Monthly Archives: May 2023

I always felt that I would like to keep Shabbat and be religious. But unfortunately, when I lived in California during the ‘70s, I had to work on Shabbat. I wanted to stop working on Shabbat so badly that it was burning me inside, but in every job that I took, I had to do it.

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After twelve years, I moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Myrtle Beach is popular with tourists, and in the tourist industry, Saturday is the most profitable day; if you refuse to work on Shabbat, you would be shown the door. By then, I had a family to support so once again I ended up applying for a job in a chain store selling beach gear, where I had to work on Shabbat. But one day, I decided that I couldn’t take it anymore.

It was a Thursday afternoon, in the fall of 1991. During my lunch break, I decided to call the local Chabad House to ask Rabbi Doron Aizenman what to do, and he suggested that I write to the Rebbe.

What am I going to tell him? How would I write this? “Please,” I asked, “sit down with me and show me what to do.” Rabbi Doron told me to come over, explained the traditional way to address the Rebbe in writing, showed me how to use his fax machine, and left me in his office on my own.

“One thing you should know,” he warned before leaving, “is that you’re not going to get an answer for a while. It might even take three or four months.” In those days, he explained, the Rebbe no longer had the time to respond to every question that came his way, and certainly not right away.

I wrote my letter, placed it in the machine, dialed the number, and waited for the beep that told me it had been sent. After going back to work, I closed the store, headed home, and went to sleep. (more…)

The oldest of four boys, I grew up in Tel Aviv in a traditional home where we soaked up a love of the Jewish people, its Torah, and its land. We had emigrated from Baghdad, Iraq, in 1935 when I was just two.

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Raised in the atmosphere of an up-and-coming country, I had a strong desire to be a part of the action. At seventeen, I was drafted into the army and signed up for permanent service. There, I served as an officer in the Nachal brigade and later, wanting to focus on education, as a commander at the Command Military Academy and in the Youth Corps, or Gadna.

In the early ‘70s, Prime Minister Golda Meir empaneled a special commission to inquire into the matter of Israel’s youth in crisis. In particular, it would be focused on youth within migrant communities, or “marginalized youth,” who, because of the inequalities in Israeli society and the discrimination they experienced, were suffering high rates of school drop-out and delinquency. I was then a colonel, and in light of my educational experience in the IDF, I was called on to lead the commission.

When the commission turned in its findings, we included a long list of recommendations for policy changes in the fields of education, housing, employment, health, and welfare. As a result, Golda Meir requested that I be discharged from the army, to join her office as an adviser for social welfare and to coordinate her staff’s efforts in implementing the commission’s recommendations, within the relevant government departments. Even after Meir’s resignation, her successor, Yitzhak Rabin, asked me to stay in this role, which I ended up filling for a total of four years. (more…)

When I was growing up in the early sixties, the Lower East Side of Manhattan was full of great Torah scholars. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the foremost Halachic authority in America, lived in our co-op complex. Not far away were the Kapishnitzer and Boyaner Rebbes, and Rabbi Yosef Eliyahu Henkin was there too.

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Rabbi Feinstein’s granddaughter was my sister’s best friend, and at some point, she suggested to her grandmother that I could come over and help out, to answer the phone, or to write Rosh Hashanah cards. I was only ten, but for the next two decades, I used to come by Reb Moshe’s, as he is known, on a regular basis. Later on I would even sleep over on occasion, whenever his wife was away and someone had to be there to see how he was doing.

The Feinstein home was like Grand Central Station. People were ringing the bell or calling the phone every minute, and Reb Moshe would spend time speaking with them in person. But he spent most of his remaining time writing, whether it was writing up his Halachic responsa or his classes on the Talmud, which have now been printed in his Igros Moshe and Divros Moshe.

One of the things I used to do for Reb Moshe was give out his books. When he would publish a new volume, I would give it out to a list of thirty or forty prominent rabbis in the Lower East Side.

One Thursday night in 1969, I came to Reb Moshe’s house, and told him that I would be going to have an audience with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. It was not my first time visiting the Rebbe; my father had taken my brothers and I to our first private audience a few years earlier, and we came back a few times after that for other audiences and public gatherings. (more…)

In the late 1950s, Jewish day school graduates began finding themselves in Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges – and I was one of them.

On campus, we encountered an environment that was often hostile to Jews. Classes were held on Shabbat and exams were often given on holidays; we bought our own kosher food, but we still had to pay for room and board and could not bring our food into the dormitories. We also found that people were asking us questions about Judaism that we couldn’t answer. Despite our years of yeshivah education, many of us felt that we didn’t know enough, and we wanted to continue learning.

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We began organizing different groups: At Barnard, where I was, we called our group Ari; at Columbia, they called theirs Yeshurun and used to gather for afternoon prayers in the laboratory of a doctoral student; in Harvard, they called it Taryag; while Cornell had a Young Israel House with a kosher kitchen.

Once we heard about each other, we decided to establish a single body to coordinate all the groups. We called it Yavneh and our founding convention was in February 1960. Our goal was to promote Jewish learning and observance on campus, to ensure that Jewish students wouldn’t feel alone, and that if they wanted to learn more, we would be there to help them.

Everybody had his or her own reason for the name, but I was trying to carry on an organization that my father, Rav Mordechai Pinchas Teitz, had started before immigrating to America, when he was a fourteen-year-old in Latvia. After coming home from the Ponevezh yeshivah and discovering that the boys he had grown up with had joined the Communist Party, he founded a club – Yavneh – for Jewish boys to learn and have fun while getting a better feeling about their Jewishness. (more…)