A WORLD OF KIRUV Rabbi Buchwald on the NYC subway with an ad promoting Shabbat Across America, an annual campaign which has attracted over 900,000 participants. 12
The Multitudes of Ephraim BY SHMUEL LANDESMAN THE DICTIONARY DEFINITION of the word charismatic is: the ability to exercise a compelling charm that inspires devotion in others; the ability to exercise a Divinely conferred power or talent. Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald is charismatic. This writer, on a recent warm Friday morning, took a bus from New Jersey to the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan and then a subway up to West Seventy-second Street. Needless to say, the sights and level of immodesty encountered, left one in despair about the future of our society and the salaciousness of our culture. How can we bring Jews closer to Torah observance while living in such an environment? The writer then proceeded on foot to a grand prewar apartment building on leafy Riverside Drive. The residents appeared to be mainly Jewish. A knock on the door of apartment 3B brought Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald to the door. He was hobbling on crutches and evidenced a lot of pain. (On the phone he had sounded full of vim and vigor.) A full-time male aide was there to assist the Rabbi. Knowing that the interviewee had attended the funeral of a local Holocaust survivor that morning, I suspected the interview would be brief. Not to mention the fact that the Rabbi had recently fallen down a flight of stairs! Two and a half hours later, this mesmerized writer had to conclude the interview because he could not handle any more information or inspiration. Inyan Magazine 11 Av 5774 13
Family Background Rabbi Buchwald was born in the Bronx after World War II. Unlike many involved in kiruv, he is not a baal teshuvah. His family is normative frum. Rabbi Buchwald s father and grandparents came from Poland. His son, Naphtali, is a kollel yungerman at Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood. His wife, Aidel (Spitz), grew up in Boro Park. His other children, Yedidiah (who learned in Ner Yisrael for four years), Ayelet (Berger) and Orly (Klimovsky) are also married and leading frum lives in the New York City area. Rabbi Buchwald s father, Reb Moshe Aharon, was born in Biale, Poland, in 1902. (Poland was then a province in czarist Russia; the Jewish population of Biala Podlawska in 1921 was about 7,000 a bit more than half of the total population.) The Biale Chassidic dynasty stems from that town. The Buchwalds, however, were sympathetic but not Chassidic. In the chaotic and dangerous aftermath of World War I, the whole family immigrated to New York City in 1921. Reb Moshe Aharon, then nineteen, was the only one of his six siblings to succeed in raising frum children in America, an unfortunately regular occurrence at the time. (A sign painter, he refused to work on Shabbos, not even for the triple overtime pay offered at the New York Wold s Fair in 1933.) Rabbi Buchwald s mother, Tillie (Magnet) Buchwald, was a baalas teshuvah at a time when this was a rarity. She and her three sisters were born in the Harlem section of New York City. Her parents, originally named Mednikov, came from Grodno Gubernya (Province), in Czarist Russia. They kept a kosher home but were not particularly observant. The shul they didn t regularly attend was Orthodox. Tillie agreed to become shomer Shabbos when she married, a decision she never regretted. They married in 1929, moved to the then-fashionable East Bronx, and were devoted to each other for over sixty years. The Buchwalds davened at the shtiebel of Harav Naphtali Glickman, the Sosnowitz- Koidenover Rav, z l. They later started attending the Young Israel of Tremont, under the leadership of Rabbi Feivel Paretzky, z l, a former talmid of the Chofetz Chaim in Radin and later the bochen of Yeshivas Rabbeinu Yitzchak Elchanan (RIETS). Reb Moshe Aharon was a tremendous ohev Eretz Yisrael (religious Zionist) and was a member of the Revisionist Zionist movement (headed by Zev Jabotinsky and later Menachem Begin). Mr. Buchwald insisted that his children speak both Hebrew and Yiddish and receive a yeshivah education, a value that many frum Jews of that era did not share. Unfortunately, they could not afford the tuition for their oldest daughter, Rinnah, and the day school they applied to would not provide them with much of a scholarship. Though she attended public school, Rinnah remained frum, lives in Bayit V gan, Jerusalem, and is the wife and mother of prominent Israeli mechanchim and askanim. The younger two Buchwald kids, Esther and Effie (as he is affectionately called), attended Soloveitchik Yeshivah on West One Hundred Eighty-fifth Street in Washington He has an uncanny ability to make Torah and Yiddishkeit seem to be the most exciting things in the world. Such is his view of life, and his enthusiasm totally enthralled this FFB writer. Rabbi Buchwald teaching the crash course in basic Judaism. 14
