An Audience of One // Rabbi David Refson, the pioneering founder of Neve Yerushalayim, ponders the past 50 years of Torah education for baalos teshuvah
by Sarah Shapiro
A few days before this interview took place, its two participants—interviewer and interviewee—agreed that the better part of wisdom would probably be to cancel. For in response to an email from me asking if there were aspects of his life and work on which he would particularly like to focus during our upcoming discussion, Rabbi David Refson, much to my chagrin, had replied:
“I have zero interest or even willingness to talk about any aspect of my work and life. My teacher, Reb Elya Lopian, zt”l, taught us that the kavod from any publicity that we seek out is taken from our reward in Olam Haba. At my advanced age, a self-serving ‘advertorial’ about myself is the last thing my neshamah needs!
“Neve is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its inauguration and as one of its founders, I would be happy to speak of its past, present, and future, iy”H. Should this be consonant with the interests of your editor, I would be happy to meet.”
To which I replied:
To which I replied:
“With your permission, I will forward this correspondence to the editor, Rechy Frankfurter. For my part, I find it hard to imagine a conversation about Neve and its history without involving the topic of your life and work.”
At this moment, even now, I still don’t know exactly how that preliminary stumbling block was removed from our path. All I can say is that the impasse, and its disappearance, served perfectly to introduce me to the charismatic, legendary director of the Orthodox world’s preeminent Torah institution for baalos teshuvah, where from one generation to the next, for the past 50 years, assimilated Jewish women from around the globe have been seeking, and discovering, their spiritual inheritance.
*
At two minutes after the hour, in strode a tall Rabbi David Refson for our 9 a.m. appointment, declining my offers of refreshment as I showed him to his seat.
“Rabbi Refson,” I begin hesitantly, “I hope it’s all right with you if we start off the interview with questions about your life.”
“Rabbi Refson,” I begin hesitantly, “I hope it’s all right with you if we start off the interview with questions about your life.”
“Absolutely! I’m happy to discuss anything you wish. Full speed ahead. As the Baal HaTanya instructed, ‘Always transcend the obstacle.’”
“Thank you. So to begin, I’d like to ask if you ever anticipated when you were growing up that one day you’d spearhead a revolutionary concept in frum society—an institution to provide adult Torah education for assimilated Jewish women.”
“Well. The short answer? No. I did not. The long answer… I grew up in a religious environment in England, in a town called Sunderland. All my Jewish friends and I went to non-Jewish schools and Hebrew school in the afternoon. I didn’t learn a thing in Hebrew school. Really, nothing at all. In retrospect, I would say that this was a function of my resentment of having to spend my evenings studying while my non-Jewish schoolmates were out enjoying themselves.
“My father was a man of wealth, an entrepreneur. He did very well. And he expected me to take over the business.
“In 1963, I went to Israel as a member of Bnei Akiva, a very Zionist youth group. I had been in yeshivah unsuccessfully. Yeshivah was clearly not my career path. But my father had told me before I left, ‘When you go to Israel, I want you to visit Rav Elya Lopian.’ They knew each other.
“Now, Rav Elya’s story is very interesting. In Europe before the war, he had been the head of the Kelm Yeshivah, the center of the mussar movement. In any case, Rav Elya asked me why I was not in yeshivah. I don’t remember exactly how I responded, but whatever I said was clearly unsatisfactory. He said, ‘We do not normally take people of your standard into our yeshivah, but I feel so indebted to your father that I feel I must make an exception. It is not proper that the son of my friend Avrohom Abba Refson should be an am ha’aretz.’
“He then proceeded to book a call—that was how long-distance calls were made in those days!—to ask the rosh yeshivah, Rav Elya Mishkovsky, to make an exception in my case. I couldn’t hear the response of the rosh yeshivah, but it was clear to me that there was no great enthusiasm on his part. And all of this was going on without once asking me for a reaction!”
“Rabbi Refson, you were saying about Rav Lopian that his story is very interesting…”
“Yes, well, you see, in Kelm, Rav Elya had been at the height of his fame and fortune, a star of the mussar movement. What happened was that in 1929, long before the Nazis came to power, he had a distinct feeling that he had to leave Eastern Europe. And that is what he did. People thought he had lost his mind, absolutely. He emigrated to England.
“In England, nobody was interested in mussar. They were interested in making money, in climbing out of poverty. Rav Elya had a terrible time there. And so years later, when my father came to visit me in Israel, Rav Elya told him very sadly that in England he had had 25 bitterer yahren (bitter years).
“Rav Elya had nine children. And the good side of it, of course, was that all except for one son, who had stayed in Telz, all his children and descendants escaped the Holocaust. So after the Second World War, it was Rav Elya’s sons and sons-in-law who became the great roshei yeshivah of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. He himself didn’t have talmidim from his years in England, but his sons and sons-in-law all became famous.
“It was miraculous.” Rabbi Refson gives one slow, wondering shake of the head. “To leave Kelm at the height of his fame and fortune, at the height of his profession… Think of it. Chazal say that you can’t sit at two tables. Rav Elya said in the name of Rabbeinu Yonah that you have a choice—reward here or reward in the next world. If people give you recognition of their own accord, then you’re not responsible. But if you decide you want fame and recognition, and you seek recognition, and you want kavod, then it comes off your cheshbon in the next world.”
I ask Rabbi Refson how one could reconcile that reality with the principle that the only yetzer hara that increases with age is the desire for honor.
“Yes. A person who lacks identity,” Rabbi Refson replies, “takes his identity from what people say about him. I believe the explanation is that people have an enormous fear of dying and being forgotten. And therefore, they reassure themselves that they are respected because they want to believe that that respect will transcend their passing.
“Every American president in our time has been obsessed with his legacy—how will he be remembered? Will he be remembered as a great president or as an average president? All of them, they all have libraries built to house their documents and papers. And who goes to study the papers? No one! You know, I’ll tell you a st—no. Never mind.”
“No, please, tell me! What story? Anything you don’t want me to include, you can tell me and I’ll delete it.”
“Well….” Rabbi Refson ponders a moment. “All right. I had a business partner back in the 1970s, a son-in-law of David Rockefeller—Paul Grohwald, a Jew, who married Rockefeller’s daughter, Eileen Rockefeller, after she converted. I was in Manhattan for Neve business one day in the early ’70s, and Paul said to me, ‘Let’s take my in-laws out to dinner.’ I was uninterested in this, so then he said, ‘Let’s go over to their townhouse for drinks.’ And that’s what we did.
“As David Rockefeller drank—it’s what all of them did after a day of work; they’d go out for drinks. They’d drink before dinner and after dinner. And during dinner.” Rabbi Refson chuckles. “So as he drank, David Rockefeller became more and more talkative. And he told me a story about his grandfather, John D. Rockefeller. They all called him “John D.” David told me that when John D. was getting up there in years, he grew increasingly upset that everybody in America knew him as a robber baron. He was said to have enriched himself at the expense of the impoverished masses. John D. was very upset that this was going to be his legacy. He said to himself, ‘Now, how can I change this?’
“So he came up with an idea—Rockefeller University! But after the university was built, John D. realized that it hadn’t helped him at all. Now people were saying, ‘Who’s behind Rockefeller U? The robber baron!’”
Rabbi Refson pauses here to smile wryly. “The point being that you can’t escape your legacy. Oh, and David Rockefeller also said to me, after he’d had a few more, ‘Rabbi, if you ever decide to cross the line, I can get you a job as the priest of St. Thomas.’ That was the local Episcopal church.”
“What? He was joking, of course.”
