Rabbi Jacob Bruskin started visiting Gershwin near the end of his second month in jail. Neither the Warden nor Ronnie, Gershwin’s RO, had anything to do with it. It was the prison pastor, referred to as Father John by the prisoners even though he wasn’t a father and even though his name was Jan, pronounced Yawn, who’d made the arrangements. Father John pitied Gershwin, who sat by himself in the Chapel mumbling fragments of Old Testament prayers in English and Hebrew while Christian bible verses were being sung all around him. “We have a prisoner here who seems to be trying to conduct his own Jewish service while sitting in a chapel filled with worshipping Christians,” he’d told the Rabbi, who presided over the only synagogue within an hour’s drive of the prison.
YawnThe Rabbi was familiar
