Yabloner Rebbe: The Rebbe of Change

David Bashevkin:

Hello, and welcome to the 18Forty podcast, where each month we explore a different topic balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless, Jewish ideas. I’m your host, David Bashevkin, and this month we’re exploring teshuva, transformative religious change. This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big, juicy Jewish ideas. So be sure to check out 18Forty.org. That’s the number 18 F-O-R-T-Y.org, where you can also find videos, articles, and recommended readings.

You may or may not know that I wrote a book about failure called Synagogue: Sin and Failure in Jewish Thought. I’m not here to plug the book, but I do want to open up this very special episode with the very same poem that I used to open up my book. It’s from a Pulitzer Prize winning poet named Philip Schultz, who has a collection of poems called The God of Loneliness. And when I saw a collection of poems with the title The God of Loneliness, I realized that this is how I needed to start a book about contending with sin and failure. I didn’t know what would be inside of it, and I opened up, and I saw that there was one poem with the title Failure. The poem is about the death of Philip Schultz’s father. And the poem begins as follows. To pay for my father’s funeral, I borrowed money from people he already owed money to. One called him a nobody. “No,” I said, “he was a failure. You can’t remember a nobody’s name. That’s why they’re called nobodies. Failures are unforgettable.”

And this poem really jumped out at me, because I think for so many people, the process of teshuva, the process of transformative change, is contending with these two feelings: the feeling of feeling like a nobody, and the realization that just because you failed, just because you have failures, that doesn’t mean that you are transformed into a nobody. Failures, ultimately, are unforgettable. They’re the catalysts that create us into the people who we are today. It’s the very friction, it’s the very point of momentum that drives us and creates our very sense of self.

And I think the story that we are going to share today is about an individual from Jewish history who has now become much more well known, but somebody who contended with that feeling, that personal feeling, of being a nobody, and ultimately, his own failures in his own life have now made him unforgettable. And that, of course, is the story of the Yabloner Rebbe, Rabbi Yechezkel Taub, one of the founders of Kfar Chassidim. His life story was almost entirely unknown until the research and incredible scholarship of Rabbi Pini Dunner of Beverly Hills, California, came forward and delivered a lecture, and ultimately published an article in Tablet entitled The Amazing Return of the Yabloner Rebbe.

It is the story of somebody, as we will hear from firsthand testimony – not only from family members, not only from researchers, but from the Yabloner Rebbe himself – it is the story of somebody who grew up as a Hasidic rebbe, suffered a tragic failure in his own life, and ultimately a tragedy that wiped out the lives of nearly everybody that he knew, left and lived a lonely and anonymous life, almost unknown to anybody else, and then ultimately, towards the end of his life, returned, and once again became that Yabloner Rebbe.

There’s a certain measure of hesitance I have with even sharing this story. There’s a reason why this story was unknown for many, many decades among the popular masses. Most people did not want to talk about it, and it’s really how my interview with Rabbi Pini Dunner began.

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

I’m going to tell you a fascinating story. It was told to me by a friend of mine who is someone I know well here in LA. He came to the original lecture that I gave about Orthodox Jews in Los Angeles, and he said something fascinating. The end of that lecture, I had this tag on this story about the Yabloner Rebbe. It was before it went viral. But he came up to me at the end of the lecture. He said, “You’ll never believe it. I met the Yabloner Rebbe when he was George Nagel.” I said, “Really? What are you talking about?” He said, “There was a fellow called Sanford Deutsch, who was the president of a shul called Shaarei Tefila, it still exists, the shul in the Fairfax area, Hancock Park area of Los Angeles, and one day he said to him, he’s a young man, Sanford Deutsch said to this fellow who was talking to me at the end of the lecture, said, “Would you come with me? I want you to meet a chassidishe rebbe to get a bracha.” He was a teenager.

So they went to a building complex, apartment buildings, condos, whatever, in Century City, and they went up to an apartment on a very high floor, and first thing he noticed was there was no mezuza on the door. They went in. This little man there without a yarmulke, no beard, and Sanford Deutsch says to him, “Get a bracha from this man.” He says, “What are you talking about? What do you mean?” He says, “This man is a chassidishe rebbe.” So the man, who was George Nagel, he said the same thing. “I’m not giving brachos. I don’t give brachos.” In the end, he did give him a bracha in Yiddish, a fulsome bracha like a rebbe would give. And afterwards he made inquiries. He asked Sanford Deutsch, or whoever came with him, “Who is this man?” They told him, this man was a famous chassidishe from Poland, went to Israel, and has now been living in LA for a number of years, and he’s a successful businessman. That was George Nagel.

Now, you can imagine that if some be like the Kornwasser family, who are from Sosnowiec in Poland, obviously they had an afinity to the Yabloner Rebbe, who was also Polish, but I don’t think that they wanted to promote the idea that the Yabloner had become an irreligious Jew, which was a fact. I’m not sure that they were aware of what happened to him at the end of his life. I discussed it in the years before I gave the lecture, because I had some information. But as far as they knew, this man who had been a distinguished chassidishe rebbe, had abandoned his faith, and although there was an afinity that they had to him because he was this Yiddish speaking chassidishe rebbe from Poland, nevertheless, they perhaps didn’t want to promote the idea or promote the narrative that he’d gone off the derech. So they just don’t talk about it.

Now, I can’t tell you that for sure. I have no idea. But I do know that when I’ve made inquiries of people who clearly did know him during those years in Los Angeles, they’ve not been as forthcoming as perhaps they should have been in terms of giving me information. I got information from family members, but not from local Jewish community members. He was not a member of a shul or anything like that.

David Bashevkin:

And Rabbi Dunner himself mentions the Kornwasser family. I happen to know a grandson in that family. He would kill me if I mentioned him by name. Let’s call him Moishe. But I know the family who did know him during that period. I wasn’t able to verify why they didn’t speak necessarily publicly about who this person was, who they knew personally in LA. But suffice it to say, this was not a well known story. I did not know this story, and I am fascinated by Hasidic stories, and I’m fascinated by people who leave observance and come back to observance, and all of the other facets that this story entails.

So there really is a reason why this story was not told. And that’s why I was hesitant in many ways to now share it again, particularly on the 18Forty podcast. So before I even went out to develop this very episode, I reached out to my teacher and mentor, a past guest who’ve we’ve had on the 18Forty podcast, Rav Moshe Weinberger. And I asked him, “Should we be sharing this story? And what exactly is the message that we hope people take away from this?” And this is what he shared.

Rav Moshe Weinberger:

So I want to thank my dear friend, Reb David, for asking me to share a thought, feeling, and I also want to thank my friend, Rav Pini Dunner for revealing the light of this tzadik, Reb Yechezkel Taub, of this fallen and comprised tzadik who came back, who did teshuva. There’s a performer in Eretz Yisrael. I’ve been talking about this fellow for a while now, since Tisha Ba’av. Since my kids sent me a couple weeks before a song from this Chanan Ben Ari. It was very, very popular in Eretz Yisrael. And the song has a refrain, “gam ani cholem kmo Yosef,” I also had dreams like Yosef, “Vgam oti zaku labor,” but I also ended up thrown into a pit. And I came back mitoch tachposet, wearing a costume, wearing a disguise. Uchmo David ani oseh mizeh mizmor, and like David Hamelech I made all of my life into a song. Chevra, what should I tell you? I think one of the most moving experiences of my life, and others who were with me shared the same feeling, was being at the grave, at the scene in Kfar Chassidim, of this tzadik Reb Yechezkel Taub.

