A Cold Reception for Jew who Embraced Iran

Having become a pariah in Vienna's Jewish community, the Orthodox man photographed kissing the president of Iran is living in Brooklyn — and his presence is causing an uproar among the borough's fervently Orthodox Jews.

Moshe Arye Friedman, who traveled to Iran in December for a conference meant to doubt that the Holocaust took place, arrived last week in New York. His wife had arrived in Brooklyn several weeks ago, in what some are calling a move to distance herself from her husband.

Mr. Friedman and five members of a tiny chasidic sect called Neturei Karta — Mr. Friedman is not a member of that group — attended the Tehran gathering, hosted by the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Mr. Ahmadinejad, who has vowed to acquire nuclear capability, has called for Israel to be wiped "off the map."

Leaders of the Orthodox community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn are providing housing, social services and financial assistance to the wife, an Antwerp native, and their seven children, a source close to the family said yesterday.

Mr. Friedman, who has lived in Vienna for about a decade, grew up in the Brooklyn neighborhood as part of the Satmar community, a non-Zionist chasidic Jewish group. Satmar leaders have condemned the Jewish men who traveled to Iran.

Police from the city's 66th precinct Saturday night escorted Mr. Friedman, who wears a black hat and a long black coat, out of the Park House hotel in Borough Park. He had called law enforcement asking for protection after an estimated some 150 demonstrators — some shouting "Friedman Out" and "Friedman, Friend of Nazis" — amassed outside the hotel. A police spokesman did not say if Mr. Friedman was alone, or where he was escorted.

He had checked in Wednesday night under the name Rosensweig, which sources said is his wife's maiden name, and paid in cash for his room. Mr. Friedman was asked to leave the premises Friday afternoon, after a passerby, who recognized the man from his photograph with Mr. Ahmadinejad, alerted hotel management of his identity. "If we had known it was him, we would have never let him check into the hotel," the general manager of Park House, Israel Tyberg, said. "He stands for something no one normal would stand for."

Having already paid about $170 for his Friday night stay, Mr. Friedman could not be ejected, hotel management said. Guests staying in six other hotel rooms checked out early, upon hearing Mr. Friedman was staying there, according to Mr. Tyberg. "Some guests felt very hurt that we let him in," he said. "They didn't know that we didn't know about it."

Mr. Friedman stayed inside the hotel room with his wife and four of their children for the entire Jewish Sabbath, which begins Friday night and ends Saturday night, Mr. Tyberg said.

The hotel permitted members of a militant Jewish group, the Jewish Defense Organization, to go into Mr. Friedman's vacated room. The group's founder and leader, Mordechai Levy, said he found the room empty —save a slow cooker in the sink, a large bag of snack food in a cabinet and two tubs of kosher ice cream in the refrigerator.

Mr. Tyberg said many Borough Park residents are Holocaust survivors, or have parents or grandparents who were persecuted or killed by the Nazis. According to the Jewish Community Study of 2002, 13% of Jewish households in that heavily Orthodox neighborhood have at least one "Nazi victim."

Israel's largest circulation daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, is reporting that the wife is seeking a divorce from Mr. Friedman. Without a "get," or a Jewish divorce granted by a husband, Orthodox Jewish women may not remarry in a religious ceremony.

"I hope he as enough sense to give her a divorce if she asks for one," Rabbi Hertz Frankel, the principal of a Satmar girls' school in Brooklyn, said.

Rabbi Frankel added that Mr. Friedman "represents no one but himself — not even his wife."