Everybody noticed when Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, the last Jewish Republican in the Senate, switched over to the Democratic Party on April 28. But there was also another, less noted, shift of Jewish power on the same day.

As Politico reported, Republican primary candidate Pat Toomey, a potential Specter opponent in the 2010 Pennsylvania Senate race, hired Nachama Soloveichik to be his new press secretary. Toomey lured her away from the low-tax, limited-government Club for Growth (of which Toomey used to be president).

In a phone interview with the Forward, Soloveichik confirmed that she is indeed an offspring of the famed Soloveitchik rabbinic dynasty, which has produced some of the most important and revered scholars of American Orthodox Judaism. Her great-uncle was Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, known to his followers as “The Rav,” who almost single-handedly forged the framework of Modern Orthodoxy, and who is studied across the spectrum of Jewish thought. Her grandfather was Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik, himself an important Talmudic scholar and the long-time head of Yeshivas Brisk in Chicago.

Nachama Soloveichik said that she had not known The Rav, but said that she was close to her grandfather, as they both lived in Chicago while she was growing up.

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