By KEVIN RIORDAN
Courier-Post Staff
In The Rabbi and the Hit Man, Arthur J. Magida makes an ambitious and persuasive effort to explain how and why Rabbi Fred Neulander evolved from ordinary clergyman to murderer most extraordinary.
So extraordinary, he could perform a wedding ceremony for the man he hired to kill his wife in 1994, blessing the union in the same Cherry Hill living room where Carol Neulander's blood and brains had splattered the walls.
This was among the more astonishing stories from Neulander's two media-saturated trials, the second of which ended last November in a conviction and a life sentence.
The Rabbi and the Hit Man has its own jaw-dropping revelations - such as the fact a mysterious poet mailed rhyming hints about the crime to the cops. But this thoughtful and important book, which goes on sale Tuesday, is also concerned with less sensational matters, such as those of faith.
Magida, a Baltimore-based journalist who writes frequently about religion, explores Neulander's lower middle-class background in Queens, N.Y., pegging him as an angry, shallow social climber with a knack for being in the right place at the right time.
After a tepid high school and college career, Neulander seemingly settled on the rabbinate as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. He also married "up;" Carol was from wealthy Woodmere, N.Y.
By the early 1970s, the Neulanders had moved to Cherry Hill and were raising three children (two of whom would ultimately come to believe in their father's guilt). The rabbi soon established himself as the founder and leader of South Jersey's largest reform temple, M'Kor Shalom.
But by the early '90s, Neulander had also become a compulsive philanderer, answering personal ads and using his synagogue office for assignations. Some M'Kor Shalom members strenuously looked the other way, as when Neulander arranged to be left alone with his mistress, Elaine Soncini, immediately after she had undergone a ritual bath that marked her conversion to Judaism.
Magida shows Neulander as particularly exploitive of emotionally vulnerable people, some of whom worshipped him as an almost god-like figure (Soncini was freshly widowed when she became his mistress).
While he makes no excuses for the rabbi, whom he clearly views as despicable, Magida does suggest American clergy can find itself placed on a prison-like pedestal, trapped by its and others' unreasonable expectations.
Neulander's affairs "released him from the sanctimony and restrictions of rabbinic life. He could be his true self - not Rabbi Neulander, who had time and compassion for everyone in need, but just Fred, a regular guy with regular needs of his own," writes Magida.
It was Neulander's desperate need to escape his marriage and be with Soncini that led him to hire an unlikely hit man, a compulsive liar named Len Jenoff. The decision would also prove the rabbi's undoing six years later, when the guilt-wracked Jenoff confessed to authorities.
Magida's account of Jenoff's life is sadly compelling; clearly, the author has done his homework and legwork. And while neither Neulander nor Soncini agreed to be interviewed, many others did and Magida deftly assembles their insights into his brisk narrative.
All the more reason why the book's over-reliance on anonymous quotes is distracting. Surely Magida could have persuaded a few more folks to talk on the record. The Rabbi and the Hit Man is occasionally ponderous as well: "The people grieving for Carol . . . were also mourning a different sort of loss: the loss of their own innocence, their certainty that life in Cherry Hill would always get better."
Whatever the quality of Cherry Hill's innocence before or after Carol's murder, Magida's book makes chillingly clear her husband was, and is, an evil man.
No great convictions or grand passions drove Fred Neulander. In the end, he had his wife killed because he could and because he thought he could get away with it.
Review
`The Rabbi and the Hit Man' by Arthur J. Magida (HarperCollins, 304 pages, $25.95)
Reach Kevin Riordan at (856) 486-2604 or kriordan@courierpostonline.com