Heights, then a large yeshivah day school. Tillie Buchwald took a job outside the home, just to be able to pay the yeshivah tuitions. Unfortunately, Esther Buchwald was influenced to leave the derech and settled on a socialist kibbutz in Israel for a while, where she married and had three daughters. She subsequently divorced, moved back to the States and settled in central New Jersey with her children. Rabbi Effie, his older sister Rinnah and his elderly parents were deeply pained by the granddaughters nonreligious upbringing and feared they would be lost to intermarriage. They kept in touch with the children and tried to influence the girls with Yom Tov gifts, mishloach manos and Chanukah gelt. When Reb Moshe Aharon and Tillie Buchwald passed away within a short time of each other in the early 1990s, Reb Effie took part of the modest inheritance left him by his parents and offered his college-age nieces a free trip to Israel if they would attend a two-week Torah program there. (This was way before Project Birthright.) His plan worked. Happily, two of the girls are frum today and living in Eretz Yisrael; the third is married to a Jew. His sister Esther has also since returned to religious observance. Rabbi Ephraim Z. Buchwald and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman. Educational and Work Background Reb Effie attended Yeshiva University High School for Boys in Manhattan (MTA) for high school and then Yeshiva College. He intended to become an electrical engineer or a chemist, but he was having too much fun teaching Torah and doing Jewish outreach to ever pursue engineering professionally. He has an uncanny ability to make Torah and Yiddishkeit seem to be the most exciting things in the world. Such is his view of life, and his enthusiasm totally enthralled this FFB (frum from birth) writer. It is now quite clear to me why Ephraim Buchwald never became an engineer. Reb Effie taught Hebrew school in Yonkers to help pay his college tuition. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Yeshiva University s Division of Communal Services (DCS) ran biannual Torah Leadership Seminars (TLS), which were five- to seven-day-long programs of Torah classes and seminars for hundreds of public school teens and preteens. This program was enormously successful in reaching Jewish kids. His goal was to get as many as possible of his Hebrew school and youth group kids to participate in TLS. Upon graduating college in 1967, Reb Effie taught limudei kodesh at Dov Revel Yeshivah in Forest Hills, and then for three years at the Ramaz day school in Manhattan. He views his tenure at both schools as valuable experiences because he learned administrative skills from their extremely professional staffs. In the summers, Reb Effie was the head counselor at Camp Yaron in Neve Hadassah, Israel, where he met Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, founding Rabbi of Lincoln Square Synagogue (LSS) on Manhattan s Upper West Side. In 1972 Rabbi Riskin invited Rabbi Buchwald to teach adult education classes at Lincoln Square. Reb Effie was a natural for the job. So, in 1973, he left Ramaz, returned to YU to finish his requirements for semichah and was appointed educational director at LSS. (Reb Effie is not a big believer in sleep.) Within several years, LSS, which had gained a reputation as an outreach synagogue, was offering fifty Torah classes per week to over 1,200 students. Working as a Kiruv Professional In December 1975 Reb Effie made two life-changing moves. First, he married Aidel Spitz. Second, he started the LSS Shabbos morning Beginners Service (thirty-eight and a half years and going strong, b H). Reb Effie started it at the request of his student Steven Reich (a world-famous music composer who became frum), with four beginners. The service began catching on, and in 1978, after The New York Times published a major story on the Beginners Service, attendance became SRO (standing room only). Well over 15,000 Beginners have attended the service over the years, most have been hosted for Shabbos meals by the Buchwalds and many are frum today. As a result of the innovative programming, many young Jews began to flock to the Upper West Side to live. It was common for over 5,000 such American Jews to attend the dancing outside LSS on Simchas Torah. Rabbis Riskin and Buchwald are often credited with singlehandedly rejewvenating the Upper West Side. They were certainly making Inyan Magazine 11 Av 5774 15
