Man who bought hametz in NYC 'had a lot of respect for the Jewish community and tradition'

• Date: 15 March 2021
• Published date: 15 March 2021
• Author: Ben Sales
• Publication title: Israel National News (Israel)

That man, a real estate agent named John J. Brown, acted as the linchpin of a Jewish legal process that is crucial to those who keep the strict laws of Passover, which forbid Jews from owning or benefitting from hametz, or any products containing leaven. Because most observant Jews don't want to throw away all of their hametz ahead of Passover, they sell it to a non-Jewish person, who sells it back when the holiday ends.

For thousands of Jews, Brown was that non-Jewish buyer. Every year from 1977 to 2019, he bought hametz from the congregants of dozens of synagogues in and around New York City, completing the sales via the synagogues' rabbis.

Last year, the tradition was suspended because of the pandemic. This year, someone else will have to pick it up: Brown died in February at age 88.

"It meant an awful lot to him," said Paul Jacobs, Brown's son-in-law, who is Jewish and would often make the trip to New York City with him. "There was an extremely high level of mutual respect. It was a business transaction and John treated it as a business transaction, so that was part of it. John had this commitment to real estate and contracts and all that."

But Jacobs said that to Brown, it was more than just another business deal. Brown, Jacobs said, had a lot of intellectual curiosity and would pepper his speech with Latin phrases as well as Yiddishisms he picked up in New York.

"There's an element of fun to it," Jacobs said. "He was trying to follow the rules of the Torah and the Talmud, but there was some creativity there."

The respect was mutual. Rabbi Gidon Shoshan, the son-in-law of Rabbi Mordechai Willig, who orchestrated the sales with Brown, wrote on Facebook that Brown "was a legend in the Willig family, in the Riverdale Jewish community, and — for those that knew his name — actually an important role player in the lives of many thousands of Jews each Pesach for decades."

Willig, who rarely speaks to the media, did not respond to a request for comment.

Willig and Brown met when Brown worked on the 1975 purchase of the Young Israel of Riverdale, where Willig was the rabbi. In 1977, the synagogue was looking for a new hametz buyer, and Willig thought of Brown, figuring he would understand the complex legal processes involved in the hametz sale.

"In Jewish law, real estate is a powerful lever for legal transactions," said Rabbi Shmuel Hain of Young Israel Ohab Zedek of North Riverdale/Yonkers, who sold his synagogue's hametz to Brown for more than a decade and...