The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 25

Thursday, June 1, 2000 THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER 3A25 COMMENTARY Casey's contradictions were a study for greatness Jane Eisner American Rhythms A synagogue fire brings out the worst and the best. Fear meets fellowship Larry Eichel The Body Politic In N. J. race, big money is changing everything By Craig Dimitri i li Gabay's quiet sorrow hung in the av-i iu an yaiciuajr aa lie auivcjrcu, again, the charred remains of the building built on faith and destroyed by tire. The new carpet installed by con fer's pro-choice position antagonized rank-and-file Republicans.

The 1990 election, during the height of the abortion wars, coincided with my senior year at St. Joseph's Prep in Philadelphia. It was the last election in which I was too young to vote, and I was disappointed that I wouldn't have the opportunity to cast a vote for Casey. Although the student body (including me) was largely very conservative, very Republican, everyone liked Bob Casey regardless of whether we were antiabortion or pro-choice, Republican, Democrat or independent. He was a man of substance, of character.

He had those enormous eyebrows a cartoonist's dram come true. In an age of politicians constantly holding their fingers to the political winds, Casey was a man of conviction, unafraid to fight 3 A pro-life Democrat, (i a conservative ni who raised taxes, a bucker of odds. Bob Casey, who died on Tuesday, was a remarkable, often heroic figure regardless of what you thought of his politics. And make no mistake about it, both during and before his two terms as Pennsylvania governor, Casey antagonized many people throughout the political spectrum. As an economic liberal and social conservative, Casey was at odds with conventional wisdom on both counts.

These unorthodox views essentially left him a man without a party. He angered conservative Republicans when he attempted to raise taxes under the guise of "tax reform" in 1989. He angered them further when he raised taxes by $3.3 billion in the middle of the 1991 recession. He also had little interest in another conservative cause signing death warrants because of his moral opposition to the death penalty. (He opposed both capital punishment and abortion on pro-life grounds.) Conversely, he outraged his fellow liberal Democrats with his uncompromising antiabortion stand.

He ardently supported the antiabortion cause, signing the Abortion Control Act, the Pennsylvania law that ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The court upheld much of the substance' of the law, effectively removing the teeth of Roe, which had discovered an imaginary constitutional right to an abortion. Although the court declined to overturn Roe formally, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (Casey, as governor, was named as the lead defendant on behalf of the commonwealth) will live on for generations in the law school casebooks.

He also led an unsuccessful crusade to keep the Democrats from moving to a firm pro-choice position. For both reasons, Casey's name will thus be linked forever to the anti-abortion cause a legacy of which he was undoubtedly proud. In one of the odd developments of politics, Casey was an antiabortion Democrat, whose two Republican opponents (Bill Scranton in 1986 and Barbara Hafer in 1990) were both pro-choice. His antiabortion position won both races for him. In 1986, it pulled in enough Catholic Republicans to hold off Scranton.

In 1990, Casey demolished Hafer, largely because Ha- gregants of Beit Harambam was covered with ash. The windows they'd carefully replaced in recent months shattered. The food they had brought to celebrate the Sabbath immolated. And the holy books! When firefighters responded early Saturday morning and found that prayer books, bibles and Talmuds had been used for kindling, they threw them into the backyard to stem the blaze that had ripped through the roof and riddled the floor of the modest split-level in Northeast Philadelphia. There the books remained, covered in plastic, awaiting burial according to Jewish custom.

A few torn pages already have escaped, pushed by the spring wind. Eli Gabay picked up a mangled book. "This is for Yom Kippur," he sighed. For the sins we have committed A sin was committed here on Verree Road at dawn last Saturday. Police have classified the fire as arson, though they haven't decided whether it was a hate crime targeted at Jews or an act of depraved vandalism.

For now, the consequences are the same. A congregation stands bereft. A tidy, unassuming neighborhood is scarred. And the city has lost another bead in its fraying necklace no diamond or sapphire but a workaday stone, the kind that keeps people here and may even bring them back. In the Northeast, along Lancaster Avenue and elsewhere, Philadelphia has hundreds of these homemade places of worship, where Baptists or Buddhists or Orthodox Jews have gathered.

A census underway by the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work and the Center for Religion and Civic Society estimates that of the 2,000 congregations in the city, one-fourth are located in storefronts, homes or borrowed space. Often they are temporary, transitional sites, established with the hope that something bigger and more permanent can be found. Other times they are the very best that a small congregation can afford. Such is the case with Beit Harambam. Named for the rambam the 12th-century scholar and philosopher Moses Maimonides the congregation was begun more than 20 years ago by Amiram Gabay, an Israeli-born rabbi who is a shopkeeper and police chaplain.