And I thought a great deal about what was it that moved me so much, being there, and I think this song captures it. Rav Kook calls David Hamelech “moshiach mshorer hateshuva,” the singer of the poet of teshuva. And the song, of course, has ups and downs, high notes and low notes. Reb Yechezkel Taub, the Yabloner Rebbe, their dream is for who he would be, before he came to the world. And when he came to the world, the dreams he had. And he was a pioneer, and he tried to live those dreams, and he came to Eretz Yisrael, and he was so broken and so disappointed. And he felt that he was thrown into a pit.

And you know what happens to us when our dreams don’t materialize, and even turn into nightmares? What often happens to us, especially with our Yiddishkeit, all that we were dreaming of accomplishing, we hide. We run. That began with Adam Harishon in Gan Eden. And Kayin was running, and Adam Harishon was hiding. But that voice of Hashem is just somehow still being heard, as much as we try to drown it out, the voice of Hashem, it’s just, it’s there. It’s there. No matter how many aliases you have, and you try to hide, and you run to Los Angeles, and you live a life of separation and isolation from your community. At the end, Kemo David, like David Hamelech, he took all of the ups and downs of his life, and he made a song. He made the song of teshuva. What type of teshuva? How strong was the teshuva? Did he go back to what he once was? Was he somebody different at the end? I don’t know exactly. It’s unclear. But he did come back. He did come back to a life of connection to his people. And from what Rabbi Dunner described, the turning point was when he was told that, “You didn’t fail us. You didn’t fail us. We know that you did your best. You didn’t fail us.”

And that broke down that wall. And I think we’re all waiting to hear that from Hakadosh Baruch Hu. The way things are now, the kids are being raised with this impression that everybody’s perfect, and that nothing happened in Gan Eden. Therefore, teshuva, a lot of the chevra just means, maybe this year I have a little more kavana by davening, or maybe I should take on chalav yisrael. But heartfelt, deep transformation, that realization that all along, as hard as I was running away, as much as I was running away, Hashem never let go of me, and at the end of the day he knows, Hashem knows that I tried. I tried, but I was so broken by my failure that I was hiding, and I want to come back.

I think that’s the message. I know that’s what resonates with me, and I spoke to a lot of our chevra about this. I think that’s what so remarkable and so beautiful and so moving about this story, and I would recommend chevra to stop by. I think it would give him a lot of nachas to know that his story is our story, our story is his story, and it’s a place to think about that, and to remember that, and to daven that we should hear Hashem’s voice. We should stop hiding and come back.

David Bashevkin:

And that song that Rav Moshe Weinberger referenced to me, which I had actually never heard of, and it’s a song called Chalom Kmo Yosef by an Israeli singer named Chanan Ben Ari. And the translation of the lyrics of that song, some of which he mentioned, but the opening is so, so beautiful. The lyrics, and this is of course a translation, the song is in Hebrew, is “every person is expelled from the Garden of Eden. Everyone undergoes a flood. Every person has some Abel,” meaning from the story of Cain and Abel, “about whom he is deathly jealous. In everyone, there is a tower of rebellion and confusion.” And I think in sharing this story, there’s a part of all of us that retreats and becomes, so to speak, the Yabloner Rebbe. Runs away, tries to hide from some public or private failure, and ultimately, if there’s anything that we’re going to take away from his life and his story, it’s the capacity and the courage to return, to confront, and to ultimately come back and embrace that story that you began, no matter how long ago it was.

Before we begin the story as told through the scholarship and research of Rabbi Pini Dunner, he was kind enough to share with me an interview that Rav Yechezkel Taub, or as he was known at the time, George Nichols, when he spent most of his life in America, totally distant from Jewish life and observance. At the end of his life, as you will hear in more detail, but at the end of his life, he did give an interview that we do have a recording of. I wanted to kind of share and begin with his telling of the story, and the noticeable absences that he even has in his own story. This is the story of the Yabloner Rebbe as retold by the Yabloner Rebbe, Rebbe Yechezkel Taub, or as he was known at the time, George Nichols.

Norman Tanis:

So how did you come to the United States, and when did you come the to United States?

Yabloner Rebbe/George Nagel:

Oh, I came to United States for the first time in 1927. Not straight to United States, it was under the [inaudible], that way, and I came. Some years ago I came to United States, temporary, for a mission to do something for Israel. But circumstances didn’t permit me to go back to Israel for seven years. But then I went back to Israel, and again I came here again in 1938. I left ’38, and I arrived here ’39. It was the last month of December. That’s the way I came. In Los Angeles, I came later. I came 1939 to New York, and when the war broke out, the second world war, things didn’t go as they should have gone, and I realized that I have to do something. It was my war, it was Hitler’s war, and I’m Jewish. It was my war. I realized I had to do something, and I was too old to enlist in the navy or the army, so I could have a chance to enlist in the merchant marine, but –

Norman Tanis:

You didn’t like bouncing on the ocean?

Yabloner Rebbe/George Nagel:

Yeah. So I came here to Los Angeles to work in shipyards, to build ships. That was my contribution to the war. I worked in the shipyards until the end of the war.

Norman Tanis:

I see.

David Bashevkin:

So he tells his story in just a few minutes, and he leaves out nearly all of it. He doesn’t explain the fact that he was a rebbe. He doesn’t explain the fact what exactly that failure was. To understand more of this, I’d like to introduce the person who really brought the story of the Yabloner Rebbe to the public, my conversation with Rabbi Pini Dunner.

So maybe we could begin with a very basic question of, who was the Yabloner Rebbe?

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

He was a chassidishe rebbe of a mid-ranking chassidus in central Poland, in Warsaw. Yablono was a resort town, which I think was like an hour from Warsaw. They had a rav there. There was the local rabbi. In fact, the local rabbi, there was a man called Rabbi Don, whose son became very well known after the second world war as one of the leaders of Neturei Karta, and one of their main propagandists, which is interesting. Although in later years, he spoke about the Yabloner. But I never spoke to him about it, but I heard this from other people. He never spoke about him too negatively, even though he had become a tziyoni, because they obviously came from the same city.

But Rabbi’s Don father was Rabbi Don, the rav of Yablono. But there was also a Rebbe in Yablono, which was not unusual. In Poland, you had towns and cities where there was a local Rav who was the posek, was the rosh bes din, and then you had the rebbe, who was in essence the spiritual leader of the town. And in Yablono it was no different. So the Yabloner Rebbe’s father was the local rebbe. He died at the age of 60. The Yabloner Rebbe had a brother-in-law who had died a little earlier who was slated to take over the rebbisteve, but he never got to it because he died. The Yabloner Rebbe, who was in his 20s, this Yechezkel Taub, is named for his esteemed forbearer, the Kuzhmirer, Yechezkel Taub. Also the Modzitz dynasty comes from this same branch of Chassidus. The same line. And he became the Rebbe of the Yabloner chassidim.

It would seem, and I don’t have any powerful evidence for this, but leraglayim ledavar, that he was never too fond of being a chassidishe rebbe, and he was looking for other outlets. He had had private, he says in a video which I discovered. He gave an interview for, he was in UC Northridge, and he gave an interview at some point in the 19, I think early 1980s, in which he describes the fact that he had a private tutor, paid for by his father, who must have been, in Yiddish you say a shtickle maskil. He was definitely teaching him things that his father –

David Bashevkin:

Enlightened, yeah.

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

His father was not approving of. But he taught in Yiddish and in Hebrew, not in Polish. But he got access to secular literature, et cetera. So he was somebody who already before he became the rebbe in Yablono was clearly, had a leaning towards external stuff. Let’s put it that way.

