Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard finds it in the budget, which is where he finds most things.<\/p>\n
Security, forty two thousand dollars, up from nine in 2024. He asks Josh Adelman who the men in the lot on Friday nights work for and Adelman says a company, and the company turns out to be an LLC registered in Nevada in 2025 with a resident agent and no website and no state guard license, and the invoices are paid on time and in full and the shul’s share of them is about a third of what the men actually cost.<\/p>\n
The rest comes out of the pocket of Michael Danziger, who set the whole thing up eighteen months ago as a favor and asked that nobody be told, because he did not want the credit.<\/p>\n
Danziger is thirty seven. YULA, UCLA, four years at a big firm, then his own practice on Olympic with nine people in it. He does the books for the day school, for two of the kosher markets, for about sixty families in this neighborhood, and for the Barn. He does Chava Perlmutter’s return every March for nothing and has since her husband died. He drives people to LAX. He is the man you call at eleven at night, and half the room would tell you he is the finest young man in the congregation, and the other half would say it about his brother.<\/p>\n
The eighteen months line up with the year the neighborhood changed.<\/p>\n
There was the window at the Persian shul in February of 2025 and the windows at the day school in April. There was the man with the knife on Pico in June who got nine feet from a stroller before two people put him down. There was the attempt on the door of a shtiebel on Robertson at four in the morning in August that failed because whoever did it did not know how to build the thing he was trying to build. There was the boy followed home from mincha in October and there was the deli.<\/p>\n
The LAPD response time on the Friday night in June was twenty three minutes. The off duty officer program the shuls ran together went broke in March because six congregations could not agree on a formula. The federal nonprofit security grant the Barn applied for in 2024 came through in 2026 for eighty six thousand dollars against a hardening estimate of four hundred and ten, with a match requirement and a reimbursement schedule that runs eleven months behind the spending.<\/p>\n
Into that gap came two large men in a black Suburban who arrive at 5:40 on Friday and leave when the last Jew leaves, and who are polite, and who are very good at it.<\/p>\n
Grossbard reads the Times in March and recognizes one of them from a photograph in a story about a federal case, and he sits with the paper for a while, and then he starts pulling on it.<\/p>\n
What he assembles over five weeks is not proof of anything and would not survive nine minutes with a lawyer.<\/p>\n
Danziger runs a game. It has run since 2019 in three or four private houses on the Westside and up in the hills. The buy in is high and the players include people whose names appear in trade papers, and the house takes a cut, and the cut is large, and the game has been continuous long enough to be a business with a P and L, which for a CPA is the only kind of thing worth running.<\/p>\n
A game that size cannot exist without an arrangement. Somebody makes sure the money moves and the debts get collected and nobody robs the house, and the men who do that in this city, for games at this level, come out of a network that federal prosecutors have been building cases against since 2023. Two men connected to it have been found dead in the past four years, one in a car in Panorama City and one in a trunk near the flower market, and neither of them was an innocent party, and both of them had done things that would turn your stomach.<\/p>\n
Grossbard writes that sentence down on a legal pad and then writes under it: irrelevant.<\/p>\n
Then he writes: a man who has killed four people who deserved it has demonstrated a capacity. Capacity does not check the merits. The capacity is what stands outside my shul at 5:40 on Friday.<\/p>\n
They meet in Danziger’s office on Olympic at seven in the morning.<\/p>\n
“You know why I’m here.”<\/p>\n
“I’ve known for about two weeks. You’ve been asking people questions and half of them called me.” Danziger pours him a coffee he does not drink. “Ask it.”<\/p>\n
“The game.”<\/p>\n
“I run a game. Nine years. It’s illegal in California and it’s a misdemeanor for me and nothing for the players, and I want to be clear with you that I know exactly what it is. I’m not a kid who fell into something.” He sits back. “Adults. Nobody’s coerced. Nobody’s marked. The house doesn’t play. I’ve barred four people in nine years for gambling money they didn’t have, one of them a member of your shul, and I did that at a cost to me.”<\/p>\n
“And the men.”<\/p>\n
“Are the men.”<\/p>\n
“Say the rest.”<\/p>\n
“You want me to say it out loud so you can be shocked.” Danziger looks at him. “Rabbi, with all the respect I have for you, and it’s a lot, you’ve been telling this city for twenty years that every arrangement in it has a price and everybody’s running one. You don’t get to be surprised at seven in the morning.”<\/p>\n
“I’m not surprised. I’m here about the invoice.”<\/p>\n
“There’s no invoice.”<\/p>\n