Rabbi Refson tips his head back with a happy laugh. “Oh, no. He wasn’t joking, he was drunk. Rockefeller was a big donor to the church. He said to me, ‘We need someone like you in the church.’ His wife, who was sitting there in the living room with us, said to him, ‘Dear, even you can’t do that. You can’t offer a Jew a job as the priest.’ And he retorted, ‘Oh, yes, I can. In that church, I get what I want.’ You see, he was drunk, and he owned Chase Manhattan Bank.”
Rabbi Refson laughs again, heartily, and changes the subject. “I gave someone an interview once, which he promised he wouldn’t publish until after I die. It was sort of like a post-mortem clause. I told him that I was prepared to be candid with him provided that whatever I did not wish to be published while I was still alive he could print after I die.”
“Why didn’t you want it published?”
“Too much about me.”
I ask Rabbi Refson if he could reconcile that with Rabbi Avigdor Miller’s statement that every person is obligated—that it’s a non-optional mitzvas asei—to remember, to keep a record, to write down everything that has happened to him in his life, all the stations he has passed through during his own 40 years in the desert. For otherwise he will forget all the kindnesses Hashem has done for him.
“That’s for the person himself; it’s not for others. It’s for ourselves that we mustn’t forget.”
“Why not tell others?” I ask. “People can inspire each other and educate each other. We learn from other people’s life experiences.”
“True. But if my purpose in sharing is to impress you, then that’s wrong.”
I ask how a person can escape the desire to impress.
“By playing to an audience of One.”
“You mean Hashem.”
“Yes. If the purpose is to show other people a superior mode of behavior, well, that’s fine. For example, people often think that certain things are impossible to achieve. By sharing the stories of gedolim, people realize they can go a lot higher. The Gemara tells such stories in order to show to what heights a person can aspire.”
“So, Rabbi Refson, what about a person telling his own stories?”
“If he’s doing it to benefit others, that’s good.”
“And what if he’s doing it to benefit himself as well as others? I’m thinking of something else I heard on a tape by Rabbi Miller—that if you do something good for yourself, you’re helping a fellow Jew.”
“Well, because it can become addictive. Once you see how people are impressed by you, it can take over your life. You do things to impress people. It’s two different things—talking about one’s life in order to impress, or doing exactly the same thing in order to inspire.”
“And if inspiring others impresses them?”
“That’s perfectly all right. If my intention is to inspire and people are impressed, that’s not my fault. It’s fine. Let’s say a person thinks he cannot study more than four hours a day. I used to think that; then I found out it’s not true. I have students who will tell me that they can’t do it, and I say, ‘I used to think that about myself, and then I discovered that it’s an artificial limitation.’
“The same goes for doing chesed, and even for the amount of sleep we think we really require. Have you ever heard someone say, ‘If I don’t get enough sleep, I’m a zombie’? Then we hear how little sleep the gedolim get and ask ourselves whether we really require eight hours of sleep. After all, when we are really enjoying ourselves, we make do with far less. Rav Elya taught us that this is one meaning of the dictum of Chazal that jealousy of scholars promotes wisdom.”
I ask Rabbi Refson if the question of doing something good for other people’s approval or for purer motives—for Hashem’s approval—is especially an issue for those who have grown up under the influence of British culture, because of the English emphasis on doing what’s proper.
“Proper,” he retorts, “is a goyishe concept.
“My late father, z”l, was exceptionally successful in this world. And I noticed that he was careful to talk to my brother and me about both his successes and his failures. He spoke to us about where he had gone wrong. He would tell us that he did such-and-such and it didn’t work out, and he would tell us why.”
“You mean in his business ventures?”
“Doesn’t matter whether he was talking about business or other matters. What I’m saying is that he was trying to inspire us not to be afraid of failure. Afterward, I found out that many fathers only tell their children about their successes, the result being that the children develop an exaggerated fear of failure. They think, ‘My father never failed, so I can’t fail.’ So if there is a chance of failing, the children won’t—they can’t—do things. They have a terrible fear of failing.
“When I was born, my father was over 40. My mother, too. I have one sibling who was born a year after me. I was therefore brought up by mature parents. They weren’t learning parenthood on the job.”
“Wouldn’t you say that when it comes to parenting, learning on the job is inevitable?”
“Yes. True.”
“And arriving at age 40 doesn’t necessarily mean that a person is mature.”
“Right again. But one’s chances of being mature are better at 40 than at 20.”
“I’m sure you’re not recommending postponement of marriage and parenting until age 40, are you?”
“No, certainly not. They would make a problem for me if they heard me saying that in Meah Shearim! I’m simply pointing out the advantages of having mature parents. There are many benefits. My parents brought to their parenting a certain maturity. On the other hand, because my father’s father and my father’s grandfather all died very young, he didn’t want to leave orphans.”
“Did your father die young?”
“Yes.” Rabbi Refson sits and thinks for a few long moments before continuing. “You know, we always imagine that other parents are like our own parents, and then we find out when we talk to our friends that some of the building blocks of personality were missing. That they were teaching the wrong things.”
“Was your father religiously observant?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, absolutely. But there was no Jewish school for the children of observant families—the Jewish population was too small for that—so, like all the Orthodox parents at that time and place, there was no recourse for them other than to send their children to a non-Jewish school and to Hebrew school in the afternoons.
“In the gentile school, there were only four Jews in my grade, all four of whom were at the top of the class. Now, some of the Jewish parents told their children that they were innately superior, but my father told me that I was a big fish in a small pond. He saw the danger in allowing class rank to become the governing factor in a child’s self-esteem, in deciding how clever he is. This served me well when I went to yeshivah and discovered that in the yeshivah environment, I was regarded as thoroughly mediocre!”
“So, Rabbi Refson…it sounds as if your father indoctrinated you quite well.”
“It wasn’t indoctrination. It was education. Absolutely. Education is not indoctrination. My late father taught his two sons very well. One of the things he told my brother and me was that there are two groups in life that are condemned to misery. One is the group of bright people who think they are brilliant, and the other is the group of brilliant people who think they are geniuses.
“He explained that both kinds are miserable because when they don’t achieve what they imagine they’re supposed to achieve, they come to the conclusion that there is a conspiracy in the world of the mediocre against the outstanding. They tell themselves false stories—which they themselves come to believe—about why they haven’t achieved what they expected to achieve. Their expectations outstrip reality. It is a dangerous place to be.”
“What you’re saying, Rabbi Refson, reminds me of a line attributed to the writer Kurt Vonnegut, that educators teach children how to succeed, but what they should really be teaching them is how to fail because that’s usually what happens.”
“Well, that’s not quite what I’m talking about. What actually happens is that before we succeed, we fail. And if one is not careful, the failure can cause a sense of hopelessness. Rav Yitzchok Hutner, zt”l, used to say that you can afford to lose battles, but you cannot afford to lose the war. Failure is what happens along the way. And after each failure, you’re more capable. As Shlomo Hamelech teaches, ‘The righteous fall seven times and get up.’”
“Can you share a time when you failed?”
“Oh!” Rabbi Refson gives that dismissive wave of his hand, as if brushing off a fly. “There are too many of them to remember. Many of my brilliant ideas turned out to be failures. Too many failed seminaries and programs even to recall.”
“Schools besides Neve?”
“Oh, yes.”
“So how did Neve get off the ground?”
“Back in the 1960s, I put an ad in The Jerusalem Post, ‘Jerusalem Yeshivah Courses for Adults,’ and to my surprise, the great majority of respondents were women. I was so surprised; I’d been expecting male respondents. Most of the women who responded were in their late 20s and early 30s, and I was 24. Some of them were ten years older than I! So I went to Rav Shlomo Wolbe, zt”l, and he told me to open a women’s seminary. He said, ‘It’s fine—just don’t let them know your age.’ He also revealed to me that after the Second World War, he had opened a baal teshuvah seminary for women in Sweden.