Norman Tanis:

My name is Norman Tanis, and this is California State University Northridge. My guest today is Mr. George Nagel, the oldest or youngest living alumnus of this university, who is now here taking post-graduate studies, and remains in one of the dormitories or living facilities of the university. Mr. Nagel is a great lover of the university libraries, which endears him to me immediately. He is also our youngest author, and has recently written a book on some of his experiences on dealing with mental patients who are in a rehabilitation center near the campus. Mr. Nagel is a native of Poland, and was a former contractor and builder in the valley and in the Los Angeles area. Mr. Nagel has made his career in education during the last few years. But George, I understand that your early education took place in Poland, not in formal school at all. Is that correct?

Yabloner Rebbe/George Nagel:

Yes, that is correct, and especially because I’m Jewish, and Jews had great need for education, because it says in the Shema, you shall teach your children the Torah, the law, and if you have to teach the children, you have to know yourself what to teach them. Therefore, though there was no schools, government schools in Poland, but the Jews had their private schools to teach the children. Especially I had a little more education because my father was a rabbi. Also there was another reason. It was a small village, and not all the children of the village got as much education as they should have. Parents couldn’t afford to pay, and the community wasn’t too rich to pay. So they stopped early.

But for me, the education continued. And I was lucky enough, after bar mitzvah, that’s bar mitzvah, age 13, and that was probably age 14, I got a tutor. Though my father was not a rich person, but still everything was spent, education had to be done.

Norman Tanis:

He felt it was important.

Yabloner Rebbe/George Nagel:

Yeah, it was very important. I had a tutor. That tutor was a very pious man, very religious and everything, but introduced me to literature. He had passion for literature in Hebrew. I didn’t understand, maybe a little Polish, but Hebrew was my language. My mother tongue was Yiddish, but the school language was Hebrew, and introduced me to Hebrew, and introduced me to become very passionate to read novels, quite a lot. The classics of that time, Russian classic, French translations, German translations, and I don’t regret that. I always remember him for the love that he has stowed into me for reading novels. At that time, not much science, but literature.

Norman Tanis:

My prejudice is that that’s one of the most valuable things you can give to a child, is a love of reading and an understanding of how to do it.

David Bashevkin:

Not your typical rebbe.

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

Not, well, we don’t know, but there may be many rebbes like that. We haven’t explored them all. If you look at David Assaf’s book, you see that there were other rabbis who, for all intents and purposes, at least for external purposes, were full fledged chassidishe rebbes, but privately went through a lot of pain and grief because they felt quite excluded from the world, or the wider world, and they felt that they were imprisoned in this chassidish environment. So I don’t know. We don’t know what people were going through.

But this particular chassidishe rebbe had a relative who’s called, he’s known today historically as Admor HeChalutz. He was a brother of the Piaseczno Rebbe, and he, Shapira, he came from an also very famous Hasidic line.

David Bashevkin:

Which is now known as the Piaseczno, known as the Esh Kodesh, for our listeners.

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

Correct, the Esh Kodesh, and there is a Piaseczno rabbi today in Bet Shemesh who’s a descendant of Admor HeChalutz, that he was a Zionist. He never founded personally or took groups of people to Eretz Yisrael during the ’20s. The ’20s was a time of a tremendous amount of aliyah. After the Versailles treaty, and the British took over mandate Palestine, and they’d given the Balfour Declaration, there was a honeymoon period where Jews were permitted to move to Palestine. It didn’t last long. It lasted about 10 years, a little bit longer, I would say, but some time in the early ’20s, ’23, ’24, until the mid-1930s, it was very easy for any Jew who wanted to come from anywhere in world and live in Palestine, it was easy for them to get an entry permit to do that.

Now, by the way, thousands came and went back, because it was so hard to live in Palestine, that they had these pioneering dreams, but when they got there, it didn’t work out. So they went back. But many stayed, and this was the time of the huge growth in population, of Jewish population in Palestine. And of those, there was obviously a percentage who were religious. Now, it wasn’t a representative percentage because demographically, there were many more religious Jews in Eastern and Central Europe, let’s say, who were religious, who were Orthodox. Not just nominally Orthodox or descended from Orthodox, but were actually Orthodox. Then there were those who decided to become immigrants to Palestine.

The number of Orthodox, properly frum immigrants to Palestine was pitifully small. It was not huge numbers. The reason for that was because even those rabbis who were pro-Zionist were not eager to lose their communities to Palestine. So if you went to your rav, and you asked him, “Should I immigrate?” They would say, “What are you going to with your children? Where are they going to be educated? Here in Europe, we have yeshivas. We have a structure. We have kosher food, we have everything is there. If you go to Eretz Yisrael, the vast majority of the Zionists are secular, and your children will be destroyed. You may stay frum, but your children are going to be destroyed.” By the way, they gave the same advice to people who came to them to move to America. But people who moved to the United States were economic migrants.

David Bashevkin:

When I left yeshiva, it’s funny, I’ll interject. When I left yeshiva, I bumped into somebody from where I was learning who saw me. Usually when we were in yeshiva, we would wear hats to weddings, and I wasn’t wearing a hat to the wedding. And he came up to me, and he said, “Look, David, I’m not worried that you’re going to go off the derech, but I’m worried about your children going off the derech.” So sounds like the…

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

So it’s a standard, classic line that rabbis would give. Now when immigrants were moving to America, because they were economic migrants, I don’t buy the story that they were escaping persecution because millions of Jews stayed behind. So clearly the persecution wasn’t that terrible that everybody felt that they had to leave. But they were economic migrants. So they went to the rav, they asked the shayla, and the rav said, “Don’t go,” and they still went. Or they sent a representative, and then the rest of the family followed. But there were many more immigrants to the United States, as an example, than there were to Palestine. Because Palestine, you not only had to be willing to not listen to your rav who was telling you not to go, you also had to be willing to take massive economic risks, because financially, it was just not viable to live in Palestine, even though the British had allowed Jews to come in.

That all stopped in the middle of the 1930s when there were Arab riots. ’36, I think, things began to really deteriorate badly, and the Peel Commission came. Recommended, by the way, division of Palestine, which would have been a devastating blow to the Zionists, although they considered accepting it. But the key thing was, it suggested a quota of Jews to be allowed into the country from then on, and that persisted until the British left in 1948. So from 1938 to 1948, it was very hard to move to Palestine.

So somewhere between 1923, ’24, and 1936, there was a huge influx of Jews. Among those were people like Admor HeChalutz, Rabbi Shapira, Rav Shaya Shapira, I think his name was, and he would go to Poland, and he would advocate aliyah to frum Jews. And he would go from community to community. He was a powerful speaker, powerful orator. He was also an extremely warm person. He wasn’t just a good speaker, he was a very warm man, and he came from this Hasidic aristocracy. He went from community to community. To be perfectly honest, he wasn’t that successful. So there are exceptions. For example, Rav Gerstenkorn, who came and established Bnei Brak, which officially was meant to be this Charedi town close to Tel Aviv. It wasn’t quite like that, by the way. It was as many Mizrahi people as there were Charedi people in early Bnei Brak. That’s changed today, but that took decades, generations to change.

Then there was this story of the Yabloner Rebbe. So Rav Shapira spoke in Yablono one Shabbos. And the Yabloner Rebbe, who himself was a very powerful speaker, got up after he spoke, and said, “Mori v’rabosai, chassidim anshei maysa, we have to take action. It’s not good enough to listen to Rav Shaya Shapira, and give him a bit of money, and help chalutzim who are already in Eretz Yisrael. We must be chalutzim, and I propose to you that we’re going to move Yabloner chassidus from Poland to Eretz Israel.” He must have been so charismatic that they immediately established a committee to move to Eretz Israel, and that’s what they did. About 200 or 250 of them, I’ve got photos of them, are standing in Romania, on the shores of the Black Sea, about to take the ship to Turkey, and then from Turkey they went to Haifa, and they moved to Eretz Israel.

