s final section, Chafets dredges up stories of misdeeds by perhaps as many as three Syrian Jews, most notably the antics a generation ago of Eddie Antar who is strangely identified as “for many years the most famous SY in the world.” Did Antar scream out, “I am Crazy Eddie, a Syrian Jew?” What was Frank Purdue’s ethnicity? Or Tom Carvel’s? Antar operated a small chain of appliance stores, committed fraud and went to prison. Now, many years later and because Chafets was writing an article about Syrian Jews, he went to his files or Googles and dishes out the irrelevant dirt. We also read of another retailer who sold his business on the verge of bankruptcy and of a New Jersey Syrian Jew who has been charged with serious wrongdoing.

The Times would not permit the inclusion of such material in an analytical article about another ethnic group. I am sure of this. What gives the newspaper the license to allow Chafets to descend into the foul zone of bigoted journalism? Is it because Jews and especially religious Jews are always an acceptable target?

There is no answer. We have come to accept the Times as it is. The newspaper and the Sulzburgers are, for sure, the most venerated names in biased journalism

Marvin Schick’s columns and essays are now available on the Internet, at www.mschick.blogspot.com.

Mr Schick says, &quot;...the newspaper that we have come to love and hate .&quot;

He speaks for himself. I hate the NYT because of their anti-Jewish record that goes back to the times of the holocaust when that tragedy too was buried in their tiniest columns as far as possible from the front page.

There were not enought facts supporting the article MOST of the article wasnt true

Please forward the following message to the Toussie family:

I was raised in a home that was situated directly behind the Toussie family house (around the corner-with our famous short cut) for over 20 years, and was considered like one of the family. The entire family was my friend for the bulk of my growing up. They are a great family to the core. The Toussie family consists of wonderful people who helped fill my childhood with great memories, and much of their great qualities, I believe came from their father.