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A DAVID ROSENMAN'S

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Attorney

Continued from preceding page

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28

FRIDAY_SEPTEMBER 23 1988

invaluable Judaica library. Lewin says he
was able to bring together his legal
expertise and Talmudic knowledge in
representing the current Rebbe in a case
so bitter that it could not be resolved in a
more private setting. (It was not a pro bono
case since the Rebbe insisted that Lewin
be paid for his work.) When a federal court
ruled in favor of the Rebbe, that the library
belonged to him and his Lubavitcher
movement, there was dancing in the
streets of Williamsburg, N.Y.
"It was a dream litigation for me," says
Lewin, "to use my skills against a top
adversary and to use my knowledge of
Yiddish and Hebrew and of Jewish law. I
even brought a page from the Shulchan
Aruch (the Code of Jewish Law), to court
to prove that it was permissible in Jewish
law to take the case to a secular court."
Perhaps the toughest case in Lewin's
career was his representation of Bernard
Bergman, an Orthodox rabbi in New York
who was convicted in a nursing home
scandal in the mid-70s. "Never was I as
personally affected by a case," he says. "I
received a tremendous amount of abuse
from the Jewish community (for vigorously
defending Bergman), and that surprised
me. I hadn't realized the intensity of feeling
about Bergman. People hate nursing home
owners and take out their own guilty
feelings on them. He didn't deserve that
kind of rancor from the Orthdox Jewish
community."
Lewin says that a good lawyer never
asks his client whether he is guilty, and in
most cases he doesn't know himself. "lb
this day I don't know if Bergman was
guilty or not, but the pre-judgment he
received in the media was appalling."
The Village Voice broke the nursing
home scandal story and featured a front-
page photo of Bergman, wearing a black
velvet yarmulke, with the headline, "Is
This The Meanest Man In New York?".
"People were outraged that Bergman
wore a yarmulke in court," Lewin recalls,
"but we had talked about it first and
realized he would have been attacked either
way."
"The Jewish community's criticism of
Nat was 100 percent unjustified," says
Julius Berman. "They were very embar-
rassed by Bergman and they ran for cover.
Nat didn't."
The Bergman case was one that tested
Lewin's strong belief that an accused
person deserves the strongest defense
possible. "The healthier the society, the
better the representation," says Lewin. He
resents the pre-judgments carried out in
the press "based on very little information."
Lewin notes that to this day few people
know that Bergman was charged with a
mis-statement on a partnership tax return
rather than with Medicaid fraud and was
convicted and sentenced to four months in
j all — too short a sentence in the eyes of
most critics. "All hell broke loose when the

sentence came down," recalls Lewin, "but
the judge (Marvin Frankel) did the abso-
lutely right thing. And he was never
promoted after that." Bergman died
several years after serving his sentence.
In the Meese case, Lewin wrote an Op-
Ed piece published in the New York Times
in February, asserting that the media was
treating the case unfairly by calling for
Meese's resignation before he had even
been indicted, much less found guilty.
Representing Meese, wrote Lewin, "has
shown me the last stop in the degeneration
of the once hallowed presumption of inno-
cence."
After the 830-page report by indepen-
dent counsel James McKay was issued last
month, suggesting that Meese "probably
violated the criminal law" on four
occasions since taking office, Lewin

Lewin served under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy
in the early 1960s and worked with him on the
prosecution of the Teamsters' Jimmy Hoffa. This photo of
Lewin and Kennedy hangs at the entrance of Lewin's
office and includes a warm inscription from RFK.

expressed outrage at the charges as the
efforts of an overzealous prosecutor
seeking to justify a long and costly
investigation. He dismissed the report as
"nothing more than one man's opinion,"
and helped write an immediate rebuttal.

`He Never Says No'

Despite the notoriety of cases like the
one involving Meese, colleagues feel that
Lewin's greatest accomplishment has been
his advocacy of the rights of religious
persons in his pro bono cases. Marvin
Schick says that Lewin's record is "un-
matched in this country in terms of the
amount of pro bono work and in securing
religious freedoms." He adds that Lewin's
brief in defense of Orthodox communities
to construct an eruv, or religious enclosure
to permit carrying on the Sabbath, "is the
best brief on a church-state matter that
I've ever seen. It is so strong and so