(His son Eli is the synagogue's president.) It serves a largely immigrant community, mostly Israeli and Russian, who want a Hebrew-speaking synagogue. At most, 300 people show up for High Holiday services; the core membership is about 60. No one draws a salary. No one has to pay dues. For 11 years, a congregant allowed Rabbi Gabay to conduct services in the ALEX LLOYD GROSS For The Inquirer Investigators discuss the fire at Beit Harambam.

Verree Road house until enough money was raised to purchase the building last December. Some worshippers need a soaring cathedral, a story in stained glass, a testament in gold and stone to lift their prayers. Beit Harambam's congregants needed only a wooden ark for the Torah scrolls, a few dozen chairs, a long table for study, and shelves, many shelves, for books. All were lovingly built or collected over time. All vanished in an instant of fire, smoke and water last Saturday.

"You feel detached," Eli Gabay tried to explain. "All of a sudden you find yourself with no place to go." The soul of a city can be eaten away by such tragedies, but, ironically, it can also be nourished. Three blocks away, Shaare Shamayim-Beth Judah synagogue welcomed the Beit Harambam congregants warmly and immediately. Police and fire officials acted with sensitivity and dispatch. A cemetery has donated space to bury the holy books.

And local religious leaders have hastened to show their support. The Rev. David Brown of Bustleton United Methodist Church visited the congregants at their study session on Saturday evening, relocated to Shaare Shamayim while their own synagogue lay smoldering. He told them that this kind of violence had no place in the community. He expressed his sorrow and repeated offers to help.

He cried. "I can't tell you what that did to my people," Gabay said. "He jumped into their hearts." For a moment, chasing fear and sorrow away. For information on the Beit Harambam rebuilding fund, call 215-832-0565. for his beliefs.

The state was transfixed when Casey underwent a heart-liver transplant in 1993. It triggered a debate never settled as to whether Casey received preferential treatment because he was the governor. (The official explanation was that patients who needed two organs went to the top of the list.) Few recipients of heart-liver transplants had survived more than 'a few months afterwards. Casey enjoyed seven additional years of life, and it shouldn't have surprised any of us. His toughness, perseverance and joy of life made him a formidable opponent for the oft-ravaging powers of aging and disease.

He was a great man. We're not likely to see another Bob Casey any time soon. Craig Dimitri (cdimitri5go.com) is a 4 1999 graduate of the Villanova University School of Law. 1 01 Tomorrow: "Worldview" with Trudy Rubin; "Alarms and Diversions" with David Boldt; Larry Eichel. Jane Eisner's column appears here on Thursdays.

Her e-mail is jeisnerphillynews.com Acel Moore Urban Perspectives I spent enough time on the campaign trail with Jim Florio in Camden County yesterday to sense the renewed optimism he feels as he campaigns for the New Jersey Democratic Senate nomination. Then I returned to the real world, defined herein as any place where there are television sets. And the first one I walked past was showing a commercial for his opponent, Jon S. Corzine, which is what they always seem to be showing these days. On the surface, the news has been almost unbelievably good, for the Florio camp this past week, what with major newspapers endorsing his candidacy and the damaging revelation that Corzine had hired private detectives to probe the former governor's past.

But to the average New Jersey television viewer, it was a week like any other, all Corzine, all the time. Spots praising the former Wall Street executive's persona and program. Spots ripping apart Flo-rio's record as governor. With the primary five days away, there is, alas, only one aspect of this race that stands out, and it's not the debate over whether Florio, who now opposes investing Social Security funds in the stock market, has flip-flopped on the matter. It's the money, Corzine's money.

The money that's paying for the commercials, the private investigator, the direct mail, the phone banks and the street money promised for Election Day. When it comes to campaign cash, Corzine is in a world of his own. His total spending, which we won't know until next month, is likely to surpass $35 million and perhaps approach $40 million, the vast majority of it coming from his personal, self-made fortune. Forget the Senate. That's enough to win a presidential nomination.

Depending oh the turnout and the outcome, Corzine's spending could approach $200 per vote, which is astounding and absurd. And this is just the primary. The general election's still to come. There's nothing illegal about any of this under the current campaign finance laws. It just feels, well, wrong.

The word disproportionate keeps coming up. Corzine makes no apologies. He argues that as a political newcomer he had to spend lavishly merely to compete with Florio, who had all but universal name recognition in the state. Besides, since the days of Nelson Rockefeller, some voters have been attracted to the idea of a self-financed candidate, the theory being that such a politician, once elected, is less likely to be beholden to special interests than one who must rely on those interests to fill his campaign treasury. And in this race, there are those who would have backed any reasonably attractive alternative to Florio, people who think he wore out his welcome years ago with his combative personality and the $2.8 billion tax increase he pushed through Trenton in 1990.

Last year, when Florio started complaining about the unfairness of having to run against a man of Corzine's wealth, he often sounded like a whiner. Not anymore. Corzine, by pushing his financial advantage to the max, has made himself fair game. Yesterday, Florio described this election as an auction and Corzine as an "American oligarch," one of those "people who want to advance by waking up one morning, generally in a mid-life crisis, and say, 'Boy, I'd like to be president, I'd like to be senator. I'm going to write millions of dollars in checks.