“In any case, that’s how Neve began. I left ‘Jerusalem Yeshivah Courses’ and Rabbi Baruch Horowitz morphed it, so to speak, into Dvar Yerushalayim, which exists to this day. And with Rabbi Chalkovsky, a master educator, and Rachel Levy, who was one of the original students at Gateshead Seminary, we started Neve Yerushalayim. Rachel Levy, too, was a highly experienced educator. She was niftar about 20 years ago.
“What did I learn from this experience? I learned that you need mature people to serve as teachers. So then I requested of Rabbi Eliyahu Munk, zt”l, that he come to join us. Rabbi Munk was the eponymous rabbi of the famed synagogue of the German kehillah in London. He was a pillar of Torah and a pillar of common sense. And he came. He taught every single day at Neve for 11 years, up until the day he died. He was our advisor. He had seen everything in life. When he came to us, he was already past the age of 73.
“Rabbi Munk once listened in to my counseling of a Neve woman and afterward said to me, ‘You immediately responded by considering what could be done. In my experience, you must first consider if anything should be done, because doing nothing is often the best option. Only if you conclude that something must be done should you then consider what to do.’ This advice has saved me on countless occasions.
“We also used to go to Be’er Yaakov every week to ask Rav Wolbe our questions.”
“What kinds of questions? Can you give some examples?”
Rabbi Refson laughs. “You know, I don’t have any sisters, only one brother. So one of my questions was, what do you do when a woman cries? And what was Rav Wolbe’s answer? ‘You have a box of tissues on the table!’ Another question that we asked Rav Wolbe: ‘What meforshim should we use when we teach Chumash?’ And Rav Wolbe told us to search for those that inspire, that bear a contemporary message.
“We learned something extremely important from Rav Wolbe that he said he himself had learned as an educator in Sweden. He said that most of the young women in the seminary that he started after the war had come from religious homes, but they had no education; they had arrived in seminary after being in Nazi concentration camps for five or six years. What was the process by which they became religious? Once you know the process, said Rav Wolbe, then you know what to teach and how to teach it.’
“What stands in the way of becoming religious? It is not a lack of knowledge. That’s not how it works… It’s a lack of inspiration and a lack of feeling comfortable with being religious. You have no idea how important it is the way the people around you influence you, how they react to you. What will your parents say? What will your friends say? Will I lose my friends? Will I lose my parents?
“Rabbi Noach Weinberg, zt”l, believed that you could prove to people that Judaism is right, that Judaism is truth. That G-d created the world, that He gave the Torah at Sinai—and that once you prove that, the person gets up and shouts, ‘Eureka!’ I disagreed with Rav Weinberg.
“For the last 20 or 30 years, philosophy has been a dying subject. In the colleges of America, they’re shutting down philosophy departments due to lack of students. Two hundred years ago, Rav Nachman said the only place one could find people who were philosophically inclined was in France; even today, turn on a television in France and you’ll see philosophers talking.
“But in our society nowadays, people don’t make decisions in life on a philosophical basis. When people profess philosophical doubts, it is simply a way of avoiding religious obligations. They want someone to ‘prove’ to them that G-d exists, that He gave the Torah at Sinai, and [they ask] where G-d was during the Holocaust, etc.—and after getting answers to that, they will suddenly give up everything and go to live in Meah Shearim?
“In my experience, it’s not like that, certainly not for women, and not for men either. In 50 years, not one woman has ever told me she prefers scuba diving or shopping to sitting in shul. It is always framed instead in terms of belief. Yet the truth is that we’re in a generation in which people fire off the arrow, then draw the circle.
“Chazal made an identical statement two thousand years ago. Jews have never worshiped idols except as a way to do whatever their hearts desired.
“You have to teach students enough so that it speaks to them. Women know what they want out of life. Women want a life with meaning and purpose. They want children. A family. They want an honest, sincere, appreciative husband. And they have to be shown that the way to acquire this happiness is by marrying someone who has an obligation to act this way.
“A few weeks ago, a donor came to Neve—an observant person, the son of a well-known rabbi—and he was looking to see what Neve is all about. We introduced him to six students. One was a stockbroker, one was a dentist, another was an accountant, one was in PR. Six successful women. They told him their stories. He listened and listened, and finally, he couldn’t help himself and he said, ‘Why did you become religious? You had it all.’ One of the women said to him, ‘Don’t you understand the difference between success and fulfillment?’ But he didn’t give up. He said to them, ‘So was it trauma that brought you to religion?’
“The women were looking around at each other with an expression on their faces that was like, What’s with this guy? So one of them said, ‘I failed driver’s ed twice.’”
“She was joking?”
“Of course she was. Her point was that trauma was not what brought her to Neve. Trauma as a path to becoming religious is very rare now. Rabbi Wolbe wrote a sefer after the Six-Day War, and in it he made two points: Miracles rarely produce lasting baalei teshuvah. Miracles didn’t make people religious at Har Sinai, and miracles don’t make people religious today. Miracles don’t work. And trauma doesn’t work.”
“The students you chose to bring to the donor—they were all professionals, right?”
“Yes. That’s the kind of student we get at Neve nowadays. And the average age of the Neve student today is post-graduate. The majority have been to college, and they have professional qualifications. They’ve done what was expected of them in their secular culture, and it did not bring them fulfillment.”
“Rabbi Refson, when I was becoming observant in the 1970s, philosophical questions did play a huge part in my process. It did for everyone I knew back then—maybe in part because of the Holocaust; it was so close behind us. So Rabbi Weinberg’s approach, Rebbetzin Weinberg’s approach, was just right for us.
“What I needed, I think, was to realize that my fellow human beings couldn’t know the answers to the kinds of questions I was asking, but that being a committed, believing Jew isn’t a matter of having answers to philosophical questions. Being able to keep posing the questions, though, to express them to a knowledgeable, trustworthy person who wouldn’t condemn you for asking—that was essential.”
“Yes, you’re right. The process of becoming religious changes with every generation. I see it at Neve. Every five or six years, there’s a massive change in the Neve population. When you run a school like Neve, you come to realize that the process of becoming frum is within each person. You can give the necessary information; you can provide certain inspiration. But essentially what you have to do is avoid ruining that feeling inside them. You can’t exhibit prejudice. All you have to do is not say the wrong thing.”
He pauses before continuing. “Playing to an audience of One is the prerequisite.”
I ask what his involvement in the yeshivah consists of nowadays.
“Well, I’m still traveling five months a year to do Neve fundraising, and when I’m back home in Jerusalem, I teach at the school 12 hours a week. There are various schools on the Neve campus now that share the classrooms and the facilities. I oversee these various schools and meet regularly with the heads of each one.
“There are three separate schools for women from religious families, as well as programs for Israeli-born students and for students from other countries, from non-English-speaking backgrounds. There’s a high school for American olim and a mental health facility for chareidim—the largest one in Israel. There’s a post-master’s-degree training program in clinical psychology and other degree programs. The cultural integration of the diverse student populations enriches the educational experience in myriad ways, for everyone.”
“My machateniste, Batya Barak, was one of your earliest students in the 1970s. She’s told me that after she got married, she used to go to you and your wife for Shabbos quite often with her young family. My daughter-in-law was just a toddler then, but she remembers that.”
Rabbi Refson nods, remembering.
“How many graduates have there been altogether through the years?”
“Approximately 35,000.”
“Rabbi Refson, do you have more Rav Elya stories?”
“Oh, yes. Many.”
“Can you share one now?”