With tens of thousands of Jews longing for more Jewish involvement, Lincoln Square s model should be replicated in Jewish communities throughout the country. Rabbi Buchwald leading a model Seder. Torah observance fashionable. In 1980 they created, as an experiment, the now renowned Turn Friday Night Into Shabbos program at LSS, for Jews unfamiliar with the Shabbos Seudah Experience, a slogan created by LSS member Jesse Cogan. The Rabbis advertised it locally and charged only $4 a person for a full Shabbos meal. To their amazement, 400 nonobservant Jews immediately signed up. Going National After several years, Reb Effie thought, With tens of thousands of Jews longing for more Jewish involvement, Lincoln Square s model should be replicated in Jewish communities throughout the country. When Reb Effie proposed this idea to Rabbi Riskin, the latter informed him that it was a great idea but that he was making Aliyah to become the Rabbi of the new Israeli town of Efrat. Reb Effie seemed to bide his time for four years, but he was readying his plans. In June 1987 he left his secure, full-time job at LSS to found National Jewish Outreach Program (NJOP) and at the same time became the founding chairman of the Association of Jewish Outreach Professionals (AJOP). He still runs Lincoln Square s Shabbos morning Beginner s Service. AJOP, which he headed for ten years, is now led by Rabbi Yitzchak Itche Lowenbraun of Baltimore. Rabbi Buchwald, who had never done any serious fund-raising before founding NJOP, was determined to have adequate funding before starting. Fortunately, a nonobservant cousin helped him raise much of the start-up money. He also received substantial funding from Zalman Sanford Bernstein, who founded the Avi Chai Foundation. Rabbi Buchwald paused to share an interesting story about one of his cousins. Many years ago, I was approached by my cousin, the real-estate mogul Edward S. Gordon, who told me that he was prepared to write his sixteen-year-old daughter out of his will because she showed no interest in anything Jewish and seemed determined to move away from Jewish life. I suggested that rather than punishing her, he try to do something positive and proactive. I convinced him to send his daughter to spend a few weeks at 16
the Brandeis-Bardin Institute. That positive, joyous Jewish experience changed her life. Soon after she returned, she started attending the LSS Beginners Service, eventually married a man from a traditional Jewish background and sent their children to a yeshivah day school. In early June I attended their twenty-threeyear-old son s amazing Chassidish wedding. Recognizing how just a small piece of advice had changed the destiny of this young lady s life and now her family s life, as well is positively enthralling. The NJOP The National Jewish Outreach Program (NJOP) was established to stem the loss of Jews from Jewish life due to assimilation and lack of Jewish knowledge. Through attractive and exciting free programs, NJOP reaches out to unaffiliated Jews, offering positive, joyous Jewish experiences and meaningful educational opportunities. NJOP began with crash courses in reading Hebrew and basic Judaism. They pioneered using radio ads with catchy jingles and were among the first to use toll-free telephone numbers such as 1-800- 44-HEBREW and 1-888-SHABBOS. They were hoping for 800 Jews to sign up for the Hebrew classes. To Reb Effie s astonishment, about 5,000 Jews signed up for the first Hebrew-reading crash course, some 3,000 of whom later enrolled in the basic Judaism crash course. Since its initiation in 1988, approximately 900,000 Jews have experienced the Shabbat Across America program; 200,000 Jews have taken the crash course in Hebrew reading (now called Read Hebrew America and Canada ), and 85,000 Jews have taken the Crash Course in Basic Judaism. As of June 2014, NJOP programs have been offered at more than 4,884 locations across North America and in forty-two countries worldwide. About 10 percent of North American Jews have participated in NJOP programs. Many years ago, NJOP ran a very popular campaign to convince Jews to give up smoking on Shabbos, titled: Give Your Lungs a Religious Experience This Shabbos, light candles instead of cigarettes (another brilliant Jesse Cogan slogan). With imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, other kiruv groups frequently imitate many of NJOP s methods and programs. Rabbi Buchwald explains that kiruv has become more difficult in the last ten to fifteen years due to the implosion of the Conservative Judaism movement, which was the biggest feeder to the baal teshuvah movement and to NJOP programs. Also, young Jews today have no memories of Hebrew school, bar and bas mitzvah ceremonies or even of a grandmother lighting Shabbos candles, as Jews of just a few years ago did. Regretfully, they are also likely to have many gentile relatives, and do not usually feel part of the Jewish people. Lastly, they are deeply Rabbi Buchwald with the