Andrew Guckes | Staff Writer
Sheriff Fred Harran is, to his knowledge, the only Jewish sheriff in the state of Pennsylvania. He said that he is used to being the only Jew in the room, but he also recalled a brief period when there seemed to be an influx of Jewish police recruits in Philadelphia. In the early 1990s, this dynamic was legitimate enough to spawn an oft-repeated joke in the department.
“It became a running joke amongst the Jews in the department — no one else really knew what we were talking about — but amongst us, when there were four or five of us standing in the room, we would joke [that we need] a couple more guys and we got a minyan,” Harran said.
Harran serves as sheriff of Bucks County, a position he took on in 2021. There are no longer many Jewish recruits for the police academy, and Harran said that over the course of his career, he has gotten far more used to not having Jewish co-workers than having them. As a young Jewish boy who went to yeshiva until eighth grade, his decision to join the Bensalem Police Department in 1987 was met with surprise by his dad.
“My father was not happy with my decision. My mother had passed away already, but my father was not really thrilled with it. It is what it is,” he said.
Harran worked in Bensalem for nearly 35 years before being elected sheriff in 2021. For the final 16 years, he was chief of police.
“I was going to be there for a year or two until I got my thoughts together on where I wanted to go,” he said.
Harran comes from a diligently Jewish family. They lived in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood where Harran said everyone was either “Jewish or Italian,” until the early 1980s. They moved to Pennsylvania in search of suburban safety. It was tough to get used to at first, but Harran came around to his new home.
“Being from New York, there’s only one city in America, and that’s New York,” he said with a laugh. “Everything else is farmland.”
While this may sound like the makings of a police officer’s origin story, Harran said it wasn’t until after college that he pursued a career in law enforcement.
“I was very interested in theater growing up in New York, so I went down the path of theater,” he said. “I quickly realized about my sophomore year [of college] that I was not going to make any money in the theater world, so I changed my major to political science.”
After college, he applied to a few police departments, and from there, his career in Bensalem began.
Harran is proud of the path he took to becoming sheriff of Bucks County. He said that his family worked hard for him to be able to get to this point — in fact, the proof is in their
name.
“My original last name is Horowitz. My father was a physician and my uncle taught at Yeshiva Flatbush in Brooklyn, and Jews could not get into professional school, so my father went to Chicago Medical School under the name of Harran. And my uncle, he went to University of Pennsylvania under the name of Harran [because of] antisemitism,” Harran explained.
While those two men weren’t in law enforcement, they set an example for young Harran with other actions.
“They both went in World War II. My father helped liberate concentration camps in Europe as a doctor,” he said.
The Bensalem Jewish Outreach Center member said that he watched his parents appreciate everything they had, and that that set an example for him. His grandparents came from Russia with not much to their name — his father’s father was a milkman.
“They achieved the American dream,” he said.
However, for Harran, his family story is more complex than even he knew. When he was 46, he found out that he was adopted. His sister told him before he went in for medical treatments, and since then, he has been on a journey to learn more about who he is.
“New York State has open adoption records, and I just discovered who my birth mother is,” he said. “The good news is, she is Jewish. She is still alive, and I’m having my birth-niece reach out to her to see if she will communicate with me.”
Harran wants to fly to Las Vegas, where his birth mother is, to meet her.
“If she said, ‘Get on a plane and fly out,’ I would tomorrow,” he said.
Whether his birth mother was Jewish wouldn’t really have mattered. Harran was adopted the day after his birth and is thoroughly Jewish. He lights candles at Chanukah, fasts for Yom Kippur and keeps mostly kosher.
“My wife is Italian, so I don’t do two separate sets of dishes,” he said.
Harran said that his story is one of Jews doing what they can to be Jewish. It isn’t always perfect, but the effort is there. He chuckled as he recalled his family’s observance of Yom Kippur when he was younger.
“Temple was not really walkable for us, so I remember we would drive halfway, park the car and then walk,” he said. “For my parents, it was the best they could do with the tools they had.”