The way it was going to work was that the richer Chassidim would stay behind, and those who were not that economically successful in Yablono, which by the way, was a fairly prosperous town. It wasn’t a poor town. But I’m guessing there were people there who were just ordinary folk. Whatever they did. They were tailors, they were shoemakers, and whatever it is they did, that they could afford to up sticks and move to Eretz Yisrael. And they bought enormous amounts of land via the JNF in Northern Israel, near Har Carmel. I want to just take a brief marginal tangent, if I may.

David Bashevkin:

Please.

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

There was a couple called Goronczyk, and he was a Gerer Chassid, and she came from a Radziner family. This Goronczyk fellow went to see the Gerer Rebbe, and he said, “I’m very taken with this idea of moving to Eretz Yisrael with the Yabloner Rebbe.” And the Gerer Rebbe said to him, “You mustn’t go, because the Yabloner Rebbe has taken money from the Zionists. He’s not working with them and is the master of his own destiny. He is subject to their whims. And we cannot allow frum Jews to go to Eretz Yisrael and be subject to the whims of secular Zionists.

This is interesting, because the Gerer Rebbe himself was very pro Aliyah, generally, and he built the yeshiva Sfas Emes in Yerushalayim, and eventually he went to Eretz Israel, and Gerer Chassidus was saved because he was, for example, willing to cooperate with Rav Cook, who was certainly willing to work with the Zionists. But the Gerer Rebbe had a different stance. He said, “We’ll work with them as long they’re not in control. It’s our money. It’s our process. It’s our decision making.” But whatever the case may be, this Goronczyk came home, told his wife, “Sorry, honey, we’re not going.” And his wife said, “Listen, you may be a Gerer chassid, but I’m a Radziner chassid,” and she went off to the Radziner rebbe, and said to him –

David Bashevkin:

Who at the time was Rav Gershon Henoch? Who was the rebbe at the time?

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

No, no. I don’t know. It was Rav Leiner. I don’t know which one it was. It was the father-in-law of the Radziner Rebbe of Bnei Brak, whose name is Englard. Englard’s father-in-law was the Radziner rebbe in Warsaw. So she went to the Radziner rebbe, and the Radziner Rebbe gave her a bracha and said, “For sure you should go.” So this couple, who are buried, by the way, in Kfar Chassidim, went with the Yabloner Rebbe, even though they weren’t Yabloner Chassidim, they went to Eretz Yisrael, and they were one of the founders of Kfar Chassidim. The interesting thing is, they had a son called Shlomo, who changed his name to Goren, and he became the chief rabbi of Israel. First he was the chief rabbi of the army –

David Bashevkin:

Shlomo Goren –

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

Shlomo Goren only arrived in Israel as a result of the Yabloner Rebbe. And he writes about it briefly in his autobiography, in his memoirs. He doesn’t say much about the Yabloner Rebbe, just that the Yabloner Rebbe was the one that led the group from Poland to Eretz Yisrael, and that his parents came along with the Yabloner Rebbe, and that’s where they lived.

You can watch, there’s a very interesting That’s Life program, I don’t know how to put it, like a biographical program, where he meets people from his life, Rav Goren. It’s a TV program. It’s on YouTube, you can watch it, in which he meets all kinds of people, and it seems that his parents were very active in supporting the fights with the British, the military campaign against the British by the pre-Israel Haganah, and in fact, they hid people in their home. Guess where? In Kfar Chassidim. So the so-called terrorists who were working for the creation of the state of Israel at that time were hidden in the home of this Gerrer Chassid, and his wife, the Radziner Chassid, whose son would later on become the chief rabbi of the army, and then chief rabbi of Tel Aviv and chief rabbi of Israel. But they were chassidim who joined Kfar Chassidim as one of its founders in the mid 1920s.

David Bashevkin:

I did not know that, but that was a jaw dropping tangent, which again, for our listeners, getting into the nitty gritty politics between Radzin and Ger, which came from conflicting schools and the break off between Kotzk and Izhbitz, which is really part of the namesake of 18Forty. I’m going to leave that for sleuths who want to investigate that more, but that is a jaw dropping tangent and footnote that I was totally unaware of. So the Yabloner Rebbe comes to Israel to settle this community. It does not go well.

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

So he comes there. He’s got huge amounts of land, 10,000 dunams of land, but he’s got no idea what to do with it. I mean, let’s be honest. As I said, these people were shoemakers and tailors. They weren’t chaklaim, they weren’t farmers. They certainly had no training in draining swamps. They’d not gone to hachshara. They were Chassidim. So they come there, and they try their best, and besides for the fact that the local Arabs were not eager to leave.

Now, the laws at that time, if you look into it, you’ll discover. This is, of course, very pertinent to modern history. There were local Arab tenant farmers all over Palestine. The land belonged to Syrian land owners, and they would rent out the land. It was not expensive. I’m sure they made pennies from it. And when the Jews were willing to pay huge sums of money to buy the land, they would willingly accept it. Why wouldn’t they accept it? The first time anybody ever offered anything worthwhile for land that they thought was worthless. The problem was that there were existing farmers on the land. Farmers whose descendants today call themselves Palestinians, but in those days it was simply Bedouins or farmers, people who eked out their parnassah, their food from the land, never went more than two and a half miles from where they lived, and that’s where they’d lived for a couple of generations, or however long they’d managed to rent this land.

Well, the British supported the Jewish purchase of land in Israel, in Palestine, and even the Turks had supported it, but the British were even more supportive. They created laws to say that you could evict tenant farmers from land that was bought if you didn’t want them there. If you wanted to build a town or city or moshav or kibbutz or whatever it is, you could evict these tenant farmers. But you can imagine that the local tenant farmers were not too happy about being evicted from their homes, particularly because they had nowhere to go. It’s not like they had somewhere else to go. They had nowhere to go. They’d have to find somewhere else to rent land.

So very often, they were paid money to leave, and they’d take the money gladly, and then wouldn’t leave. That’s what happened in Kfar Chassidim. At that time, Nahalat Ya’akov. They wouldn’t leave, and then they would pay more money. Eventually they went up the hill, down the hill. They were killing the cows, they were blocking the wells, and they were doing all kinds of things, shenanigans, to prevent Nahalat Ya’akov from getting off the ground. And the Yabloner Rebbe had not been prepared for that, and there was no infrastructure.

You have to understand something else. There was no infrastructure in Palestine. The Turks had basically ignored Palestine from the early part of the 20th century. It’s now 20 something years later. The British have come in. They haven’t yet managed to establish a proper infrastructure. They did, by the way. All the main roads in Eretz Yisrael have their basis in roads that were built by the British. The water system, the plumbing system was put in there by the British. The electric grid was put in there by the British. It’s almost as if the British got the mandate, it was a gift from Hashem that the British would be there for the 25 years that they were there, so they could prepare the groundwork for a Jewish state to exist, and to thrive and survive. Because had we got the land, had the Jewish nation got the land in 1919, it would have been an utter disaster, because no one in the Jewish agency, they were political Zionists. They were not infrastructure people. No one had the faintest idea what to do. How are you going to build a road? How are you going to plan a city? None of these things, they had no concept of it. They had no experience. The British had been colonists for the previous hundreds of years, since they’d come to the United States of America before, it was then known as the colonies. They had tremendous amount of experience building countries that had no infrastructure. And that’s what they did.

But at the time that the Yabloner Rebbe came, which was 1925, there was zero infrastructure. There was no safety net. So if you had no money, it wasn’t that you could go to the government and say, “We’re starving to death.” You had no money, and you had no food, then you starved to death. It was as simple as that. You had no money and no food. So what happened was that with the local Arabs not really willing to do what they needed to do in order to enable the Chassidim to establish Kfar Chassidim, and with the Chassidim having little or no experience or know how, let’s put it, in order to create a town out of a rocky hill, the whole thing floundered terribly.

