By Mike Wagenheim, JNS
“As a judge, and as a Jew, I consider that everything I do reflects God and affects His image,” the judge once wrote.
Alvin Hellerstein, a senior federal judge and arbiter of high-profile cases, died on Wednesday at age 92.
An Orthodox Jew, Hellerstein had said that he scheduled sentencing hearings for Fridays to give himself a chance to reflect on Shabbat about whether his rulings were fair.
Then President Bill Clinton appointed him to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1998. He was elevated to senior judge in 2011. Most recently, he oversaw the prosecution of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro on torture and drug trafficking charges.
“Judge Hellerstein was an insightful and dedicated lawyer,” stated Laura Taylor Swain, the court’s chief judge. “His energetic and dedicated service to this court continued until his death. He is greatly appreciated and will be sorely missed.”
Hellerstein drew the ire of U.S. President Donald Trump by blocking the president’s efforts to move his 2024 conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to federal court and have it dismissed based on presidential immunity.
The judge also ordered that Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen be released in 2020. He concluded that Trump’s Justice Department retaliated against Cohen for writing a book about Trump by trying to revoke Cohen’s home confinement and send him back to jail for campaign finance violations, tax evasion and bank fraud.
Hellerstein presided over the bulk of civil wrongful death and property damage lawsuits originating from the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and oversaw headline-grabbing fraud and market manipulation cases.
“As a judge, and as a Jew, I consider that everything I do reflects God and affects His image,” Hellerstein wrote in a 2013 law review article.
He was president of the Jewish Center, a Modern Orthodox synagogue that Mordecai Kaplan created on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and was president and chairman of the Board of Jewish Education.
“He’s a great judge—fair and well-balanced,” Jewish law scholar Alan Dershowitz previously told JNS. “He’s also a great tennis player, even in his late 80s and early 90s, and a real mensch.”
“He’s a deeply committed Jew and a deeply principled lawyer,” Dershowitz told JNS in January.
“He understands two things from the Bible. No. 1, ‘Tzedek, tzedek tirdof,’ you must always seek justice,” Dershowitz said. “No. 2, ‘Lo takir panim,’ don’t recognize faces.” (Both quotes come from Deuteronomy 16.)
A native of New York City, Hellerstein earned his bachelor’s and law degrees at Columbia University, where he served as law review editor.
He served in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the legal wing of the U.S. Army. Hellerstein spent 38 years at the law firm of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan before becoming a judge.
