Whitewater figure celebrates her 10-year friendship with NJ rabbi

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

She made headlines in the 1990s as a business associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton who defied prosecutors investigating the controversial land deal known as Whitewater.

She spent two years behind bars in connection with that case on charges including fraud, conspiracy, and contempt of court.

And she became a Rorschach test for the Clinton era, as a symbol of (take your pick) the climate of corruption in the Democratic White House or a Republican witch hunt against the president.

Susan McDougal also happens to be a Southern Baptist from Arkansas who, while serving time at a federal detention center in California, formed a friendship with Rabbi Aaron Kriegel of Congregation Beth Ahm of West Essex in Verona.

That friendship has endured for more than a decade — a fact she plans to celebrate when she speaks from his pulpit on Saturday, Sept. 16.

The rabbi and the inmate met at a federal detention center in Los Angeles, where Kriegel was serving as a chaplain before moving to Verona.

McDougal was transferred to California from a federal prison in Texas, where, she said, the environment was infused with a born-again Christian culture that made her nearly as uncomfortable as it did the handful of Jewish fellow prisoners.

“It was a terrible thing to watch them being harassed,” said McDougal. The proselytizers “wanted the Jewish women to come to prayer meetings and kept telling them they weren’t being saved. Even though I grew up as a Baptist, I was not comfortable with that right-wing sort of thought, and the Jewish women really welcomed me,” she said last week, speaking by cell phone from her home in Camden, Ark., some two hours south of Little Rock.

So, in an act of defiance that McDougal said is emblematic of much of her life, she asked prison officials to identify her as Jewish rather than Christian.

“My statement was, ‘If you’re going to be harrassing these other people, you’re going to be harassing me, too,’” she said.

McDougal began attending Jewish services at the prison, eating kosher food, meeting with the Jewish chaplain, and even learning to bake hallah.

“She said, ‘I’m going to be Jewish, too, as a statement of conscience,’” said Kriegel. “She is an incredible person.”

When McDougal was transferred to the federal detention center in Los Angeles and met Rabbi Kriegel, McDougal said she was pressured by the warden to cease identifying as a Jew. “He could not believe a good Southern Baptist girl could do such a thing,” she said. “It was really the first time I was ever talked to in an anti-Semitic way.”

Although she has never officially converted to Judaism, McDougal described her written declaration of Jewish identification as “a kind of tilting at windmills. That’s just my life.”

Reactions to some of McDougal’s acts of defiance were harsh.

For about five months, she was locked behind thick glass walls in the maximum security facility nicknamed the “Twin Towers.” “I was locked up 23 hours a day with one hour out to shower. They called it the Hannibal Lechter cell,” named for the villain in the book and movie Silence of the Lambs.

McDougal claimed such treatment was an attempt to coerce her to testify before a grand jury in the Whitewater case.

Among other things, she refused to testify that she had sex with former President Clinton —an allegation she calls a lie.

“I never really knew him very well,” she insisted. “I wouldn’t lie about anybody. The prosecutors wanted me to lie and say the guy did something I know he did not do in order not to be prosecuted. There’s no way. I would not say somebody else is guilty to save my own skin and have to live with that for the rest of my life.”

McDougal said she will explain in her synagogue talk how Kriegel gave her the strength and resolve to withstand incarceration.

“I want to talk about the impact of a man like Rabbi Kriegel on women who have literally nothing and what he brought into the four walls of the jail when he came,” she said. “He talked to us and he listened. Most of the chaplains who come in and talk preach to you, and they give you these lessons or a story from the Bible. But Rabbi Kriegel really came in and listened to the women’s stories and made them feel he really cared about them.”

McDougal said she now divides her time between writing a book on women in prison and taking care of her parents, both of whom are in their 80s.

“My mom’s health suffered a lot while I was in jail,” she said. “They were so frightened for me the whole time I was gone.”

Yet, she said, “I am a better person today for the two years I spent in jail because of the women that I met there. One of the great things about going to jail is there’s not much that scares me anymore.”

McDougal’s talk will take place in the Congregation Beth Ahm sanctuary at 9 p.m. on Saturday Sept. 16. Admission is free. People wishing further information can call 973-239-0754.