He needed more money. He went back to Poland for more money, and they gave him more money. And eventually he ran out of money, and the chassidim were very angry with him, and he went to the JNF, and the JNF said, “You came here, and you had no experience, and you didn’t know what you were doing. We’re willing to help you, but we’re not doing it for nothing. Everything costs us money. If you’re willing to give us your land in order for our chalutzim to settle, if you’re willing to share Kfar Chassidim with our chalutzim, we will establish together with you Kfar Chassidim.

So they diluted the project from it being a uniquely Hasidic community to being something much broader. And they brought in Mizrahi settlers from Germany and from Holland, and the reason I know this is because several members of the Dunner family became chaklaim in Kfar Chassidim. They’re buried there. My grandfather’s name was Reb Yosef Tzvi Dunner, he was the Rav in London. He had a great uncle after whom he was named, also called Reb Yosef Tzvi Dunner. He had a son, and he actually had 14 children, but one of those children ended up in Kfar Chassidim as an elderly parent of Yosef Tzvi Dunner, who is named after his grandfather, who is one of the central figures, one of the most important people in Kfar Chassidim, starting in the 1940s, I think, and continued, he died I think in the 1990s, or maybe around 2000. He’s also buried in Kfar Chassidim. The Dunner family are well established in Kfar Chassidim. I don’t have much contact with that branch of the family, but they’re very well established there in Kfar Chassidim.

But the Yabloner Rebbe still ran out of money, and people began arriving after there was anti-Semitism in Europe, began arriving in Eretz Yisrael and saying, “Where’s our home that you said you would build for us?” And he didn’t have it. And there was terrible arguments about money, and accusations that he was dishonest, and he was a fraud, and he’d stolen their money. And he felt the need to go and raise money in the United States. This was in the late 1930s.

He arrived in the United States, I think in ’38 or ’39, and he was staying with his niece in New York. His wife, they never had children. His wife, it seems, went back to Poland, and was ultimately murdered in the Holocaust. But he was in the United States when the second world war broke out, and of course the Germans invaded Poland. He’d raised some money, but he couldn’t get that money to Palestine at the time.

David Bashevkin:

And at this point in America he’s an observant Jew still?

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

Yes, seeing pictures of him, it would seem that he wasn’t quite as rebbish anymore as he had been 15 years earlier. So the hair is more organized, and his beard is trimmed. But he’s still got a beard and wearing a yarmulke and wearing rabbi looking clothes. He volunteered for the army. They didn’t want him. They weren’t looking for –

David Bashevkin:

The American Army?

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

The American Army. He said, “I want to fight.” First of all, the Americans weren’t yet in the war. Second of all, they weren’t looking for 50 year old Hasidic men who were five foot six. So I don’t think he had much of a chance. But what he did manage to do, he said, “I’ve got a lot of experience because I built up, I’ve got engineering experience,” and they stuck him in a shipyard in California. It would seem that around this time he got wind of the destruction of Yablono in Poland, and I assume the murder of his wife, although he may not have heard that particular detail. He must have known that it was probable. And the fact that he couldn’t go back to Kfar Chassidim, because at this stage, he had no money to give them, and everybody who was there thought he was a ganav.

David Bashevkin:

A thief.

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

Yeah, they thought he was a thief. He was a fraud. He’d taken their money, promised them something which he had not delivered. The moshav, the village of Kfar Chassidim was, if not a complete failure, very close to being a complete failure, and he had presided over that project. So in the 15 years since he’d left Poland, he’d been an abject failure. So as somebody who was working for the war effort, he became naturalized, but he changed his name. I found his naturalization papers, and he changed his name to George Nagel, and I had always thought his name was George Nichol. It could be that was a nickname he was given. I’ve never managed to establish why anybody thought his name was George Nichol, but for sure, his name was George Nagel, and he shaved off his beard, took off his yarmulke, cut off his peyos, and became a, for all intents and purposes, just a regular immigrant refugee from Poland living in California.

David Bashevkin:

Let me jump in with a question at this point, because it’s this period that really fascinates me, and you touch upon it in that article that obviously we’ll link to. You have a line that during this period, he was no longer religious, but yearning for an occasional connection with the traditional Jewish life of their youth. He was not observant in any clear way, kosher, holidays, even Yom Kippur, you mentioned, was not a part of his life. How do you know that he –

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

I’ll tell you more. His niece had an uncle and aunt by marriage, that means they’re not a direct relative of the Yabloner Rebbe, who lived in Los Angeles. I’ve spoken to their son, who lives somewhere near Santa Barbara, I think. He told me that when it came to his bar mitzvah, I mean, George Nagel was very much a part of their life. He doesn’t know anything about the Yabloner Rebbe, he only knows him as George Nagel. And George Nagel was very much a part of their life, and they knew that he came from a religious background, but that was the extent of it.

His parents were reformed, and they obviously have no money, very little. And when it came to having a bar mitzvah, there was this discussion about how much money it was going to cost, and this man who spoke to me said that he told his parents, “It’s totally fine. I don’t need a bar mitzvah. We can just have a party at home for my friends. I don’t need to go to the shul. We don’t have to have a big party. It’s fine.” So I asked him, “Did you discuss that with George Nagel, or any aspect of your Jewish upbringing?” He said, “Nope, it was never something that was discussed.”

It would seem that even though this was his adopted family, he had no sense of achrayus. Here was a young man who’s about to turn 13, and who was saying, “I don’t want a bar mitzvah.” He didn’t feel the need to say to the boy, “Come on, let’s do something. Let’s learn parsha in the Torah, let’s do something which will increase your religious identity and connect you to your heritage.” That to me is very telling, because it means he’d totally abandoned his faith. He had no interest in a faith based Judaism. Because there’s no one in the world, even someone who is quite divorced from normative observant Judaism, who doesn’t value the idea of a Jewish heritage event such as a bar or bat mitzvah. I think I’m correct in saying that.

David Bashevkin:

Yeah, no, but that’s what I’m so curious about, because in your article, you have this wonderful story about a Hasidic rebbe who came to Los Angeles and held a tish –

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

Yes, the [inaudible] came.

David Bashevkin:

Yeah. And George Nagel is there, the former Yabloner Rebbe.

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

He’s anonymous. He’s sitting there anonymously.

David Bashevkin:

He’s anonymous, and he overhears somebody say, “You call this a tisch? This is a joke. A shadow of what a real tisch should look like. I remember the tisch of the Yabloner Rebbe. My father took me to one when I was a child. Now that was a real tisch with proper singing and a real spiritual atmosphere that uplifted everyone, not like this one.” And then he got up and left. And the Yabloner Rebbe, the former Yabloner Rebbe, so to speak, is sitting there listening to this. And my question is, if he really abandoned everything, why is he showing up to these things?

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

He had a very close friend in Los Angeles called Yidel Rottenberg. And Yidel Rottenberg had a brother actually, called Reb Ephraim Rottenberg, who was the rav of a shul, Rottenberg shul, in LA. It was also, they were chassidish. They were Kosona chassidim, I think. Kosov or Koson. There’s a Kosoner Rebbe in Monsey called Rottenberg, and they’re relatives. So they lived in Los Angeles, and this Yidel Rottenberg was very kind to him. I met Yidel Rottenberg’s daughter, who said that George Nagel, as she knew him, she saw the pictures in the article. He would come to their house on a regular basis. He would eat dinner there. Don’t forget, he was a man on his own. He had no children, no wife. And he would come there and eat dinner, and he would even come there for Shabbos. It was not for religious purposes, it was for social purposes.