His gaze turns toward the window, where summer leaves are turning to fall.
A few long moments pass.
“All right. Another Rav Elya story. I was once with my teacher at a wedding, and he called me over and said, ‘You speak English, Dovid. Go over to that fellow over there and tell him to come to yeshivah.’ I looked and saw that Rav Elya was pointing to a young man with a long ponytail. This was the hippie era, you know. And I said under my breath, ‘Rebbe, he doesn’t look like yeshivah material. And anyway, you can’t just go over to someone and suggest that he turn his life around.’
“Now, this was, of course, some 20 years before Reb Meir Schuster did exactly that, with such massive success, at the Kotel. Rav Elya said to me, ‘Just do what I say.’ I objected again, this time saying, ‘Rebbe, please, I’m British. I need an introduction to him.’ My teacher became very agitated and said, ‘Tell me, if that fellow’s pants were on fire, would you wait for an introduction? I am telling you, the whole person is on fire. Go and speak to him.’
“So I did. And while the young man was very pleasant to me, he declined my suggestion, and I returned to Rav Elya with my report. My teacher must have identified a certain ‘I told you so’ note of triumph in my response, whereupon he quoted Rav Chaim Volozhiner, the founder of the Volozhin Yeshivah, who said, ‘We are not obligated to succeed, merely to try our best.’ ‘In the next world, Dovid,’ my teacher said, ‘people will blame us for not having done our best to persuade them to be better Jews. To escape this accusation, we are obligated to present to them the option of Torah.’
“Now, I am not suggesting that my teacher was a prophet, but he was teaching me a lesson, and it became the cornerstone of my life and career.”
Rabbi Refson glances at his watch and practically leaps to his feet. “Oh—I’m late! Please excuse me, I must go.” He expresses a courteous thank-you, bids me and my family a very good Shabbos, and with that, larger than life, he is on his way.
“Rabbi Refson, you were saying about Rav Lopian that his story is very interesting…”
“Yes, well, you see, in Kelm, Rav Elya had been at the height of his fame and fortune, a star of the mussar movement. What happened was that in 1929, long before the Nazis came to power, he had a distinct feeling that he had to leave Eastern Europe. And that is what he did. People thought he had lost his mind, absolutely. He emigrated to England.
“In England, nobody was interested in mussar. They were interested in making money, in climbing out of poverty. Rav Elya had a terrible time there. And so years later, when my father came to visit me in Israel, Rav Elya told him very sadly that in England he had had 25 bitterer yahren (bitter years).
“Rav Elya had nine children. And the good side of it, of course, was that all except for one son, who had stayed in Telz, all his children and descendants escaped the Holocaust. So after the Second World War, it was Rav Elya’s sons and sons-in-law who became the great roshei yeshivah of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. He himself didn’t have talmidim from his years in England, but his sons and sons-in-law all became famous.
“It was miraculous.” Rabbi Refson gives one slow, wondering shake of the head. “To leave Kelm at the height of his fame and fortune, at the height of his profession… Think of it. Chazal say that you can’t sit at two tables. Rav Elya said in the name of Rabbeinu Yonah that you have a choice—reward here or reward in the next world. If people give you recognition of their own accord, then you’re not responsible. But if you decide you want fame and recognition, and you seek recognition, and you want kavod, then it comes off your cheshbon in the next world.”
I ask Rabbi Refson how one could reconcile that reality with the principle that the only yetzer hara that increases with age is the desire for honor.
“Yes. A person who lacks identity,” Rabbi Refson replies, “takes his identity from what people say about him. I believe the explanation is that people have an enormous fear of dying and being forgotten. And therefore, they reassure themselves that they are respected because they want to believe that that respect will transcend their passing.
“Every American president in our time has been obsessed with his legacy—how will he be remembered? Will he be remembered as a great president or as an average president? All of them, they all have libraries built to house their documents and papers. And who goes to study the papers? No one! You know, I’ll tell you a st—no. Never mind.”
“No, please, tell me! What story? Anything you don’t want me to include, you can tell me and I’ll delete it.”
“Well….” Rabbi Refson ponders a moment. “All right. I had a business partner back in the 1970s, a son-in-law of David Rockefeller—Paul Grohwald, a Jew, who married Rockefeller’s daughter, Eileen Rockefeller, after she converted. I was in Manhattan for Neve business one day in the early ’70s, and Paul said to me, ‘Let’s take my in-laws out to dinner.’ I was uninterested in this, so then he said, ‘Let’s go over to their townhouse for drinks.’ And that’s what we did.
“As David Rockefeller drank—it’s what all of them did after a day of work; they’d go out for drinks. They’d drink before dinner and after dinner. And during dinner.” Rabbi Refson chuckles. “So as he drank, David Rockefeller became more and more talkative. And he told me a story about his grandfather, John D. Rockefeller. They all called him “John D.” David told me that when John D. was getting up there in years, he grew increasingly upset that everybody in America knew him as a robber baron. He was said to have enriched himself at the expense of the impoverished masses. John D. was very upset that this was going to be his legacy. He said to himself, ‘Now, how can I change this?’
“So he came up with an idea—Rockefeller University! But after the university was built, John D. realized that it hadn’t helped him at all. Now people were saying, ‘Who’s behind Rockefeller U? The robber baron!’”
Rabbi Refson pauses here to smile wryly. “The point being that you can’t escape your legacy. Oh, and David Rockefeller also said to me, after he’d had a few more, ‘Rabbi, if you ever decide to cross the line, I can get you a job as the priest of St. Thomas.’ That was the local Episcopal church.”
“What? He was joking, of course.”
Rabbi Refson tips his head back with a happy laugh. “Oh, no. He wasn’t joking, he was drunk. Rockefeller was a big donor to the church. He said to me, ‘We need someone like you in the church.’ His wife, who was sitting there in the living room with us, said to him, ‘Dear, even you can’t do that. You can’t offer a Jew a job as the priest.’ And he retorted, ‘Oh, yes, I can. In that church, I get what I want.’ You see, he was drunk, and he owned Chase Manhattan Bank.”
Rabbi Refson laughs again, heartily, and changes the subject. “I gave someone an interview once, which he promised he wouldn’t publish until after I die. It was sort of like a post-mortem clause. I told him that I was prepared to be candid with him provided that whatever I did not wish to be published while I was still alive he could print after I die.”
“Why didn’t you want it published?”
“Too much about me.”
I ask Rabbi Refson if he could reconcile that with Rabbi Avigdor Miller’s statement that every person is obligated—that it’s a non-optional mitzvas asei—to remember, to keep a record, to write down everything that has happened to him in his life, all the stations he has passed through during his own 40 years in the desert. For otherwise he will forget all the kindnesses Hashem has done for him.
“That’s for the person himself; it’s not for others. It’s for ourselves that we mustn’t forget.”
“Why not tell others?” I ask. “People can inspire each other and educate each other. We learn from other people’s life experiences.”
“True. But if my purpose in sharing is to impress you, then that’s wrong.”
I ask how a person can escape the desire to impress.
“By playing to an audience of One.”
“You mean Hashem.”
“Yes. If the purpose is to show other people a superior mode of behavior, well, that’s fine. For example, people often think that certain things are impossible to achieve. By sharing the stories of gedolim, people realize they can go a lot higher. The Gemara tells such stories in order to show to what heights a person can aspire.”
“So, Rabbi Refson, what about a person telling his own stories?”
“If he’s doing it to benefit others, that’s good.”
“And what if he’s doing it to benefit himself as well as others? I’m thinking of something else I heard on a tape by Rabbi Miller—that if you do something good for yourself, you’re helping a fellow Jew.”
