How One Rabbi Made Florida a Financial Capital and Reformed U.S. Criminal Justice
He escaped the Soviet Union in a suitcase
One of the running themes here at The Editors is about capital and talent (Ken Griffin, Sylvester Stallone, Sean Hannity, Jeff Bezos, Billy Joel, Tom Brady, Lionel Messi, Carl Icahn, Paul Tudor Jones, Donald Trump; many of these links are to FutureOfCapitalism.com, which was a predecessor site to The Editors) moving to zero-state-income-tax Florida from higher-tax New York, Illinois, Washington, California, and Massachusetts. I have a Google alert set up to scour the news for “move to Florida” and send me the headlines.
The Florida story, though, isn’t just about taxes and regulations or weather. It’s about people and culture and community. And so while the world’s religious-news attention is focused on the new pope in Rome, it’s worth pausing, too, to remember Rabbi Shalom Ber Lipskar, who died earlier this month at age 78 after a remarkable and consequential career. He deserves some of the credit for helping to establish South Florida as a new financial capital. He also played an important role in criminal justice reform.
An article at Chabad.org recounts that Lipskar’s parents smuggled him out of the Soviet Union in 1946 or 1947 inside a suitcase when he was 20 days old. He eventually made his way to a displaced persons camp, to Canada, to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and to Miami.
An article at Lubavitch.com recounts, “When Rabbi Lipskar and his wife Chani founded The Shul of Bal Harbour in 1981, some homes in the neighborhood still had language in their deeds prohibiting sale to ‘anyone not a member of the Caucasian race, nor to anyone having more than one-fourth Hebrew … blood.’ The Bal Harbour Club wouldn’t allow Jews onto its premises until the following year.”
A colleague, Rabbi Yitzchok Minkowicz, recalled how the neighborhood eventually became “a haven of Judaism,” with many kosher restaurants.
Minkowicz said Lipskar told him, “Whatever you are planning on building, build it twice as big, because you got to think big….He was a big dreamer.” Minkowicz said when he last saw Lipskar they had each just landed after traveling by private jet to the Florida capital for an event with the governor.
Another colleague and family member, Rabbi Mendy Uminer, recalled that Lipskar started in 1981 renting a hotel room and going out on the street each week on the sabbath to try to find a tenth man for the minyan, or quorum, needed for Jewish prayer. Today the 100,000-square foot “Shul” at Collins Avenue and 95th St draws more than 1,000 people to a variety of minyans on Saturday mornings, Uminer said.
The investor Daniel S. Loeb wrote in a post on X that “Rabbi Lipskar was a great rabbi and dear friend….My own life is immeasurably better for having known and learned with him.” Senator Rick Scott called him “a friend” who was “a guiding light” during the Surfside building collapse tragedy. The Florida-as-financial capital story involves plenty of non-Jews and plenty of Jews from communities other than Lipskar’s. But as the tributes from Loeb and Scott suggest and my own informal reporting and experience indicates, Lipskar was a significant figure.
Lipskar got on my own radar screen via his efforts on criminal justice reform via the Aleph Institute, which my company has done a bit of consulting work for over the years. Aleph started out as a kind of prison ministry, with rabbis volunteering to teach Judaism to Jewish inmates and make sure they had access to kosher food. It also serves Jews in the armed forces. Eventually it got involved in bipartisan and multifaith coalition efforts that culminated in the passage of the Formerly Incarcerated Reenter Society Transformed Safely Transitioning Every Person Act, or First Step Act, of 2018. That legislation passed the House 358 to 36 and the Senate 87 to 12. Serving prisoners or advocating on their behalf isn’t the most glamorous work, but many Jews and even non-Jews who have been caught up in the criminal justice system and seen its imperfections and failings have benefited from Aleph’s work, under Lipskar’s leadership, to make it better.
As Aleph’s current CEO, Aaron Lipskar, put it, “Rabbi Lipskar established the Aleph Institute to serve a community that was too often overlooked — Jewish men and women in prisons, in mental health institutions, and later, in the U.S. military. At a time when few were stepping into this space, Rabbi Lipskar saw individuals in need of connection, dignity, and spiritual care. His unwavering belief was that no soul is ever beyond reach, and that every person deserves compassion, guidance, and the chance to grow.”
Columbia and the Pulitzers: Back on March 12, 2025, we wrote (second item, “Al Jazeera-loving Columbia dean asks press to boycott Trump”):
Columbia controls the Pulitzer Prizes, where an ideological tilt means that the university and its interim president Katrina Armstrong are shoveling prizes in the direction of the New York Times, including for its anti-Israel news coverage. The Pulitzer Board is a bunch of left never-Trumpers. Pulitzer board member Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, gave a March 10, 2025 lecture at Oxford complaining, “During the first Trump administration the American press was reluctant to refer to blatant untruths as lies or to refer to outright trafficking in racial stereotypes as racist behaviour. Our own credulity led to the press treating an autocratic president in the same manner as a democratic one.” Cobb called for news organizations to boycott Trump in solidarity with the Associated Press…
After this week’s decision to award the Pulitzer for commentary to New Yorker writer Mosab Abu Toha, the rest of the press is starting to catch on to the story. The Washington Free Beacon: “Columbia’s Pulitzer Disgrace,” reports:
Columbia University’s role in the administration of the Pulitzers and selection of the prize winners is not lost on us. The president of the university, Claire Shipman, sits on the Pulitzer board, which selects the prize winners. So does the president of the Columbia School of Journalism, Jelani Cobb, and the editor in chief of the Columbia Journalism Review. The administrator of the prizes, Marjorie Miller, is also a Pulitzer board member and a Columbia employee. Deliberations over the prize winners take place on the Columbia campus.
At Powerline, Scott Johnson weighs in: “The Pulitzer from Hell.”
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has a piece headlined, “Freed hostage Emily Damari to Pulitzer board: Mosab Abu Toha is ‘the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier.’”
I get the argument that these prizes are supposed to recognize the craft of the writing and persuasive power of the argument rather than the substance or merit of the underlying cause (or the social media presence of the writer, which isn’t what gets submitted for judging). But the board and the university are so tilted that these prizes frequently wind up being self-fulfilling and self-selecting.
Recent work: “Bret Stephens Says ‘Never Again’ to Peter Beinart, but New York Times Fawns,” is the headline over my latest piece for the Algemeiner. “The Beinart column talks extensively about Jewish Voice for Peace without disclosing to Times readers that Beinart is on the board of a foundation that is one of its main funders,” the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Please check the story out over at the (no paywall) Algemeiner if you are interested.