She said her father would push him to go to shul. He didn’t want to. She didn’t have any sense of the fact that he was a chassidishe rebbe. She just says, “He was a guy who was reluctant to go to shul,” and her father was always pushing him to go to shul. Now, of course, her father, from whom this story of the Sodige Rebbe is recorded, that’s how we know the story, knew very well that this George Nagel was no George Nagel, but was the Yabloner Rebbe. So he was pushing him to come to shul as a kind of sport. Let’s get him to shul and see what happens. Meanwhile, he was doing it because he didn’t want his dear friend from whom he was getting supper on a regular basis to be offended that he didn’t attend shul from time to time. I don’t think he had any interest in shul.

David Bashevkin:

So let’s fast forward a drop, because I have so many questions that follow the publication and the dissemination of this story, which really all stands on your shoulders, to a large degree. I don’t think the world really knew about this. Eventually he gets into home building in Los Angeles. The business turns sour. He goes back to school, gets a BA in psychology, finally graduates college. He’s now been away from his Hasidic upbringing for multiple decades. Why does he decide to return to Kfar Chassidim? For this last chapter in his –

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

So he had a nephew who was a journalist in California, and that nephew kept on pushing him to go back. Says, “You got a sister.” Was it? No. It was a niece, not a sister. He had a niece in Kfar Chassidim who wanted very much to see him. He’d remained in touch with his family. That’s very interesting. He never cut off his ties with his family. But nobody in Kfar Chassidim had heard of him for years, and they’d forgotten about him. He was no longer relevant. He was like a myth. By the way there’s no zecher of him in Kfar Chassidim, to this day. There’s no plaque in the shul. There’s no way of knowing that he was involved with the community, except if you go the to cemetery where he’s buried. But otherwise, he’s not recognized as a founder of Kfar Chassidim, because there’s still animosity towards him, to this day. But he was getting older. He was in his 80s.

David Bashevkin:

And what year was this, about?

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

’80s, in the 1980s. I would think 1979, 1980, something like that. He went back, and he has this incredible experience, because when he arrives in Kfar Chassidim for what he thinks is going to be a private visit, he is brought into the central social hall of Kfar Chassidim, and there’s hundreds of people waiting for him there, and they all pay tribute to him – those, obviously, who wanted to – to say that as a result of him having established this moshav, this village in Israel, in Palestine as it was then, their families were saved, because the rest of the Chassidim from Yablon were all obliterated by the Holocaust. And they wanted to acknowledge this.

Suddenly, it was a very emotional experience for him, because it suddenly dawned on him what he hadn’t thought about for 40 years. That notwithstanding any grievances that people may have from a financial perspective, there was a powerful recognition that it was only as a result of him initiating this project of a Hasidic village in Palestine that by that stage there were 1,000 or 1,500 people who were alive through his intervention, through his act. It was very moving and very powerful, and his niece and others said to him, “It’s time for you to come back,” and that’s exactly what he did.

He came back to Kfar Chassidim. He sold up in California. Don’t think he had very much at that stage, he’d gone bankrupt, and he moved in with his niece. I’ve seen the room where he slept, the home where he lived, and he would give little shiurim, lectures, and tell Hasidic stories outside in the yard, just outside that house. It’s a little house.

David Bashevkin:

And he grew back his beard?

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

He grew back his beard, and he put on a yarmulke, and he davened every day. He didn’t go to the shul, I checked that out, because he was still scared of people who didn’t like him, and he didn’t want to have confrontation. He was an old man. And about a year or half a year before he died, they put him in a nursing home, and he died.

David Bashevkin:

But he started davening every day again after he came back?

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

Yes. So I understand.

David Bashevkin:

Where did he have tefillin from? He had to buy?

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

I don’t know. I asked them to see the tefillin. I got the talis. They gave me his talis. I didn’t get his tefillin. But yes, I believe he had tefillin. He ate kosher, obviously, because they kept kosher. And he reintegrated himself into the Jewish world, from which he had been more or less completely divorced for four decades. So since 1940, he had not been involved with Jewish life. Yes, he’d known Jews, and yes, he had occasionally been to shul because Yidel Rottenberg had schlepped him there, but he was not involved. He’d not eaten kosher. He’d not mixed with Jews particularly. Done business with them, but it wasn’t something that he did specifically, and he’d not lived in Jewish areas. So he was completely devoid of any Jewish content in his life, and he went right back into it. A remarkable thing to do. At the end of his life he reembraced his roots.

David Bashevkin:

So one of the questions that I want to really discuss, because you’ve done such a remarkable job in your lectures and in your articles on the Yabloner Rebbe, is to talk a little bit about the reception history of this story, because it really made the rounds. And I guess before I ask questions about how it was received, I wanted to know if you could recount just briefly, what drew you to this story? You clearly have spent a lot of time investigating and doing some serious research into this person’s life. What captured your imagination about this story?

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

So first thing, which you probably already know about me, David, is that I am an information junkie.

David Bashevkin:

Yes.

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

There’s no information that’s not interesting for me. The particularly dangerous aspect of that is I’m also a collector. So you show me something, and if you give me some curious aspect of this collectible, I’m probably going to buy it. I’m the sucker who’s always going to buy that piece. The point is that what struck me most about this story is how eagerly it was received. It’s about three years ago when I first gave a lecture, just over three years ago, and just before Rosh Hashanah, it went viral. Somebody actually excerpted that particular part of the lecture and put it out on their YouTube, and then people downloaded it, and sent it out on WhatsApp. It was just before Rosh Hashanah, and it became a teshuva story. It was covered in the Jewish media. The timing was right.

It was a yomim noraim story, and people felt it was me’orer them to teshuva, that it’s never too late. You can go 40 years without any connection to Yiddishkeit, even having been as great as a chassidishe rabbi who’s done great things, you’ve abandoned your Yiddishkeit, you can come back. That’s an amazingly powerful story. It’s a lesson of teshuva. And the Rambam says it in Hilchos Teshuva. It can happen right in the last moment of your life, you can do teshuva. That’s very powerful to know that that’s actually happened to people, and I think that people took that very much to heart.

What I say struck me, it struck me that this particular curiosity, this story, took off, when hundreds of others, which I’ve spoken about over the years, have not had the same reception or been received with quite the same enthusiasm. So anybody who googles my name will discover that I’ve written dozens of articles and given –

David Bashevkin:

And a fabulous book.

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

I’ve written a book, and all of which have been well received, but none with quite the same number of hits as it were as the story about the Yabloner Rebbe. It’s not that I researched him in particular. What drew me to his story is because it was so curious and so odd, and for years and years I’d wondered what happened to him, and then it all came together, as I explained in the video, which your viewers can watch. It’s very easy to find. So that story came together, and therefore I released the information via the video, and via the article. But I’ve got many other such stories, which are equally curious, which are equally startling, about all kinds of people.

David Bashevkin:

I read your book, and I can attest to that myself, and we will absolutely link to both your website, which is just a treasure trove of information, and your book. I had one question about the reception. Was there anybody upset that you publicized this story?

Rabbi Pini Dunner:

I never got a feeling that anyone was upset. Some people questioned whether halakhically I had any right to spread information about an individual which could put them in a negative light, and I get this regularly because I published, as you say, articles, I’ve published a book which don’t necessarily always show up the protagonists in the most positive light. And we’re talking about Gedolei Olam, great rabbis, historical figures who are revered, et cetera, and the information is the information. I share it.

So there were some queries as to whether or not I should have shared the information about his years in the wilderness, and as we discussed before, there were those in Los Angeles who I felt weren’t as forthcoming with information, and I feel that they wanted to protect his dignity, and his legacy, whatever that legacy may have meant to them. I feel that there’s a lot more to learn from life if it’s real. And if you look at history, and you see that there are people who are flawed, and that they do things which aren’t quite right, I take my cue from Chazal. Chazal are willing to acknowledge that those people who feature in the stories and the narratives of Tanach are not always perfect, and that we can see from their flaws their greatness.