“That’s what frightens me,” Grossbard says. “You’ve been carrying two thirds of it for a year and a half out of your own pocket and nobody’s asked this shul for anything. Nobody asks for eighteen months. Then somebody asks, and by then it isn’t a favor anymore, it’s a relationship with a history, and the ask is the product. The security was never the product. The security is the sample.”<\/p>\n
Danziger does not answer that right away, which tells Grossbard the man is honest.<\/p>\n
“What do you think they’d want,” he says.<\/p>\n
“I know exactly what they want, because they already got it,” Grossbard says. “In October of 2023 you called me and asked if I’d write a letter for a sentencing. Man named Ohayon. You told me he sat in the back of the shul on the yamim noraim for four years and had a sick mother and you were right about both. I wrote it. I write six of those a year, I’ve written them for thirty years, and I put my name and the shul’s name on it and mailed it to a federal judge in the Central District, and I never once thought about it again until three weeks ago.”<\/p>\n
Danziger has gone very still.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t know,” he says.<\/p>\n
“I believe you. That’s the design. You’re the part of the arrangement that doesn’t know.”<\/p>\n
Grossbard puts his hands on his knees.<\/p>\n
“Here’s what I’ve come to say and then I’ll get out of your office. You have until Rosh Hashanah. You wind the game down, you unwind the arrangement, and you come tell me you’ve done it, and I’ll help you with whatever it costs, including a lawyer, and I’ll never say one word about it to any human being for the rest of my life. Or you keep the game, and your membership ends under article nine, and the shul’s books go to another firm, and I make one phone call to the day school and one to the markets.”<\/p>\n
“You’d take my practice.”<\/p>\n
“I’d take about forty percent of it.”<\/p>\n
“Over a card game.”<\/p>\n
“Over what’s attached to the card game.”<\/p>\n
“You know what I’ve done for this community.”<\/p>\n
“Better than anyone in the room, and I’m doing it anyway,” Grossbard says. “You want the honest version? If it were the game alone I’d shrug and eat herring. It isn’t the game.”<\/p>\n
He goes to the board in July and tells them a version of it that is true and incomplete, and the board takes six weeks and two closed sessions to approve a security budget of two hundred and ninety thousand dollars against a reserve that cannot carry it for more than two years. Licensed men from a company with a license and a bond and a state file number, four of them, badged, insured, with a supervisor who has done this for institutions in New York and knows what he is looking at.<\/p>\n
They cost eleven times what the old arrangement cost the shul.<\/p>\n
They are not as good. That has to be said. The two men in the Suburban were better at this than the men who replaced them, and everybody who walks in on a Friday night knows it, and Grossbard hears about it from three people in the first month and says thank you for telling me and changes nothing.<\/p>\n
Marla Feig, eighty three, moves two hundred thousand dollars from a fund her father set up in 1979 to cover the second year, and tells him to stop looking at her like that.<\/p>\n
Danziger comes to the office on the fourth of September.<\/p>\n
He does not say what he has done or how much it cost him and Grossbard does not ask. He asks for one thing, which is that his brother’s aufruf go forward in November as planned, and Grossbard says of course, and does it, and gives a drasha that is warm and funny and says nothing at all.<\/p>\n
The letter is the last thing.<\/p>\n
Grossbard writes to the court in the Central District in September and withdraws the character letter he submitted in October of 2023 on behalf of a man named Ohayon. It runs four sentences. It states that the writer submitted a letter, that the writer had at the time no knowledge of matters he has since become aware of, that the letter should be given no weight, and that the writer takes responsibility for having written it.<\/p>\n
He copies nobody. He does not tell the board and he does not tell Dina until afterward, which is the only part of the whole year she is angry about.<\/p>\n
There is no response of any kind. Not from the court, not from a lawyer, not from anyone. Nothing happens and nothing has happened since, and he does not know whether that means the letter never reached a desk or whether it reached one and the men who would care about it decided he was not worth the trouble, and there is no way to find out, and he has stopped trying.<\/p>\n
On Friday nights he goes out at 5:40 and stands on the street with the guards.<\/p>\n
He shakes the hands of four men in windbreakers who cost this congregation two hundred and ninety thousand dollars a year and who are worse at the job than the two who came before them, and he asks them about their kids, and he stays out there until the last Jew goes.<\/p>\n
He has done it every week for a year and a half.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard finds it in the budget, which is where he finds most things. Security, forty two thousand dollars, up from nine in 2024. He asks Josh Adelman who the men in the lot on Friday nights work for … Continue reading