And I'm going to buy the He said that his opponent's campaign "embodies everything about politics that people hate" and that Corzine likely "spends more on a two-week vacation than most of us in New Jersey earn in a year." Is Florio overdoing it? Probably. Is he bitter? You bet. He's trying to encourage a backlash against the money, one that might be strong enough to offset the negative feelings voters still harbor toward him. James Carville, the Democratic strategist, came to Cherry Hill yesterday to give a speech on Florio's behalf. "I think when this is over," he said, "something will have changed in American politics." Florio's backers are afraid they know what the change will be.

The most audaciously self-financed candidates of the past decade, New Jersey's own Steve Forbes among them, have all wound up losers. But the polls suggest that streak might be about to end. A strangely clad journalist caves in at Disney World -j if 1 SPRINT PCS I I I 11 3 ED; Sprint PCS built the only all-digital, all-PCs nntinntAjiHf nptwnrle frnm thr I ground up. ID! crowd control and have made moving long lines of people a science. The parks are clean, and in the four days we spent there, I did not encounter a blank stare or an attitude problem from any employee.

No, really. They were always courteous, smiling and friendly. They were obviously well trained. And they appeared ready and able to answer any question a visitor might have about the theme park in which that visitor now found him-or herself. Even if he wore wingtips and a baseball cap.

You have to work hard to remember that it's a theme park and not a model for how a municipality could work. Hard. What makes it even harder is that Disney World is a big place: large enough, in fact, for Manhattan Island to fit into several times. It employs more than 40,000 people. When I was 9, Disneyland in California was just a planned development, and the Mickey Mouse Club had yet to make its television debut.

Over the years, the Disney parks have been touted as places where fantasies come true. Indeed, the places themselves have become fantasies, places little kids (and not a few adults) dream of visiting. I saw that in my 9-year-old's eyes. As a journalist, I am (so I'm told) supposed to be a professional cynic. But I have to tell you: I was impressed with the place.

Despite being besieged by 42 million people a year parents themselves besieged with kids, kids, kids and hundreds of thousands each day, the place works. It's fun. It takes care of you as you enjoy yourself. One morning, we had breakfast with Winnie the Pooh, and, yes, I left with a photograph of me, Mickey and Minnie all smiling broadly. The editor of this page, evidently in all seriousness, said he would run that incriminating image if I produced it.

I decided against it. Better for the page if I kept this souvenir to myself. Better for my ego, too. This is not meant to be a commercial for Disney. For one thing, they don't need yet another ad; for another, they hire professionals who can do that much better than I can.

Last month, I went to Disney World for the first time, and it was better than I ever could have imagined. I found out firsthand why Orlando, Fla, is now the number-one vacation spot in the nation. My motivation for going was a 9-year-old girl who was delighted to meet Mickey, Winnie the Pooh, Tig-ger, Tinkerbell and all of the Disney characters in the Magic Kingdom. Just to see the smile of joy and excitement on her face our first day at the park was itself enough reason to be there. Although I would not admit it, I was looking forward to the visit as much as my 9-year-old.

Secretly, I love this stuff. And was I ever dressed for the role of dad-takes-wife-and-daughter-to-Disney. Both my wife and daughter threatened to change their airline tickets or walk behind me if I really intended to wear my Richard-Nixon-relaxing-on-the-beach attire, which includes plaid shorts, black knee-length socks (with gold toes!) and brown wingtip shoes. And a baseball cap. I did not, of course wear that attire at least, not the kneesocks but I found out that had I worn it, I would not have been that out of place.

In fact, many a man in the Disney crowds looked just like that. Proof positive that they'll serve you at Disney World no matter how you look. And they will serve you with" style. I have never seen any place run as efficiently as Disney World. I mean that last sentence not as a political statement, but purely as an observation: The trains run on time in Disney World.

Make of it what you will. The four megaparks are usually full of people wanting to go all over the place at once. A recipe for chaos? Only in the real world. The staffs atf the Disney parks have mastered Sprint Samsung Sprint PCS Phone Supports voteomafl and CaUor ID Vale recognition dialing 149a" (SCH3500) i 'M ViUU 111 i Mi "itfffflir.iAfl.'w IsJjJ Offtt fiom 64(00 6 1B0Q Gosrf at patwputir.q locations Mptodutti iutyr cl fo pr or sole AH promotional offtts sublet to cftnnge without notice. Photography shown is rtpitsentationol.

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Wilminejton (3071 9-8448 Acel Moore's column appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays. His e-mail adjress is amoorephillynews.com Larry Eichel's column usually appears on Wednesdays and Fridays. His e-mail ('address is leichelphillynews.com.