Somehow there’s something to learn from somebody, even if they haven’t in every aspect of their lives managed to conquer some of the human condition, which holds them back. I think that this is a good version of that. As a rabbi, if all I’m ever saying is that anybody who’s a rabbi is perfect, and anybody who isn’t is not perfect, then I’m going to lose my audience. I feel I’m going to lose them right away. But if I give people a narrative which has nuances which are positive and nuances which are negative, people can relate to that, because that’s more them than it is superhero.

Superheros may be interesting in Hollywood movies, but in real life, people want to know all the aspects of someone’s character. I give gemara shiurim. I’ll give you an example. There’s a great difference between Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya and Rabbi Eliezer ben Hurkanis. Two very different personalities, and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya, who was far more lenient and far more tolerant of human folly and human foibles, was a man who had a fantastic sense of humor. He was charming. He was willing to take a punch on the nose, as we saw in the story with Raban Gamliel. He was a fabulous personality. I would have loved to have spent time with Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya.

Rabbi Eliezer ben Hurkanis was a tougher person. He was a person who didn’t suffer fools gladly or at all. He was influenced by his time learning in the yeshiva of Shammai. Shammai was his rabbi, after Hillel died, Shammai was his rabbi for years, and then he went to Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai, and he joined the school of Hillel by taking on Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai as his rebbe. A tougher personality. And I think that when you understand the personalities of the people that you’re engaging with, it gives you a deeper understanding of what they’re saying and why they’re saying it, and why they behaved in a particular way when it came to a particular halakhic question.

Now, I know that some people, for them, everything is generic. Everything is neutral. There’s no difference between, I’ve given a lecture on Rav Moshe Feinstein and the Satmar Rebbe. There’s no difference between the Satmar Rebbe and Rav Moshe Feinstein. Both gedolei hador. You’re not allowed to say anything about them. But it’s not true. They were two very different personalities. And I think that you can learn something about what they said and how they said it by knowing who they were, and having the truth about them. Not just reading hagiography or hearing stories which tell you that they performed miracles and that who knows what.

So that’s really my approach to Jewish history, and I think that the powerful aspect of the Yabloner Rebbe story was exactly that. Here was a man who was clearly a great person. He took an entire Hasidic community and moved it, lock, stock, and barrel, and kitchen sink, to Eretz Yisrael and founded a village. Now, it didn’t work out for him, and he went to America and things went horribly wrong, and he drifted away, but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a great person. And I think the realization of how great he was was that at the end of his life, he was willing to accept that perhaps those four decades in the wilderness were not correct, and he reembraced his past, and he reembraced his faith, and he moved back to Eretz Yisrael even though he said he never would do that. I think that’s a powerful story about a great man. And you get the sense of him being great not by only knowing half the story, but by knowing the whole story.

David Bashevkin:

I cannot thank you enough for your time, and this story just, it impacted me and inspired me in ways that few episodes from Jewish history have done, and I am just so grateful and appreciative for all of your work on this.

There’s a deep personal sense of gratitude I have to Rabbi Pini Dunner for bringing this story to the public, because I think that everybody in their lives has moments where they feel that sense of alienation, that sense of distance from the story that they began, and they run away in whichever way people run.

Some people literally run away and start a new life elsewhere. Some people don’t feel comfortable going to shul. Some people don’t feel comfortable engaging in Jewish life. Some people switch careers, switch families, try to chart a new course for themselves. But ultimately, there is a trajectory in the life of a Jew, in the life of every human being, I think, that despite how much we run, despite how much we want to run away from it, despite how much we may try to cover or paper over our failures, because we do feel at times like nobodies, we ultimately need to embrace who we are and what our stories represent.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Rabbi Dunner has an incredible book that I think everybody should grab a hold of. I’ve recommended it for people countless times. It’s called Mavericks, Mystics, and False Messiahs: Episodes from the Margins of Jewish History. If you were captivated as I was from the story of the Yabloner Rebbe, and want to learn more about some of these other curious episodes in Jewish history, I would recommend that everybody go out and pick up his incredible book. Again, Mavericks, Mystics, and False Messiahs: Episodes from the Margins of Jewish History.

After I spoke with Rabbi Dunner, I actually was able to connect with a family member who he mentions in our conversation, and that is his niece, married to the nephew of the Yabloner Rebber. Her name is Shoshi Yanai, and she shared with me some personal recollections that the family has about what the life of the Yabloner Rebbe was like after he returned and came back ultimately to Eretz Yisrael, to Israel, to live in Kfar Chassidim.

Shoshi Yanai:

I know a few stories I heard. Like when he came, veteran people that still lived at that time, in ’81, 1981, when he came back, those people practically came to meet him, and practically kissed his feet, and told him that if it hadn’t been for him, they wouldn’t be alive at all. Because when he brought them to Israel in 1924, he saved them from the Holocaust. And that was one of the stories I heard. The other one was that every once in a week, they would gather together at his niece, my mother-in-law, Ela, every, I don’t know whether it was Wednesday or Thursday evening, and they would have a shiur, a lesson. At that time, he wouldn’t speak so much, but he was a good listener, and here and there would make a comment. He liked touring, going around and looking and seeing what was changed in the country, and was really surprised to find Kfar Chassidim so nice and prosperous. I know that he started again to put a yarmulke or a hat and grow back his beard, and he was very shy and modest.

One more thing. When my husband, Ehud, lived in the states and was trying to convince him to come back to Israel, he was so frustrated. He didn’t want to come back. He felt guilty for those who vanished in the Holocaust. His community, the one that were supposed to come to Israel after the first group came, and Ehud’s mother, my husband’s mother, the Rebbe niece, tried to send money and make someone to just put him on a plane and bring him back to Israel. And that happened only in 1981, when one of the women in Los Angeles managed to convince him with my husband, Ehud, and they sent him to New York first, and then back to Israel.

David Bashevkin:

But I think more than anything else, the story that ultimately endures from the Yabloner Rebbe is the story that we connect with and perpetuate in our own hearts and minds, and connect to our own lives. I think that story is best captured with the words of Rav Moshe Weinberger. Not what he said to me initially, but to bookend almost that initial comment with the words that he shared with a group of people from his shul and people who follow his Torah, he shared the following at the graveside of the Yabloner Rebbe in Kfar Chassidim.

Rav Moshe Weinberger:

There’s that part of ourselves that’s real, that wants to do the right thing, and then you get side tracked. You get lost, and you feel that [inaudible], and you feel that you let Hakadosh Baruch Hu down in your life, and that nobody cares for you, nobody wants you. When he came back, and this woman said, they start calling, “Rebbe, Rebbe,” and she said, “If not for you, we would have all been dead. We would have been killed in Poland.” Can you imagine all those years, he never thought of it like that? That’s our person, it’s so crazy. There’s so many good things that we do, and there’s so many positive changes that we make in helping our children and other people. But you never think of that. You always think of the bad stuff. So he saved so many people, he saved these families, and all the years he never thought of that. So all the years, he couldn’t think of coming back to Eretz Yisrael. He couldn’t think of putting on a pair of tefillin. He couldn’t put on a pair of tefillin. He couldn’t think of doing anything.

He was completely paralyzed in that place of, my whole life, my whole life is nothing. I ruined everything, and I’ve ruined everybody, and because of that, he couldn’t put on tefillin, he couldn’t keep a shabbos, he couldn’t do a mitzvah. Then the second, somehow her husband, this Ehud, the mishpacha that was able to convince him to come visit Eretz Yisrael. From what he told me, it was only a lot of hishtadlus to bring him back. He didn’t want to come. It was a whole thing.