“Well, because it can become addictive. Once you see how people are impressed by you, it can take over your life. You do things to impress people. It’s two different things—talking about one’s life in order to impress, or doing exactly the same thing in order to inspire.”
“And if inspiring others impresses them?”
“That’s perfectly all right. If my intention is to inspire and people are impressed, that’s not my fault. It’s fine. Let’s say a person thinks he cannot study more than four hours a day. I used to think that; then I found out it’s not true. I have students who will tell me that they can’t do it, and I say, ‘I used to think that about myself, and then I discovered that it’s an artificial limitation.’
“The same goes for doing chesed, and even for the amount of sleep we think we really require. Have you ever heard someone say, ‘If I don’t get enough sleep, I’m a zombie’? Then we hear how little sleep the gedolim get and ask ourselves whether we really require eight hours of sleep. After all, when we are really enjoying ourselves, we make do with far less. Rav Elya taught us that this is one meaning of the dictum of Chazal that jealousy of scholars promotes wisdom.”
I ask Rabbi Refson if the question of doing something good for other people’s approval or for purer motives—for Hashem’s approval—is especially an issue for those who have grown up under the influence of British culture, because of the English emphasis on doing what’s proper.
“Proper,” he retorts, “is a goyishe concept.
“My late father, z”l, was exceptionally successful in this world. And I noticed that he was careful to talk to my brother and me about both his successes and his failures. He spoke to us about where he had gone wrong. He would tell us that he did such-and-such and it didn’t work out, and he would tell us why.”
“You mean in his business ventures?”
“Doesn’t matter whether he was talking about business or other matters. What I’m saying is that he was trying to inspire us not to be afraid of failure. Afterward, I found out that many fathers only tell their children about their successes, the result being that the children develop an exaggerated fear of failure. They think, ‘My father never failed, so I can’t fail.’ So if there is a chance of failing, the children won’t—they can’t—do things. They have a terrible fear of failing.
“When I was born, my father was over 40. My mother, too. I have one sibling who was born a year after me. I was therefore brought up by mature parents. They weren’t learning parenthood on the job.”
“Wouldn’t you say that when it comes to parenting, learning on the job is inevitable?”
“Yes. True.”
“And arriving at age 40 doesn’t necessarily mean that a person is mature.”
“Right again. But one’s chances of being mature are better at 40 than at 20.”
“I’m sure you’re not recommending postponement of marriage and parenting until age 40, are you?”
“No, certainly not. They would make a problem for me if they heard me saying that in Meah Shearim! I’m simply pointing out the advantages of having mature parents. There are many benefits. My parents brought to their parenting a certain maturity. On the other hand, because my father’s father and my father’s grandfather all died very young, he didn’t want to leave orphans.”
“Did your father die young?”
“Yes.” Rabbi Refson sits and thinks for a few long moments before continuing. “You know, we always imagine that other parents are like our own parents, and then we find out when we talk to our friends that some of the building blocks of personality were missing. That they were teaching the wrong things.”
“Was your father religiously observant?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, absolutely. But there was no Jewish school for the children of observant families—the Jewish population was too small for that—so, like all the Orthodox parents at that time and place, there was no recourse for them other than to send their children to a non-Jewish school and to Hebrew school in the afternoons.
“In the gentile school, there were only four Jews in my grade, all four of whom were at the top of the class. Now, some of the Jewish parents told their children that they were innately superior, but my father told me that I was a big fish in a small pond. He saw the danger in allowing class rank to become the governing factor in a child’s self-esteem, in deciding how clever he is. This served me well when I went to yeshivah and discovered that in the yeshivah environment, I was regarded as thoroughly mediocre!”
“So, Rabbi Refson…it sounds as if your father indoctrinated you quite well.”
“It wasn’t indoctrination. It was education. Absolutely. Education is not indoctrination. My late father taught his two sons very well. One of the things he told my brother and me was that there are two groups in life that are condemned to misery. One is the group of bright people who think they are brilliant, and the other is the group of brilliant people who think they are geniuses.
“He explained that both kinds are miserable because when they don’t achieve what they imagine they’re supposed to achieve, they come to the conclusion that there is a conspiracy in the world of the mediocre against the outstanding. They tell themselves false stories—which they themselves come to believe—about why they haven’t achieved what they expected to achieve. Their expectations outstrip reality. It is a dangerous place to be.”
“What you’re saying, Rabbi Refson, reminds me of a line attributed to the writer Kurt Vonnegut, that educators teach children how to succeed, but what they should really be teaching them is how to fail because that’s usually what happens.”
“Well, that’s not quite what I’m talking about. What actually happens is that before we succeed, we fail. And if one is not careful, the failure can cause a sense of hopelessness. Rav Yitzchok Hutner, zt”l, used to say that you can afford to lose battles, but you cannot afford to lose the war. Failure is what happens along the way. And after each failure, you’re more capable. As Shlomo Hamelech teaches, ‘The righteous fall seven times and get up.’”
“Can you share a time when you failed?”
“Oh!” Rabbi Refson gives that dismissive wave of his hand, as if brushing off a fly. “There are too many of them to remember. Many of my brilliant ideas turned out to be failures. Too many failed seminaries and programs even to recall.”
“Schools besides Neve?”
“Oh, yes.”
“So how did Neve get off the ground?”
“Back in the 1960s, I put an ad in The Jerusalem Post, ‘Jerusalem Yeshivah Courses for Adults,’ and to my surprise, the great majority of respondents were women. I was so surprised; I’d been expecting male respondents. Most of the women who responded were in their late 20s and early 30s, and I was 24. Some of them were ten years older than I! So I went to Rav Shlomo Wolbe, zt”l, and he told me to open a women’s seminary. He said, ‘It’s fine—just don’t let them know your age.’ He also revealed to me that after the Second World War, he had opened a baal teshuvah seminary for women in Sweden.
“In any case, that’s how Neve began. I left ‘Jerusalem Yeshivah Courses’ and Rabbi Baruch Horowitz morphed it, so to speak, into Dvar Yerushalayim, which exists to this day. And with Rabbi Chalkovsky, a master educator, and Rachel Levy, who was one of the original students at Gateshead Seminary, we started Neve Yerushalayim. Rachel Levy, too, was a highly experienced educator. She was niftar about 20 years ago.
“What did I learn from this experience? I learned that you need mature people to serve as teachers. So then I requested of Rabbi Eliyahu Munk, zt”l, that he come to join us. Rabbi Munk was the eponymous rabbi of the famed synagogue of the German kehillah in London. He was a pillar of Torah and a pillar of common sense. And he came. He taught every single day at Neve for 11 years, up until the day he died. He was our advisor. He had seen everything in life. When he came to us, he was already past the age of 73.
“Rabbi Munk once listened in to my counseling of a Neve woman and afterward said to me, ‘You immediately responded by considering what could be done. In my experience, you must first consider if anything should be done, because doing nothing is often the best option. Only if you conclude that something must be done should you then consider what to do.’ This advice has saved me on countless occasions.
“We also used to go to Be’er Yaakov every week to ask Rav Wolbe our questions.”
“What kinds of questions? Can you give some examples?”
Rabbi Refson laughs. “You know, I don’t have any sisters, only one brother. So one of my questions was, what do you do when a woman cries? And what was Rav Wolbe’s answer? ‘You have a box of tissues on the table!’ Another question that we asked Rav Wolbe: ‘What meforshim should we use when we teach Chumash?’ And Rav Wolbe told us to search for those that inspire, that bear a contemporary message.
