A convicted fraudster has married his long-term girlfriend in an Orthodox wedding ceremony held in the jail where he is incarcerated.
The man calling himself David Edouard Sassoon secured the services of Rabbi Julian Shindler after a months-long struggle to convince the London Beth Din that he is Jewish.
Rabbi Shindler performed the ceremony in London’s Pentonville Prison between Sassoon and his British girlfriend, Sharon Levy, in August.
Sassoon, who turned 45 on October 6 this year, claims to have been born in Vermont, north America, on the day the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973.
He has claimed a string of facts about himself which do not stand up to independent verification. Some of his more dramatic claims have been rejected as completely untrue.
In interviews in 2016, he told the JC that he was related to the two great Sephardi Middle Eastern banking families, Cattaui and Sassoon. He said his parents had been married in Egypt in 1971 and that his mother, Josephine Cattaui, had been killed in the 1994 Amia Jewish Community Centre bombing in Bueons Aires, in which 85 people died.
But the JC was told by the Amia Centre that the name of Josephine Cattaui Sassoon was not among the victims of the bombing. Sassoon, however, insisted that his mother’s name did not appear on the list of the dead because she, like Sassoon himself, was an undercover agent for the US government. He has spent time in prison in America and in Britain before his current incarceration in Pentonville. In March 2015 he was jailed for 20 months by Nottingham Crown Court after being convicted of intending to pervert the course of justice and fraud, including lying on an application for a bank loan. He served 10 months.
The JC spoke to a number of people who said they had been duped out of thousands of pounds by Sassoon. In some cases he acknowledged that he owed money but said it was not as much as had been claimed.
After the JC published his bizarre story in December 2016, it is understood that he made efforts to establish his Jewish status with the London Beth Din so that he and Ms Levy could make aliyah. She is believed to hold Israeli citizenship already.
But his aliyah bid was initially turned down. Some of the evidence provided was said to be “forged or nonsense”, according to an official close to the application process.
However, Sassoon persevered and re-approached the Beth Din. The Beth Din say there are a variety of factors which govern their decision as to whether someone is Jewish. In this case, they made inquiries with contacts in the Middle East, including Arabic-speaking communities. They concluded that Sassoon “passed the threshold of likeliness” that he is Jewish. They insisted that “no one thing by itself is proof”.
The Beth Din, according to the official, concluded that some of what Sassoon said about himself was “nonsense”, but that other material was acceptable, and that they had obtained independent verification of his Jewish status. But although the Beth Din is said to have a thick file relating to Sassoon, none of the serving dayanim is prepared to discuss the evidence.
Once his Jewish status was established, Ms Levy approached Rabbi Shindler and the way was cleared for a Jewish wedding ceremony to be conducted.
The Ministry of Justice confirms that such a ceremony was carried out in August and agrees that weddings in prisons are rare and that “probably” Jewish weddings in prison are even rarer. But the ministry refuses to say why Sassoon is in Pentonville and how long his sentence is. Ms Levy, for her part, refused to speak to the JC.
