In Coney Island, he was known as "the rabbi."
With his thick white beard and pointy mustache, muscled biceps and faded white tank top, Abraham Novitsky, better known as Rabbi Abraham Abraham, did not have a traditional congregation.
His synagogue, people who knew him liked to say, was the beach, where he had been a fixture on the Boardwalk and on the winter swim scene in Brooklyn for as long as anyone could remember.
Long before Mr. Novitsky died on Wednesday at 77 after a long battle with cancer, his unusual interests - walking on hot coals, twisting his mustache into four curlicues, swimming in subzero temperatures - had become the stuff of Coney Island mythology.
"He was such an unusual character," a nephew, Martin Novitsky, said at a funeral service Thursday at Beth David Cemetery in Queens. "So many people you could cut out of a cookie. They go to school. They go to work. They get married. Their life is over. Everything about his life was eccentric."
When the magician David Blaine encased himself in a block of ice in Times Square in 2000 for 63 hours, for instance, Mr. Novitsky took up the challenge: He built an ice cube igloo on Coney Island Avenue near the Boardwalk and sat in it for 110 hours, said a friend and swim-club partner, Bob Stewart. (Though Mr. Novitsky applied to Guinness World Records for the effort, a spokeswoman said the company did not recognize the category.)
To the amazement of his swim club, Mr. Novitsky once organized a funeral, complete with an open coffin and a hearse, on the shores of Brighton Beach for a longtime club member.
And during the annual Mermaid Parade, which Mr. Novitsky led as King Neptune in 1999, he did his best to flout the rules, said Dick D. Zigun, the parade's organizer.
"He wouldn't pay the fee and he wouldn't show up to the assembly site," Mr. Zigun said. "A car would ignore police detours and come down the street in the opposite direction and make a U-turn in front of the parade. It would be Rabbi Abraham. He would jump out of the car and do a one-handed push-up."
While Mr. Novitsky loved the limelight, he did his best to preserve the Rabbi Abraham Abraham mystique, said Charles Denson, a Coney Island historian who tried unsuccessfully to interview him for an oral history project.
"He didn't want you to know what was behind the character," Mr. Denson said.
Mr. Novitsky's rabbinical credentials were difficult to confirm, too. Friends said he had documents showing that he had been ordained, and he performed funerals for Jewish members of his swim club, but no one knew where he had attended rabbinical school and people just seemed to take him at his word.
Mr. Novitsky was born and raised in Coney Island and lived there and in Brighton Beach his entire life, Mr. Stewart said. He had seven children and was the longtime owner of a chicken market in Crown Heights.
His ambitions, however, seemed to have little to do with chicken.
"He used to do Houdini impersonations before he met my mom," said Mr. Novitsky's daughter, Sherrelyn Novitsky, 45. "He would jump off the pier and hold his breath. He always found a way to revel in the limelight."
Swimming in extremely cold water became one of Mr. Novitsky's signature pursuits.
After he left or was kicked out of the Coney Island Polar Bears in the early '90s, he formed the Ice Breakers, a group of about 25 mostly older members who abide by Mr. Novitsky's strict lifestyle ethos.
"We're hard-core," Mr. Stewart said. "You don't drink. You don't smoke. You take care of your body."
Mr. Novitsky's last trip to the water was on New Year's Day, and Mr. Stewart said the two last saw each other a couple of weeks ago; even then, Mr. Novitsky was looking forward to the next thrill.
"He said, 'Yeah, I'm dying, but do you think we could do one more gig?' " Mr. Stewart recalled. "It was classic rabbi."
The gig never materialized. But at the funeral, family members gave Mr. Novitsky a proper Coney Island send-off.
A daughter, Arlene R. Wilks, 48, had collected sand from the beach to sprinkle on her father's coffin before he was buried.
"This is so he can rest like a true polar bear," Ms. Wilks said.
