Broadway actor meets 9/11 rabbi he plays

Sudak stopped by the theatre for a pleasant kibitz with Paul Whitty, the actor who portrays him within the present.
Brian Zak/NY Put up

The British rabbi featured prominently within the hit Broadway present “Come From Away” refuses to see the musical whereas within the Large Apple this week as a result of he’s being directed by a better authority.

Leivi Sudak, 61, mentioned he was an enormous fan of the manufacturing, however that the present itself was a minefield beneath his strict Hasidic interpretation of Jewish legislation — which amongst different issues prohibits him from watching girls sing.

“A Jewish man shouldn't be listening to different girls’s voices singing. The character of a musical is you've got women and men appearing and singing,” he mentioned.

“However my spouse, mom and daughter have all been to see the musical.”

The present tells the story of airline passengers whose planes have been grounded through the 9/11 terrorist assaults. Sudak has been among the many hundreds stranded in Gander, a small city in Newfoundland.

Sudak stopped by the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on Thursday for a pleasant kibitz with Paul Whitty, the actor who portrays him within the present.

For greater than an hour earlier than the curtain went up, Sudak advised Whitty how he had been on his method from London to go to the gravesite of Brooklyn’s Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a extremely influential rabbi who died in 1994 and is buried in Queens.

Sudak can't see the present himself as a result of it's towards his religion to look at girls in singing.

Matthew Murphy

“The pilot will get on and says, ‘You'll have observed we’ve been diverted. There’s been an assault in mainland US,'” he recalled. When the aircraft landed, Sudak mentioned Canadian mounted police patrolled the aisles for 14 hours.

“Years later I found from somebody … that there have been 4 individuals [on the plane] who have been suspects they usually have been keeping track of them,” he mentioned.

Throughout his time in Gander, Sudak taken care of the roughly two dozen different Jews he discovered there and operated a kosher kitchen for anybody with dietary restrictions. His work is memorialized by Whitty within the musical.

One of many present’s most memorable scenes — when Sudak meets an area Jew named Ed who escaped Nazi Germany — can also be primarily based on actuality.

On the time of his fateful journey, Sudak was flying to New York to go to the grave of an esteemed rabbi.

Brian Zak/NY Put up

“He mentioned he was a little bit boy of about 8 when the Nazis got here to energy. They have been residing in Berlin in 1935,” Sudak recalled. “In 1938 his mother and father paid an unlimited sum of cash to an English couple who would undertake Ed and his brother.”

The pair ultimately ended up in Canada the place their new mother and father warned them by no means to talk of their Jewish heritage — a warning Ed adopted till assembly Sudak.

They stayed in contact for just a few extra years and when Ed died, he was buried with quite a lot of Jewish artifacts the rabbi gifted him.

“It’s an actual honor to get to inform this story and an honor to listen to the story firsthand” mentioned a choked-up Whitty. “I’m very emotional proper now. That could be a lot to course of.”

Sudak has by no means been again to Gander, however it’s on his to-do listing.

“I wave from the window each time I fly over,“ he mentioned.