By KEVIN RIORDAN
Courier-Post Columnist
Arthur Magida doesn't remember when he first heard about the Neulander case.
He's not sure when he became convinced that Rabbi Fred Neulander had arranged his wife's murder.
But Magida vividly recalls the moment when the sad magnitude of the story he eloquently tells in The Rabbi and the Hitman became clear.
"It was the second time I visited Carol Neulander's grave," the 57-year-old author said recently from his home in Baltimore.
"I knelt in front of her tombstone, and all of it became terribly real. I thought, `How could he have done this to this person?' "
Magida would spend more than two years trying to answer that question, and many others, as he researched and wrote The Rabbi and the Hitman, which has just been published by HarperCollins.
He interviewed 225 people, sat through both of Neulander's trials, and reviewed nearly 1,000 pages of grand jury testimony. And he spent a lot of time in Cherry Hill, a town he'd known only as a highway exit sign.
"I wanted to determine who all these people were," Magida said. "Rather than write a `true-crime thriller,' I wanted to take this to another level."
Magida, who writes frequently about religion and spirituality, was attracted to the story professionally because it offered "a powerful way to address moral, ethical and theological issues."
That's one reason the book pays a good deal of attention to M'Kor Shalom, the Cherry Hill synagogue Neulander founded and led.
"It's an extremely tight-knit community," Magida said. "There's so much sorrow - the congregation in particular has suffered so much. There are so many people still looking over their shoulders."
Neulander, who's serving a life sentence, was charismatic and manipulative. He compulsively seduced women, often using his position to do so.
For some at M'Kor Shalom, Neulander himself became like a religion.
"This is antithetical to Judaism," Magida noted. "Traditionally, a rabbi is a teacher, an interpreter - not necessarily a holy man.
"It wasn't Judaism (Neulander was offering) but Fred Neulander-ism. I'd like to know what he thought he was teaching his congregants. . . . He took up so much psychological space in that congregation, he became that congregation. He took such license with the privilege. And the people of M'Kor Shalom eventually paid the price."
Neulander, thankfully, is paying a price as well.
"He's an evil man," Magida said. "The embodiment of evil."
Kevin Riordan's column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Contact him at (856) 486-2604 or kriordan@courierpostonline.com