“We learned something extremely important from Rav Wolbe that he said he himself had learned as an educator in Sweden. He said that most of the young women in the seminary that he started after the war had come from religious homes, but they had no education; they had arrived in seminary after being in Nazi concentration camps for five or six years. What was the process by which they became religious? Once you know the process, said Rav Wolbe, then you know what to teach and how to teach it.’
“What stands in the way of becoming religious? It is not a lack of knowledge. That’s not how it works… It’s a lack of inspiration and a lack of feeling comfortable with being religious. You have no idea how important it is the way the people around you influence you, how they react to you. What will your parents say? What will your friends say? Will I lose my friends? Will I lose my parents?
“Rabbi Noach Weinberg, zt”l, believed that you could prove to people that Judaism is right, that Judaism is truth. That G-d created the world, that He gave the Torah at Sinai—and that once you prove that, the person gets up and shouts, ‘Eureka!’ I disagreed with Rav Weinberg.
“For the last 20 or 30 years, philosophy has been a dying subject. In the colleges of America, they’re shutting down philosophy departments due to lack of students. Two hundred years ago, Rav Nachman said the only place one could find people who were philosophically inclined was in France; even today, turn on a television in France and you’ll see philosophers talking.
“But in our society nowadays, people don’t make decisions in life on a philosophical basis. When people profess philosophical doubts, it is simply a way of avoiding religious obligations. They want someone to ‘prove’ to them that G-d exists, that He gave the Torah at Sinai, and [they ask] where G-d was during the Holocaust, etc.—and after getting answers to that, they will suddenly give up everything and go to live in Meah Shearim?
“In my experience, it’s not like that, certainly not for women, and not for men either. In 50 years, not one woman has ever told me she prefers scuba diving or shopping to sitting in shul. It is always framed instead in terms of belief. Yet the truth is that we’re in a generation in which people fire off the arrow, then draw the circle.
“Chazal made an identical statement two thousand years ago. Jews have never worshiped idols except as a way to do whatever their hearts desired.
“You have to teach students enough so that it speaks to them. Women know what they want out of life. Women want a life with meaning and purpose. They want children. A family. They want an honest, sincere, appreciative husband. And they have to be shown that the way to acquire this happiness is by marrying someone who has an obligation to act this way.
“A few weeks ago, a donor came to Neve—an observant person, the son of a well-known rabbi—and he was looking to see what Neve is all about. We introduced him to six students. One was a stockbroker, one was a dentist, another was an accountant, one was in PR. Six successful women. They told him their stories. He listened and listened, and finally, he couldn’t help himself and he said, ‘Why did you become religious? You had it all.’ One of the women said to him, ‘Don’t you understand the difference between success and fulfillment?’ But he didn’t give up. He said to them, ‘So was it trauma that brought you to religion?’
“The women were looking around at each other with an expression on their faces that was like, What’s with this guy? So one of them said, ‘I failed driver’s ed twice.’”
“She was joking?”
“Of course she was. Her point was that trauma was not what brought her to Neve. Trauma as a path to becoming religious is very rare now. Rabbi Wolbe wrote a sefer after the Six-Day War, and in it he made two points: Miracles rarely produce lasting baalei teshuvah. Miracles didn’t make people religious at Har Sinai, and miracles don’t make people religious today. Miracles don’t work. And trauma doesn’t work.”
“The students you chose to bring to the donor—they were all professionals, right?”
“Yes. That’s the kind of student we get at Neve nowadays. And the average age of the Neve student today is post-graduate. The majority have been to college, and they have professional qualifications. They’ve done what was expected of them in their secular culture, and it did not bring them fulfillment.”
“Rabbi Refson, when I was becoming observant in the 1970s, philosophical questions did play a huge part in my process. It did for everyone I knew back then—maybe in part because of the Holocaust; it was so close behind us. So Rabbi Weinberg’s approach, Rebbetzin Weinberg’s approach, was just right for us.
“What I needed, I think, was to realize that my fellow human beings couldn’t know the answers to the kinds of questions I was asking, but that being a committed, believing Jew isn’t a matter of having answers to philosophical questions. Being able to keep posing the questions, though, to express them to a knowledgeable, trustworthy person who wouldn’t condemn you for asking—that was essential.”
“Yes, you’re right. The process of becoming religious changes with every generation. I see it at Neve. Every five or six years, there’s a massive change in the Neve population. When you run a school like Neve, you come to realize that the process of becoming frum is within each person. You can give the necessary information; you can provide certain inspiration. But essentially what you have to do is avoid ruining that feeling inside them. You can’t exhibit prejudice. All you have to do is not say the wrong thing.”
He pauses before continuing. “Playing to an audience of One is the prerequisite.”
I ask what his involvement in the yeshivah consists of nowadays.
“Well, I’m still traveling five months a year to do Neve fundraising, and when I’m back home in Jerusalem, I teach at the school 12 hours a week. There are various schools on the Neve campus now that share the classrooms and the facilities. I oversee these various schools and meet regularly with the heads of each one.
“There are three separate schools for women from religious families, as well as programs for Israeli-born students and for students from other countries, from non-English-speaking backgrounds. There’s a high school for American olim and a mental health facility for chareidim—the largest one in Israel. There’s a post-master’s-degree training program in clinical psychology and other degree programs. The cultural integration of the diverse student populations enriches the educational experience in myriad ways, for everyone.”
“My machateniste, Batya Barak, was one of your earliest students in the 1970s. She’s told me that after she got married, she used to go to you and your wife for Shabbos quite often with her young family. My daughter-in-law was just a toddler then, but she remembers that.”
Rabbi Refson nods, remembering.
“How many graduates have there been altogether through the years?”
“Approximately 35,000.”
“Rabbi Refson, do you have more Rav Elya stories?”
“Oh, yes. Many.”
“Can you share one now?”
His gaze turns toward the window, where summer leaves are turning to fall.
A few long moments pass.
“All right. Another Rav Elya story. I was once with my teacher at a wedding, and he called me over and said, ‘You speak English, Dovid. Go over to that fellow over there and tell him to come to yeshivah.’ I looked and saw that Rav Elya was pointing to a young man with a long ponytail. This was the hippie era, you know. And I said under my breath, ‘Rebbe, he doesn’t look like yeshivah material. And anyway, you can’t just go over to someone and suggest that he turn his life around.’
“Now, this was, of course, some 20 years before Reb Meir Schuster did exactly that, with such massive success, at the Kotel. Rav Elya said to me, ‘Just do what I say.’ I objected again, this time saying, ‘Rebbe, please, I’m British. I need an introduction to him.’ My teacher became very agitated and said, ‘Tell me, if that fellow’s pants were on fire, would you wait for an introduction? I am telling you, the whole person is on fire. Go and speak to him.’
“So I did. And while the young man was very pleasant to me, he declined my suggestion, and I returned to Rav Elya with my report. My teacher must have identified a certain ‘I told you so’ note of triumph in my response, whereupon he quoted Rav Chaim Volozhiner, the founder of the Volozhin Yeshivah, who said, ‘We are not obligated to succeed, merely to try our best.’ ‘In the next world, Dovid,’ my teacher said, ‘people will blame us for not having done our best to persuade them to be better Jews. To escape this accusation, we are obligated to present to them the option of Torah.’
“Now, I am not suggesting that my teacher was a prophet, but he was teaching me a lesson, and it became the cornerstone of my life and career.”
Rabbi Refson glances at his watch and practically leaps to his feet. “Oh—I’m late! Please excuse me, I must go.” He expresses a courteous thank-you, bids me and my family a very good Shabbos, and with that, larger than life, he is on his way.
