Ivanka's Upper East Side Rabbi Denounces Donald Trump's Charlottesville Remarks

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The Upper East Side rabbi who guided Ivanka Trump through her conversion to Judaism denounced Donald Trump over the presidents' remarks drawing a moral equivalency between white supremacists and neo-Nazis who staged a deadly protest in Charlottesville and counter-protesters.

Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun released a statement with the synagogue's other rabbis calling Donald Trump's apparent defense of neo-Nazis deeply troubling.

"We are appalled by this resurgence of bigotry and antisemitism, and the renewed vigor of the neo-Nazis, KKK and alt-right," read a statement by Lookstein and rabbis Chaim Steinmetz and Elie Weinstock.

"While we always avoid politics, we are deeply troubled by the moral equivalency and equivocation President Trump has offered in his response to this act of violence."

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The statement was included in an open letter sent to the congregation of the East 85th Street synagogue, New York Magazine first reported.

The full statement was later posted to the congregation's Facebook page:

Lookstein, who has been a rabbi at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun since 1958, was scheduled to perform an invocation at the Republican National Convention in 2016 before backing out of his commitment. At the time, Lookstein said he decisided to forgo speaking at the convention to avoid making a political statement.

"Unfortunately, when my name appeared on a list of speakers at the convention, without the context of the invocation I had been invited to present, the whole matter turned from rabbinic to political, something which was never intended," Lookstein said in a statement last year.

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