But they finally brought him back, and he was so afraid to walk into this place. He was hoping it was only young people, there’d be nothing of old people that remembered him that day. He was nervous, and then he comes in, they say, “Rebbe.” Once he felt that, once he realized that he wasn’t a big a rasha as he thought, and once he realized that there were good things that I did in my life. Did you ever see, there’s a viduy from Rav Kook? Some of you have seen it. There’s something from Rav Kook where he writes, “Of course, we have to, we have to say viduy for the bad things we’ve done in our lives. So we say “ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu,” and so on. So there are plenty of things.

But Rav Kook wrote a nusach in a viduy, the good things that I’ve done in my life. I daven for my children, for other Jews. I keep Shabbos. They say viduy over the good things that we’ve done. Then somehow it opened up in him once again that realization of that which should have been so obvious, that he mamesh saved… It’s not just that he saved a couple of people. Their children and grandchildren he saved. Hundreds and hundreds of people, and now it keeps on going. He saved, and when he realized that, and it became clear to him, then he was able in a second to come back to Shabbos and tefillin.

What I care about is the courage of the person to do that, to come back. I care so much about the heart breaking escape from Yiddishkeit, that he ran away because he felt he was no good, which is happening to so many of our kids and so many of our adults. Even the ones that are still frum, you look at them davening. They’re running away. Why are they running away? It’s not because they don’t believe in the Ribono Shel Olam. You think for a second he stopped being a chassidishe rebbe? He was all the years that he was George Nichol, Nagel, he called himself Nichol, George Nichol in Los Angeles, a businessman, every single minute he was Reb Yechezkel Taub, the rebbe from Yablon.

In exile. In exile. He was a tzadik in exile, and that’s exactly the whole story of our journey, what this means. The tzadik that I was talking about last night, the tzadik who’s in a state of exile, and when he realizes that the Ribono Shel Olam all along sees me as a rebbe, not the way that I look at myself. When it dawned upon him. When that woman called out, that’s what struck me in that narrative that I read. I don’t know if it was on Yom Kippur or later, when she just screamed out, “Rebbe!” He’s looking at himself, like, “Me?”

She’s, “Rebbe!” Once she said that, “Rebbe,” and he looked at himself again as not being George Nichol, but as being Yechezkel Taub, an einekel from tzadikei elyon, I’m now going back to the chozer and beyond, from all those tzadikim he came from, and that he was a person that spent his whole life, the earlier part of his life in kedusha and tehara. A million mikvos, a million tefillos, a million blatt gemara, sefarim hakedoshim, chassidim.

Then all of a sudden, he came back. From whatever madrega he came back, but he came back. So I think that we owe him, to come here to say thank you. Because this story to me is more inspiring than all of the stories I read about, the ones that never, ever had any detours. There’s a friend of mine that says, “We don’t like any of these categories that they make. They have BT, baal teshuva.” And they have FFB, frum from birth. These are disgusting titles and things. Silly titles.

But I have an old friend of mine that he said, “Me,” he says, “I’m an FFBWL.” I said, Yossi, what does that mean? He says, “Frum from birth with lobsters.” Frum from birth with lobsters. So I can relate to that. No? We could all? All right, we have a couple of BTs, they’re awesome, we love you, and everything is great. BTWL. But that takes time. That takes time. In the beginning, it’s not like that. The beginning, right, right. BTWL. Right. So it’s with lapses, it’s with lapses. And that the natural thing is that when there’s a lapse, in order to make yourself feel like, okay, good, you don’t come back. You can’t come back. So the thought of him coming back after all of that, to me, that’s like the strongest person in the world.

David Bashevkin:

This has been an absolutely fascinating journey, and whether or not you’ve read the article on Tablet, whether or not you heard the initial lecture, I hope this journey through the life of the Yabloner Rebbe leaves you with something to consider and think about in your own teshuva journey. I’m not going to tell you what that thing is. I’m not going to have a long closing, because I think his life speaks for itself, and the way that we can apply his life to our own lives is something that we each need to do in our own private and intimate way. But I want to leave this conversation with the words of the Yabloner Rebbe himself. Returning back to that interview from the early 1980s. This is the Yabloner Rebbe talking about change itself.

Yabloner Rebbe/George Nagel:

And I had a lot in my life, was a lot of ups and downs. Great things, fell down, and so on.

Norman Tanis:

So in your life now today, you can see how people really are changing rather dramatically? Maybe not immediately, but gradually.

Yabloner Rebbe/George Nagel:

It takes time. It takes time.

Norman Tanis:

But lives are turned around.

Yabloner Rebbe/George Nagel:

I wouldn’t say that everybody’s helped. Some people are not helped, and the reason they’re not helped because they stop coming. They stop gravitating to people. And if they don’t gravitate to people, then trouble sets in.

David Bashevkin:

And it’s those ups and downs in life that the Yabloner Rebbe mentions. The need to be with people, to connect with people. The need to find and situate your story in the larger story of others, of family, of the Jewish people, of Jewish history itself, that I think for so many is what helps us continue writing our own chapter. Wishing all of our listeners a kasiva vchasima tova, a good gebentched yur, a happy and healthy new year.

It seems strange, and I don’t know if other people do this, but I kind of want to just end with a private note. I kind of just want to end with a personal and private comment to all of our listeners. This episode is being dropped right before Yom Kippur, and I know when I was in Ner Yisroel, there was a rebbe, Rabbi Tzvi Einstadter, who would always give a speech right before Yom Kippur to his students. He would always say two things. One thing he said is that more than your davening, more than any holy deeds that you can do, mitzvos, more than anything you can do, the greatest merit you can have is embracing your Jewish identity. The greatest zechus, the greatest merit in anybody’s life is to embrace their Jewish identity.

But afterwards, he looked at his class, and I remember sitting there and being so moved, he asked them for forgiveness. He asked them for an apology. Say I’m sorry if there’s anybody who ever reached out and I didn’t respond to, I didn’t connect with, I didn’t give enough time to. I think about that really every year before Yom Kippur, and particularly now, when there’s so much easier to stay connected, but because it’s so easy to stay connected, it’s so easy to disappoint, because the deluge of, whether it’s emails or text messages or DMs. Countless ways that we can be in touch with one another. But sometimes things slip through, and I wanted to say to our listeners, anybody who has reached out, I am so appreciative and thankful to every single person. And I really do try to read every single message, no matter the medium, whether it’s text or WhatsApp or emails, however which way, it means a great deal. And anything that we’ve been able to achieve since our beginning is really a credit to our listeners who do so much in building and responding to what works, and of course, what does not work.

I would be pained if I didn’t say quite bluntly and personally that I am so sorry to anybody and everyone who has reached out, has made an effort, and didn’t receive a timely response, didn’t receive as in depth a response, or didn’t receive a response at all. I really do my best, and please, I hope that you are mochel, that you forgive me if I’ve ever been anything less than adequate, either in the content that we put out, or, of course, in responding to your messages, which really mean so much to me. Once again, wishing everybody a kasiva vchasima, a good gebentched yur, a happy, healthy, sweet new year for everyone, for Am Yisrael, for the entire Jewish people.

So thank you so much for listening. It wouldn’t be a Jewish podcast without a little bit of Jewish guilt, and Lord knows this is the time of year for a little bit of Jewish guilt. We put so much work into every single episode. So please, if you enjoyed this episode, subscribe, rate, review. Tell your friends about it. It really helps us reach new listeners and continue putting out great content. If you’d like to learn more about this topic or any of the other great ones we’ve covered in the past, be sure to check out 18Forty.org. That’s the number 1-8 followed by the word “forty,” F-O-R-T-Y, 18Forty.org, where you can also find videos, articles, and recommended readings. Thank you so much for listening, and stay curious, my friends.