Voices:
Neve in the 1970s
The classrooms and dining room were housed in a small apartment in Bayit Vegan, and the girls lived in a few other apartments around the neighborhood. Everything was very simple and plain. Sometimes we’d even meet with the rabbis in their cars, which doubled as their offices. We did much of the cooking ourselves, and we ate whatever was cheap and in season. (I still remember opening the refrigerator and having tomatoes roll out all over the floor. There had obviously been a sale that day.) We shopped at the “Neve Niche,” which had an array of modest clothing.
After living in the US for a while I came back to visit Rav Refson on the new Har Nof campus, and he insisted that I stay for lunch just to see how far Neve had come gashmiyut-wise. I was blown away!
The first class I ever went to at Neve was given by Rav Eliyahu Munk. I had never seen someone with hadrat panim before. He walked slowly into the classroom, and all the girls stood up. Questions were asked about any subject at all, things that made me blush, but Rav Munk answered every single question carefully and with much thought. It was very different from what I’d experienced in university.
Rav Refson had the amazing (and rare) ability to delegate. He davka hired people who would complement him. In my opinion, few people are able to do this as well as he did. He created a wonderful staff of teachers.
Being at Neve was challenging on many different levels. All day (and often until late at night) we discussed G-d, Israel, our personal lives, and how becoming religious would affect everything. It was a wonderful time, a heady time when all possibilities were on the table. I have so many lovely memories of this very special time in my life, and I am very grateful to Neve for giving me all of this and so much more. –Batya Frelich Barak
The classrooms and dining room were housed in a small apartment in Bayit Vegan, and the girls lived in a few other apartments around the neighborhood. Everything was very simple and plain. Sometimes we’d even meet with the rabbis in their cars, which doubled as their offices. We did much of the cooking ourselves, and we ate whatever was cheap and in season. (I still remember opening the refrigerator and having tomatoes roll out all over the floor. There had obviously been a sale that day.) We shopped at the “Neve Niche,” which had an array of modest clothing.
After living in the US for a while I came back to visit Rav Refson on the new Har Nof campus, and he insisted that I stay for lunch just to see how far Neve had come gashmiyut-wise. I was blown away!
The first class I ever went to at Neve was given by Rav Eliyahu Munk. I had never seen someone with hadrat panim before. He walked slowly into the classroom, and all the girls stood up. Questions were asked about any subject at all, things that made me blush, but Rav Munk answered every single question carefully and with much thought. It was very different from what I’d experienced in university.
Rav Refson had the amazing (and rare) ability to delegate. He davka hired people who would complement him. In my opinion, few people are able to do this as well as he did. He created a wonderful staff of teachers.
Being at Neve was challenging on many different levels. All day (and often until late at night) we discussed G-d, Israel, our personal lives, and how becoming religious would affect everything. It was a wonderful time, a heady time when all possibilities were on the table. I have so many lovely memories of this very special time in my life, and I am very grateful to Neve for giving me all of this and so much more. –Batya Frelich Barak
Hardscrabble background
I’m an FFB from a very broken home, to the extent that I lived with teachers and friends for most of high school. I planned on going straight to college to study psychology; Judaism, coming from such a challenging situation, just wasn’t important to me. Then one of my mentors encouraged me to study at Neve during the summer before college, saying that it would be a different experience studying Judaism as an adult, with people from a variety of backgrounds. It sounded interesting, as my background was very different from that of my Bais Yaakov peers, so I went.
From my first day I was really impressed with the openness of the dialogue, the very real-life way of learning and questioning, and the appreciation of where each person was coming from.
For the first two months I was trying to assess if Judaism had a truthful basis. Once I felt confident about it, I realized that I needed to relearn everything I thought I knew in order to really live a Torah life. But despite having grown up frum, I didn’t know how. I stayed for a full year and learned under profoundly inspiring and exemplary rabbis and rebbetzins. I also helped them cook in their homes and spent countless Shabbosim with them, learning from their ways.
When one of my Neve rabbis thought of the “right one” for me, another one checked him out. Staff took me shopping, and they were “my side of the family” at my wedding. After the births of my first few children, we stayed with one of my teachers as one would stay with her mother. Till today, 16 years and seven children later, we continue to visit for Yomim Tovim.
My life was forever changed by Neve’s chesed. It is a place of true Torah learning and caring for each neshamah through and through.
Today, my husband and I are heavily involved in community work and outreach, grateful to be able to pass on all the truth and kindness I gained from my life-changing time at Neve Yerushalayim. Thank you! –Yehudis from Yerushalayim
I’m an FFB from a very broken home, to the extent that I lived with teachers and friends for most of high school. I planned on going straight to college to study psychology; Judaism, coming from such a challenging situation, just wasn’t important to me. Then one of my mentors encouraged me to study at Neve during the summer before college, saying that it would be a different experience studying Judaism as an adult, with people from a variety of backgrounds. It sounded interesting, as my background was very different from that of my Bais Yaakov peers, so I went.
From my first day I was really impressed with the openness of the dialogue, the very real-life way of learning and questioning, and the appreciation of where each person was coming from.
For the first two months I was trying to assess if Judaism had a truthful basis. Once I felt confident about it, I realized that I needed to relearn everything I thought I knew in order to really live a Torah life. But despite having grown up frum, I didn’t know how. I stayed for a full year and learned under profoundly inspiring and exemplary rabbis and rebbetzins. I also helped them cook in their homes and spent countless Shabbosim with them, learning from their ways.
When one of my Neve rabbis thought of the “right one” for me, another one checked him out. Staff took me shopping, and they were “my side of the family” at my wedding. After the births of my first few children, we stayed with one of my teachers as one would stay with her mother. Till today, 16 years and seven children later, we continue to visit for Yomim Tovim.
My life was forever changed by Neve’s chesed. It is a place of true Torah learning and caring for each neshamah through and through.
Today, my husband and I are heavily involved in community work and outreach, grateful to be able to pass on all the truth and kindness I gained from my life-changing time at Neve Yerushalayim. Thank you! –Yehudis from Yerushalayim
Mother and daughter experience
I will never forget January 1, 1985, the day I arrived at Neve in Bayit Vegan with my dear mother. She had returned to her Orthodox roots and suggested that we spend a couple of weeks learning together at Neve.
We were blown away by the classes and wonderful staff. I ended up spending the next year and a half basking in the phenomenal greenhouse of Jewish spiritual development that Neve provides.- Chana Levitan
I will never forget January 1, 1985, the day I arrived at Neve in Bayit Vegan with my dear mother. She had returned to her Orthodox roots and suggested that we spend a couple of weeks learning together at Neve.
We were blown away by the classes and wonderful staff. I ended up spending the next year and a half basking in the phenomenal greenhouse of Jewish spiritual development that Neve provides.- Chana Levitan
A plea at the Kotel
I guess you could say I relate to Neve the way most people relate to their mothers. When I was a teenager, I blamed it for all my problems, and now, as an adult, I am deeply grateful for everything it gave me.
I had just turned 18 when I arrived, and didn’t have any money for tuition. For two years straight they let me stay without paying a penny, because I didn’t have one to give. They invested a tremendous amount of money in me, but the return on their investment was the gorgeous family I have now, as well as a lifetime of gratitude. It still feels like home and I’m sure it always will.
Raised in an atheistic Jewish home, I’d been taught that my role as a Jew was “to make the world a better place.” I first came to Israel in 1974, right after the Yom Kippur War, and spent six months volunteering on a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz. As I was preparing to leave Israel, I went to Jerusalem to say a proper goodbye. Not knowing when if ever I’d be back, I went to the Kotel.
As I watched the other women around me who knew how to daven from a siddur, I felt a mix of frustration and sadness about not knowing how to read Hebrew or even which page to turn to. (This was before ArtScroll.) It was as if these people knew some essential and relevant information that I didn’t.
