Irv Rubin : West Coast Coordinator for Jewish Defense League Chosen to Succeed Rabbi Kahane as National Chief

Irv Rubin says he has never forgotten that day back in 1971 when he was a student at Cal State Northridge and Rabbi Meir Kahane, who had founded the militant Jewish Defense League three years before, stopped by to speak.

“He told us, ‘If you see a Nazi, don’t try to convince him you’re a nice guy,’ ” Rubin recalled. “He told us to smash him.”

Rubin has done a fair amount of smashing in the 14 years since then--he has been arrested, by his own estimate, more than 30 times. So he said it came as no surprise that when Kahane announced on Friday that he was stepping down as JDL chief, Kahane named Rubin as his successor.

“Who would be more qualified than me?” Rubin asked without a trace of false modesty. “Next to him, I’m the world’s best-known Jewish activist. Now it’s my show.”

Kahane, 54, a member of the Israeli parliament, explained that he was resigning the JDL post to concentrate on politics in Israel, where his Kach Party is engaged in an increasingly active campaign to expel all Arabs from Israeli-occupied territory, according to Rubin.

Rubin, who served as West Coast coordinator for the JDL before his promotion last week, said he plans to reinforce the organization’s original mandate “to eliminate any threat to Jewish people” with a forceful, two-pronged attack on anti-Semitism.

“Priority 1 will be to teach every Jew or sympathetic gentile self-defense,” the 40-year-old Los Angeles resident said. “We’re going to hold free martial-arts classes and classes on how to handle weapons. . . .

“Priority No. 2 is that wherever the neo-Nazis rear their heads, we will be there to confront them, eyeball to eyeball. The day of the submissive Jew must be eliminated.”

Rubin, a native of Montreal who immigrated with his parents to Southern California when he was 15, said that until he heard Kahane speak at California State University, Northridge, he had “been a nice Jewish boy who obeyed every law. . . .”

However, when Kahane talked of meeting violent anti-Semitism with force, “it struck a sympathetic chord,” Rubin said.

“Afterward, I went up and introduced myself,” he said.

Rubin said he promptly joined the JDL and was soon named a regional coordinator.

About a month and a half later, Rubin said, he joined a JDL action at a department store in the Fairfax District, protesting the store’s sale of goods made in the Soviet Union.

“We had several nice, orderly demonstrations--you know, people screaming, ‘Let my people go!’ Things like that,” he said. “But it didn’t seem to faze them. We decided a more dramatic approach was needed.

‘Vibrant Sit-in’

“Myself and about a dozen others went up to the executive offices and had a sit-in. The security guards came in to kick us out. The desks went over, the chairs started flying, the lamps started hitting the wall. It was a good, vibrant sit-in.”

It was about then that the Los Angeles Police Department showed up, and it was about then that Rubin “decided to get out of there. . . .”

“I was running out when a young fellow, a bystander, tackled me,” Rubin said. “I guess he thought I was a robber. He kept shouting, ‘I want my reward! I want my reward!’ ”

Rubin’s arrest--the first of his life--followed, with an eventual sentence of probation. There were to be many more such occurrences.

“Over the years there were fines--and a lot of bail money--but I never was convicted of a felony or served time,” he said. “I’ve only engaged in civil disobedience. But it’s the Christian who turns the other cheek, not the Jew. I’ve hit back.”

Joint Interview

One incident took place the following February, after Rubin, then 26, and an official of the local Nazi Party, Joe Tommasi, then 21, arrived at the KHJ-TV studio in Hollywood for a joint television interview.

According to Sandi Craig, a producer at the studio, Rubin was drinking a cup of coffee in an anteroom when Tommasi started putting on his Nazi armband. She said Rubin spilled some coffee on Tommasi and Tommasi called Rubin a “dirty Jew.”

“That’s when all hell broke loose,” Craig said later.

The ensuing fistfight ranged from the anteroom to a control booth and back, eventually being brought under control by studio employees and an armed guard.

Controversial Remarks

Several hours later, Tommasi told police, someone fired three shots at him as he was driving near his Nazi headquarters in El Monte. Rubin was arrested and booked on suspicion of attempted murder, but charges were later dismissed for lack of evidence.

More incidents followed, including arrests during JDL demonstrations against Arabs, the Soviet Union and the French Consulate, but perhaps the most controversial involved remarks Rubin made at a Los Angeles news conference on March 16, 1978.

“We are offering $500, that I have in my hand, to any member of the community . . . who kills, maims or seriously injures a member of the American Nazi Party . . . ,” Rubin said. “We are deadly serious. . . . “

Rubin spoke at a time when American Nazis were planning a march in Skokie, Ill., home to a large number of Jews, many of them survivors of the Holocaust.

Rubin was arrested and charged with solicitation of murder. The charges were dismissed as a violation of constitutional guarantees of free speech, then reinstated. Finally, on May 4, 1981--more than three years after he made the remarks--Rubin was acquitted.

Familiar Name

The case made Rubin’s a familiar name, enough so that he sought, but failed to win, a Republican Assembly nomination on the Westside in 1982.

A year later, it was controversy again. Angered by what he perceived as an anti-Semitic stance by Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson--a stance Jackson denied--Rubin launched a “Jews Against Jackson” campaign to heckle the candidate “wherever he shows his face.”

The presidential race over, Rubin was quiet for a while, but his name surfaced again last May, when a bomb exploded outside the Northridge home of a retired high school teacher, George Ashley, who has argued that the Nazis did not kill millions of Jews during World War II. The letters “JDL” were found painted on the teacher’s doorstep.

‘Too Bad’

“We certainly didn’t bomb Ashley’s home,” Rubin said, when asked for comment. “But it’s too bad that Mr. Ashley wasn’t blown up.”

And now that he is the new national chairman of the JDL, he does not intend to rest on his laurels, Rubin said Monday.

“There’s a neo-Nazi group planning to hand out literature next month at the (Los Angeles) County Fair,” he said. “We’ll be there.”