washington | Jack Abramoff made a name for himself in the Washington political world as an insider with strong ties to Republican circles of power.
But within Washington’s Jewish world, Abramoff cut an image as a lone ranger, someone who shunned the organized Jewish community and chose to create his own Jewish institutions to serve his needs. Several of them quickly failed.
That hasn’t kept Abramoff, who is Orthodox, from turning to Judaism to explain allegations that he overcharged Indian tribes for lobbying services and used his ties to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and other Republicans to advance his personal interests.
Abramoff is at the eye of a gathering ethical storm over allegations that a number of congressmen — most prominent among them DeLay — accepted gifts and favors from him.
In a New York Times interview, Abramoff compared himself to the biblical character Jacob, saying that his involvement in the rough and tumble world of lobbying — with his attendant use of shocking and abusive language, revealed in e-mails leaked to The Washington Post — was similar to the incident in which the biblical patriarch took on the identity of his brother, Esau.
Few in the Jewish community are concerned that the scandal surrounding Abramoff will reflect poorly on the Jewish community and its ties with conservative Republicans. Lawmakers and other power brokers know Abramoff is Jewish but don’t lump him in with the organized Jewish world.
Sources close to Abramoff said his conservative religious values helped him bond with DeLay and other Christian conservatives. That approach mirrors those of many Orthodox leaders who in recent years have forged ties with Christian and Republican leaders.
At a time when his influence was growing in Washington, Abramoff shunned offers to get involved with Jewish groups and lasted only five months on the board of directors of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington.
Instead, Abramoff became renowned as the owner of Stacks and Archives, which were the only two kosher restaurants in the capitol before they closed last year.
He also opened the Eshkol Academy, a Jewish day school that grew out of the home schooling he provided for his own children and like-minded families in suburban Maryland.
“He felt people had to make too much of an extreme choice” between a thorough religious education and quality secular teaching, and he wanted an integrated program that stressed both, said Rabbi David Lapin, who helped found and run the school.
The New York Times reported last week that Lapin, chief executive of Strategic Business Ethics in California, received a $1.2 million contract from the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory in the Pacific and an Abramoff client. The island’s attorney general, Pal Brown, told the newspaper that the government had been unable to determine what Lapin did under his no-bid contract to promote ethics in government.
The contract reportedly included a trip to the island for DeLay. Abramoff was lobbying in Washington to keep U.S. labor laws from applying in the Marianas, where Chinese workers are employed in the garment industry.
As more is learned of Abramoff, it may become harder to separate the religious man from the political man. Recent profiles noted that he became more religiously observant after seeing “Fiddler on the Roof” when he was 12, and that e-mails filled with expletives and derogatory terms for Native Americans still referred to God with a hyphen instead of using the middle letter.