JTA — Less than a week after rushing to Ground Zero as a police chaplain on 9/11, Rabbi Alvin Kass led Rosh Hashanah services — not only for his Brooklyn congregation but at a makeshift synagogue at LaGuardia Airport for emergency responders who had flooded into New York City after the terrorist attacks.

“It was,” he would later say, “the most meaningful religious service in my career.”

Kass died early Wednesday at 89 as the longest-serving chaplain in the New York Police Department, with a career that included responses to global terrorism, local violence and the intimate needs of police officers — as well as a hostage crisis that he famously resolved with a non-kosher pastrami sandwich.

He had worked until weeks before his death and, days earlier, had tuned in from his hospital room to a ceremony honoring him for 60 years of service within the NYPD.

“As our longtime spiritual director, he anchored Shomrim in Torah values and service, guiding us through milestones, line-of-duty tragedies, and everyday decisions alike,” the Shomrim Society, a fraternal organization for Jewish police officers, said in a statement. “His counsel shaped our traditions, his presence steadied our hearts, and his example set the standard for what it means to be a Shomrim leader.”

Born and raised in New Jersey, Kass attended Camp Ramah before enrolling at Columbia University in 1953. His freshman-year roommates there were Robert Alter, who would become a preeminent translator of the Bible, and Shalom Schwartz, later a leading psychologist in Israel.

After graduating from college, he earned both a doctorate from New York University and ordination as a Conservative rabbi from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America before joining the US Air Force as a chaplain. Returning stateside, he took a pulpit in Queens before being urged to join the city’s police department as a chaplain.

At the time, he was only the third Jewish chaplain to work for the NYPD. He would become its longest-serving and the first three-star chaplain, working under eight mayors and 21 police chiefs.

At the same time, Kass spent decades in congregations, helming the East Midwood Jewish Center, a Conservative synagogue in Brooklyn, for 36 years until his retirement in 2014.

“He was just a very kind and unassuming person — and a dream to work with,”........

© The Times of Israel