Assembly Speaker’s Fall Guy: Deceased Lubavitcher

To Sheldon Silver, the powerful speaker of the New York State Assembly, it was nothing but a simple case of mistaken identity.

In the 1970s, Mr. Silver, a Democrat, worked with a new nonprofit group, the United Jewish Council of the East Side, to block low-income housing on a large, barren site in his district on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the beginning of a decades-long effort that was described in a recent article in The New York Times.

Those actions, Mr. Silver insisted after the article was published, were actually taken by another man: Sheldon E. Silver, a Minneapolis-born Lubavitcher lawyer, who moved to Brooklyn in the early 1970s and passed away in 2001.

But Mrs. Shoshana Silver, the widow of the deceased lawyer, later told the New York Times that while her husband did briefly hold a job with the newly formed United Jewish Council right about the time he was admitted to practice law in New York, in June 1973, he was let go by the group by early 1974.

If anything written on behalf of the council had Mr. Silver’s name on it after 1974, it had nothing to do with her husband, she said.

Continue reading at the New York Times.

Update: The AP is now reporting that Sheldon Silver’s office has dropped a request for a correction from the New York Times in connection to the decades-old project.