Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard finds out at a kiddush in October, from one sentence, said by a woman who does not know she is saying anything.
Chava Perlmutter, seventy nine, widow of a pharmacist, tells him she asked Shmulie for eight thousand dollars out of her deposit in August for her granddaughter’s wedding, and it took six weeks, and Shmulie was so apologetic about it, and she wants Grossbard to know that she is not complaining, because that man is a saint.
Grossbard says something warm and moves on to the next person and finishes the kiddush and shakes ninety hands.
He knows. He has known for about four seconds and he will spend the next nine days confirming it.
Shmuel Berkovits, sixty seven, has run the Chesed Fund out of the back room of a print shop on Robertson since 1993. He does not draw a salary. He buried his wife in 2018 and did not miss a Sunday. He has lent to something over four hundred families in this neighborhood. Tuition gaps, medical bills, a first month and a deposit for a woman leaving a marriage, funeral costs, a man’s payroll on a Thursday when a client paid late. No interest, because that is the whole point of the thing, and no paperwork worth the name, and no bank in California would have written one of those loans.
He also takes deposits. That is how it works. A man with money sitting idle gives Shmulie forty thousand dollars because Shmulie will do more good with it than a savings account will, and the man understands he can have it back when he needs it. There is no agreement. There is no statement. There is no auditor and no examiner and no insurance and no capital requirement, and in California the state regulators treat the whole category as religious charity and stay a hundred yards away from it.
Grossbard has known every structural feature of this for thirty years. He has never once said them out loud from the bimah, because the day he does, half the good in this neighborhood stops moving.
Six weeks to get eight thousand dollars out of a fund that has never taken longer than a day.
He goes to see Berkovits on a Tuesday night.
The back room has a card table, two folding chairs, a four-drawer file cabinet, and a shoebox. The book is index cards. Green for loans out, white for deposits in, and a spiral ledger that Berkovits keeps in a hand Grossbard cannot read.
“Shmulie.”
“Rabbi.”
“How much is the hole.”
Berkovits sits down. He does not ask what hole. That is the first thing.
They go through it for two hours and forty minutes. Deposits standing at about four million one. Loans outstanding that are collectible, maybe one million six, and Grossbard makes him mark every card he has doubts about and the doubtful pile is bigger than the good one. Six hundred thousand in the account. And then the rest of it, which since 2017 has gone into a friend’s real estate deals at nine and eleven and fourteen percent, because a man who lends at zero and takes deposits at zero has to find the spread somewhere, and the deals were fine for six years and stopped being fine in 2023.
The hole is a little under one point nine million dollars.
“When did it start.”
“I don’t know.”
“Shmulie.”
“I’m telling you the truth. There’s no day. Nobody woke me up one morning.” He puts both hands flat on the card table. “Somebody needed forty for a wedding and it was sitting there. Then the Fein girl needed a deposit and Yudel Rosen’s payroll was three weeks out and the money was doing nothing in an account. Then Ari showed me his numbers and it was eleven percent and I thought, I could lend twice as much.”
“And in August, to pay Chava Perlmutter, you used somebody else’s deposit.”
“I used the Kleins’ deposit.”
“You know what that is.”
“I know what that is.”
Berkovits looks at the file cabinet.
“Do you know what I’ve done out of this room,” he says. “Thirty two years. Four hundred and six families. I put nine kids through YULA that nobody knows about. I paid for two funerals. There’s a woman living in Sherman Oaks with her children right now because I had eleven thousand dollars in a drawer on a Sunday night in 2011 and no bank on earth would have given it to her.”
Grossbard lets him say all of it.
“Am I a thief,” Berkovits says.
“You will be on Monday if you take another deposit.”
They sit with that.
“So don’t take another one,” Grossbard says. “Starting tonight. Not one dollar, not from anybody, not if a man begs you. Every card comes to me. And you don’t speak to anyone about this until I tell you to, including your son.”
Grossbard drives home and sits in the driveway for a while.
The arithmetic is not complicated and he runs it four or five times looking for a door.
If the depositors find out, they come at once, because that is what depositors do, and the fund pays out six hundred thousand to whoever gets there first and the rest of them get nothing. If it goes to the United States Attorney, a receiver gets appointed at four hundred dollars an hour billed against an estate consisting of a house in Beverlywood with a mortgage on it, a Toyota, and a room full of index cards. If it goes to a beth din, the beth din can compel testimony from observant Jews and can rule on liability and cannot subpoena a bank, cannot conduct a forensic accounting, and cannot make one point nine million dollars appear.
There is one door and it costs one point nine million dollars.
Adina Reiss comes to the office on Thursday, because he has told her, because she is the only person he tells things to before he has decided them.
“You go to the U.S. Attorney,” she says.
“And then what.”
“Then it isn’t your call anymore. That’s the entire point of the U.S. Attorney.”
“Here’s what happens. Receiver gets appointed. Bills the estate into the ground. Chava Perlmutter gets nineteen cents on the dollar in 2032 if she lives. Shmulie goes in at sixty seven and comes out at seventy four or doesn’t come out. And four hundred families in this neighborhood never see another gemach as long as they live, from him or from anybody, because nobody in Los Angeles is going to run one after that.”
“And your way.”