Standing at the Kotel, I asked Hashem, “If You’re really here, let me know it. This is the time and the place, because if You do exist and I go back to my life, I may never find out. And if You do exist, I want to know what that means for me as a Jew.”
A few moments later Rav Meir Shuster approached me and asked, “Are you Jewish? Do you want to learn about Judaism?” in a sincere, goal-oriented manner. He gave me a small paper with Neve’s address, and I went there the following morning.
The rest is history. I davened for the truth and I received it…at Neve.
I guess you could say I relate to Neve the way most people relate to their mothers. When I was a teenager, I blamed it for all my problems, and now, as an adult, I am deeply grateful for everything it gave me.
I had just turned 18 when I arrived, and didn’t have any money for tuition. For two years straight they let me stay without paying a penny, because I didn’t have one to give. They invested a tremendous amount of money in me, but the return on their investment was the gorgeous family I have now, as well as a lifetime of gratitude. It still feels like home and I’m sure it always will.
Raised in an atheistic Jewish home, I’d been taught that my role as a Jew was “to make the world a better place.” I first came to Israel in 1974, right after the Yom Kippur War, and spent six months volunteering on a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz. As I was preparing to leave Israel, I went to Jerusalem to say a proper goodbye. Not knowing when if ever I’d be back, I went to the Kotel.
As I watched the other women around me who knew how to daven from a siddur, I felt a mix of frustration and sadness about not knowing how to read Hebrew or even which page to turn to. (This was before ArtScroll.) It was as if these people knew some essential and relevant information that I didn’t.
Standing at the Kotel, I asked Hashem, “If You’re really here, let me know it. This is the time and the place, because if You do exist and I go back to my life, I may never find out. And if You do exist, I want to know what that means for me as a Jew.”
A few moments later Rav Meir Shuster approached me and asked, “Are you Jewish? Do you want to learn about Judaism?” in a sincere, goal-oriented manner. He gave me a small paper with Neve’s address, and I went there the following morning.
The rest is history. I davened for the truth and I received it…at Neve.
Lifelong gratitude
Back in 1974, Neve consisted of one apartment that served as a dining room and kitchen, and another that was used for classrooms. The students lived in several apartments that were scattered around Bayit Vegan. The physical environment was very humble, to say the least. Phone calls to home were made at the central post office, or else we scheduled an appointment to use the communal phone that was shared by all the neighbors in the building.
But it didn’t matter. We were thankful to have the opportunity to learn halachah and hashkafah, and to delve into Chumash and mefarshim. Neve united women from around the world who had very little in common other than a desire to learn and grow. Many of these friendships have lasted a lifetime, based on the shared experience of a meaningful stage of life.
Questions were encouraged, no matter how difficult. We also learned from the personal example of Neve’s staff, who exemplified Torah values even when facing significant challenges. We respected our rabbis and teachers, and it was obvious how they honored gedolei Yisrael. They modeled emunas chachamim and numerous other middos with humility (and humor).
Against great odds, Neve taught Torah in such a way that thousands of Jewish women have been inspired to live their lives with the yearning expressed by Dovid Hamelech: “Horeini Hashem darkecha,” and “shivti b’veis Hashem kol yemei chayai lachazos b’noam Hashem u’levaker b’heichalo.”
During every family simchah and trip to the Kotel, I feel gratitude for the opportunity to have raised children who are now bringing up their own children to be ovdei Hashem. There have been many times in my life when I thought, Maybe it was for this that Hashem gave me the privilege to come closer to Him.
After learning in Neve I don’t take anything for granted, not even the knowledge that Hashem exists and how to thank Him.
Back in 1974, Neve consisted of one apartment that served as a dining room and kitchen, and another that was used for classrooms. The students lived in several apartments that were scattered around Bayit Vegan. The physical environment was very humble, to say the least. Phone calls to home were made at the central post office, or else we scheduled an appointment to use the communal phone that was shared by all the neighbors in the building.
But it didn’t matter. We were thankful to have the opportunity to learn halachah and hashkafah, and to delve into Chumash and mefarshim. Neve united women from around the world who had very little in common other than a desire to learn and grow. Many of these friendships have lasted a lifetime, based on the shared experience of a meaningful stage of life.
Questions were encouraged, no matter how difficult. We also learned from the personal example of Neve’s staff, who exemplified Torah values even when facing significant challenges. We respected our rabbis and teachers, and it was obvious how they honored gedolei Yisrael. They modeled emunas chachamim and numerous other middos with humility (and humor).
Against great odds, Neve taught Torah in such a way that thousands of Jewish women have been inspired to live their lives with the yearning expressed by Dovid Hamelech: “Horeini Hashem darkecha,” and “shivti b’veis Hashem kol yemei chayai lachazos b’noam Hashem u’levaker b’heichalo.”
During every family simchah and trip to the Kotel, I feel gratitude for the opportunity to have raised children who are now bringing up their own children to be ovdei Hashem. There have been many times in my life when I thought, Maybe it was for this that Hashem gave me the privilege to come closer to Him.
After learning in Neve I don’t take anything for granted, not even the knowledge that Hashem exists and how to thank Him.
Dancing dilemma
When I came to Neve, I had recently graduated from the Juilliard School as a dance major and begun to establish a career as a dancer and choreographer in New York. I had started learning Torah in Manhattan and had begun to keep Shabbos, but I wasn’t sure how Torah, halachah and dance could go together.
This was over 35 years ago, and there was no one for me to look at as a role model, as there didn’t seem to be any frum dancers.
A lot of frum people had advised me to give up my focus on dance, but fortunately, Rabbi Refson wasn’t one of them. He even once spotted a book about a famous ballet dancer as he was passing through an airport on one of his trips, and he bought it for me. I was shocked when he gave it to me.
The Neve staff encouraged me as well. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Rabbi and Rebbetzin Kass, who put countless hours into providing me with direction for my creative side.
I was a student In 1987 when Neve had a fundraising event at the very large Binyanei Ha’uma. Dancing my heart out as one of the evening’s performers was a turning point for me. I finally saw and trusted that with daas Torah and creativity, I could find ways to integrate dancing into my life as a frum woman.
Now, 35 years later, there are many communities in which frum women are dancing, singing, acting and doing many other creative things.
For me, Rabbi Refson and Neve made what felt like an impossible transition possible. – Lisa Marcus
When I came to Neve, I had recently graduated from the Juilliard School as a dance major and begun to establish a career as a dancer and choreographer in New York. I had started learning Torah in Manhattan and had begun to keep Shabbos, but I wasn’t sure how Torah, halachah and dance could go together.
This was over 35 years ago, and there was no one for me to look at as a role model, as there didn’t seem to be any frum dancers.
A lot of frum people had advised me to give up my focus on dance, but fortunately, Rabbi Refson wasn’t one of them. He even once spotted a book about a famous ballet dancer as he was passing through an airport on one of his trips, and he bought it for me. I was shocked when he gave it to me.
The Neve staff encouraged me as well. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Rabbi and Rebbetzin Kass, who put countless hours into providing me with direction for my creative side.
I was a student In 1987 when Neve had a fundraising event at the very large Binyanei Ha’uma. Dancing my heart out as one of the evening’s performers was a turning point for me. I finally saw and trusted that with daas Torah and creativity, I could find ways to integrate dancing into my life as a frum woman.
Now, 35 years later, there are many communities in which frum women are dancing, singing, acting and doing many other creative things.
For me, Rabbi Refson and Neve made what felt like an impossible transition possible. – Lisa Marcus
ALL credit to Sarah Shapiro And The Ami Magazine
Photos: Shlomi Treichter, Ezra Trabelsi
