The Shake-Up at Park East Synagogue

There is almost no synagogue in the modern Orthodox world as wealthy and as important as Park East, on Manhattan's Upper East Side. And there is probably no Manhattan pulpit rabbi as famous or as respected as Arthur Schneier, a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor and self-made Jewish communal emissary to world leaders and diplomats. So when Rabbi Schneier summarily fires a popular assistant rabbi after 10 years of service, it's a major event in the life of a leading American Jewish institution. There's little that's more painful or divisive for any synagogue than the dismissal of a rabbi, especially when it happens without any warning. In this case, all it took was a 45-second phone call.