“My way, every depositor gets a hundred cents on the dollar inside sixty days, the fund closes, and one man walks.”
“That’s the part I can’t do.”
“I know,” Grossbard says. “That makes you the better person and me the one handling it.”
She sits there.
“People are going to say you did it for mesirah. That you wouldn’t inform.”
“Then let’s be clear with each other so at least one other person in this city knows. I would call the FBI on Shmuel Berkovits tomorrow morning and eat lunch afterward. I’ve got no problem with it and I hold by the poskim who say report and I’ve said so from the bimah twice. I’m not doing it because of the arithmetic. Not because of a teshuvah. And I’d like that on the record, because half this neighborhood is about to hand me credit I did not earn.”
He gets three noes.
The first is a man who says he would need to see something in writing, which is a no. The second is a man who says he will do four hundred thousand if others come in, which is a no. The third calls his lawyer before he calls Grossbard back and the lawyer uses the phrase aiding a concealment, which is a no with a bill attached.
The fourth is Farhad Hakim, fifty eight, who goes by Fred, who builds and holds industrial property from Vernon out to Rialto, and who has never been a member of the Barn and never will be, and whose family davens at a Persian shul in Beverly Hills where his father has a seat with a plaque on it.
Grossbard has met him three times in nine years.
They sit in Hakim’s office on Olympic with the door closed.
“How much.”
“One point nine.”
“For Berkovits.”
“For the depositors.”
“Same thing.”
“No,” Grossbard says. “One of those two I care about.”
Hakim takes a while.
“There’s a dinner on the twelfth at the Montage,” he says. “Ilan Yaghoubi is raising a fund. Second one. I want you at the table.”
“To say what.”
“Nothing. Eat the fish. It’s kosher, I checked with your office.”
Grossbard sits back.
“You want a photograph.”
“I want a photograph.”
“Say the rest of it. I’d rather we both hear it.”
“You want me to say it out loud,” Hakim says. “Fine. Every Persian man in that room knows who you are. You’re the rabbi who took the pop star’s money and wouldn’t let her in the class. Half of them can’t stand you and all of them believe you. You sit at that table for two hours and eat a piece of fish and say nothing to anybody about any fund, and forty men in that room decide Ilan is a serious person. That’s what I’m buying. I’m paying one million nine hundred thousand dollars for it. It’s more than it’s worth.”
“Is Yaghoubi clean.”
“As far as I know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer anyone has ever had about anybody,” Hakim says. “You’ve been giving that answer for thirty years. Every man you ever shook hands with at a kiddush in front of somebody else got that answer.”
Grossbard has nothing for that.
“Why are you doing it,” he says. “You could tell me to go to hell and I’d have no complaint.”
Hakim opens a drawer and closes it again without taking anything out.
“In 1996 my mother needed eight thousand dollars and my father was too proud and I was twenty eight and had nothing. Somebody sent her to a man in the back of a print shop on Robertson. He gave her the money in an envelope in about nine minutes and he never told one person. Not one, in thirty years. I found out in 2019 because she told me on her deathbed.”
He shrugs.
“So,” he says. “You want the check or not.”
Grossbard asks for the money to come as an unrestricted gift to the Chesed Fund with no conditions of any kind stated anywhere in writing, and Hakim says of course, and both of them understand what that document is for, and Grossbard asks for it anyway.
It takes fifty one days.
Every depositor gets a hundred cents on the dollar. The letter that goes out says the fund is closing after thirty two years because its founder is retiring and no successor structure is in place, which is true in every particular and is a lie.
Chava Perlmutter gets a cashier’s check for a hundred and eighty one thousand two hundred dollars, which is everything she has, and she comes to the print shop to collect it in person, and she takes Shmuel Berkovits’s hand in both of hers and tells him he is a saint and that this neighborhood will never see another one.
Grossbard is standing four feet away. He watches Berkovits take it.
The Journal runs three hundred words in February under community services. Beloved Free Loan Fund Closes After Three Decades. There is a photograph of the print shop and a quote from Berkovits about how the community’s needs have changed. Nobody calls Grossbard and Grossbard does not call anybody.
By spring there is no gemach on the Westside that will lend above thirty thousand dollars, and a woman leaving a marriage in April cannot get first and last on an apartment in Palms in under three weeks, and she goes to a shul on Pico that sends her to a shul in the Valley that sends her to a lender at fourteen percent.
Two men at the Barn tell Grossbard to his face that he should have found a way to keep it open. One of them says it at a kiddush with people listening. Grossbard says he tried, which is the second lie, and takes a piece of herring.
He goes to the Montage on the twelfth.
The fish is sea bass and it is kosher and it is very good. He is at table four with Hakim on his left and a dermatologist on his right and Ilan Yaghoubi two seats down, forty one years old, well spoken, three questions in and Grossbard has learned nothing about him at all. Grossbard says nothing about any fund to any person. He talks for most of an hour to an eighty year old woman across the table about her husband’s family in Hamadan and she is the best conversation he has had in a month.
A photographer works the room between the salad and the entree.
The picture runs the following Thursday on page eleven of the community paper, under the fold, five men at a round table with the water glasses in front of them.
Second from left, the caption says. Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard of the Barn.