former Chief Rabbi of Israel, who is now Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau. acculturated into today s very secular popular culture. Kiruv Today To the writer s surprise, the classic NJOP programs (Hebrew Reading Crash Course and Shabbat Across America) are now, in 2014, mostly attracting only those over age forty. So in order to attract the underforty crowd, Rabbi Buchwald has had to retool his approach. His experts tell him that, like it or not, the only way to reach young unaffiliated Jewish people today is through social media. In 2014, even the term Jewish outreach has become a pejorative. NJOP now uses the term Jewish engagement. In addition to its impressive and engaging website designed to attract nonobservant Jews, NJOP has expert writers and bloggers who send out NJOP s enormously popular Jewish Tweets; its Inyan Magazine 11 Av 5774 17
blog is circulated by and forwarded to about 250,000 Jews every single day. Rabbi Buchwald also has his Weekly Torah Message blog on the parashah that contains deep thoughts, articulated in a sophisticated and appealing way. One can sign up for free e-mail subscriptions to all these NJOP material. Rabbi Buchwald believes that the key to winning back intermarried Jews is constant, gentle, and loving communication. He says, We have to keep in touch. Then we must develop new strategies to lead them to religious observance. Working Together Rabbi Buchwald has worked very hard to avoid controversy within the Orthodox world. While he comes from a Yeshiva University (YU) background, when his kids were younger, the Buchwalds would summer in a heimishe (chareidi Orthodox) Jewish community in Tannersville, New York (Harav Yosef Breuer, zt l, used to summer there). Rabbi Buchwald developed a close friendship with Reb Yehuda Leib Braun, a talmid muvhak (prime disciple) of Harav Elya Swei, zt l, Rosh Yeshivah of the Philadelphia Yeshivah. Reb Yehuda Leib introduced Rabbi Buchwald to his Rosh Yeshivah. In 1989, Yehuda Leib arranged for Rabbi Buchwald to meet with the Moetzes Gedolei hatorah (Council of Torah Sages) of Agudath Israel. Rabbi Buchwald developed relationships with Harav Avraham Pam, zt l, Rosh Yeshivas Mesivta Torah Vodaath; and, ybl c, Harav Aharon Schechter, Rosh Yeshivas Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin; and the Novominsker Rebbe, Harav Yaakov Perlow, shlita, Rosh Agudas Yisrael. Rabbi Buchwald subsequently arranged two meetings between these three Torah giants and about thirty YU Rabbanim. Additionally, every Thanksgiving morning, Rabbi Buchwald would travel down to Philadelphia and meet with Rav Elya Swei for several hours. Harav Dovid Cohen, shlita, of Congregation Gvul Yaavetz in Flatbush, has been NJOP s regular posek Rabbi Buchwald blowing shofar at NJOP s Great Shofar Blast-off! To create awareness of the Yamim Nora im, NJOP sponsored the Great Shofar Blast-off! a contest to name best baal toke a in the U.S.A., in Manhattan s Herald Square, (halachic authority). However, in 1994 an issue came up that Harav Cohen felt was too big for him to decide alone. Harav Cohen introduced Rabbi Buchwald to Harav Zelig Epstein, zt l, Rosh Yeshivas Shaar HaTorah in Queens, an Alter Mirer and a grandson of Harav Shimon Shkop, zt l, Rosh Yeshivah of Grodno. For a year they worked on the issue. In 1995, with Harav Zelig s guidance and despite objections from some Rabbis, NJOP rolled out the Shabbat Across America program. Some 70,000 Jews participated in that Shabbos event. Kiruv and Orthodox Lay People Rabbi Buchwald believes in mobilizing every frum baal habayis (layperson) for kiruv. He avers, Kiruv cannot just be delegated to outreach professionals. Every baal habayis must be an ambassador of kiruv to the nonobservant Jewish world. Rabbi Buchwald defines success in kiruv using an analogy of the Kotzker Rebbe. Success is facilitating a Jew going up the ladder of Yiddishkeit from wherever he starts. Rabbi Effie constantly expresses tremendous gratitude to Hashem for giving him the opportunity to spend his life spreading Torah and mitzvos the word of Hashem. Looking Ahead Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald s achievements show how one man can make a difference to the Jewish people. Reb Effie is a regular frum Jew from a normative frum background. He is your next-door neighbor, someone you shmooze with before davening. While unusually dynamic, the source of Reb Effie s passion and charisma is his love for Torah and the Jewish people. This love is something we can all grow in, and by doing so, also make a difference to the Jewish people. I For assistance or questions related to kiruv, please call the Oz Nidberu Kiruv Hotline at 1-800-98 KIRUV. For comments and suggestions related to the A World of Kiruv column, you are invited to e-mail kiruvupdate@gmail.com. 18