Page 41 - HaMizrachi Yom Yerushalayim - Shavuot 5782 USA

to buy an apartment in Israel. Everyone knows how challenging
Rabbi Rakeffet with his grandchildren celebrating his completion of the Talmud, 1992 You have spent the great majority of your life teaching
Completing a Sefer Torah at Mercaz Shvut Ami, 1997
Rabbi Rakeffet teaching during his trip to Moscow in 2017 contemporary.” It took a long time in America to go from the
it is to buy a place in Israel! The Mossad’s division that dealt with
Soviet Jewry, later known as Nativ HaDemama (“The Silent Path”),
gave these children the money they needed to buy an apartment
in Israel, with the understanding that their father in Russia
would give the equivalent amount to Jewish activists there. The
children told their father “when someone shows you a picture
of a baby with a bottle, give the money to him!” Sure enough, we
showed him the picture, got the money, and passed it onto the
people who needed it.
When I came back in January of 1981 I helped organize Shvut Ami,
an organization that taught Russian Jews who came to Israel
about yiddishkeit. I used to walk in there once a week, and it gave
me life! It was a beit midrash in Yerushalayim where everyone was
learning Gemara in Russian, their native language. Out of Shvut
Ami came many rabbanim, mashpi’im and mechanchim; it functions
until today, teaching Torah to Jews in Russia and Israel.
thousands of students in Jerusalem, at Yeshiva University’s
Gruss Kollel, Midreshet Moriah and many other institutions.
From your vantage point, what are some of the changes
you’ve seen in the Anglo Jewish community over the years,
both in Israel and the Diaspora?
Our greatest mistake is to call ourselves Orthodox Jews. That
implies that observing Torah and mitzvot is a choice. So I refuse
to call myself an Orthodox Jew; I call myself a Jew. There is only
one way to be a Jew, and that is to live a life of Torah and mitzvot.
Every survey in the world shows us that there where there is no
Torah and mitzvot in the big Western world, there is assimilation
and intermarriage. Any family that has been in America for a
long time, you see what happens to them without Torah and
mitzvot – they cannot survive as Jews, period.
We love every Jew – we must welcome them with kindness and
warmth. But on the other hand we have to be clear; this is Torat
Hashem Temimah, this is how we have survived and how we will
survive. We cannot compromise our message for the sake of
political correctness.
We’re always going to have a problem with American Jewry.
People think Jews in Israel can get along with and understand
Jews in America. Yes, we can understand a religious Jew living
in Borough Park, to a certain degree. But for the assimilating
American Jew – we are a bone in his throat! We remind him that
he’s Jewish, we remind him that there is a G-d, we remind him of
Jewish history, we remind him that we have a national homeland!
Daniel Gordis wrote a wonderful book, We Stand Divided: The Rift
Between American Jews and Israel. People think we can placate
American Jewry and bow to them, but it’s absolutely wrong. The
more we talk about pluralism, the more we try to placate them,
the more we will fail. Pluralism is a synonym for intermarriage
and assimilation and I challenge anyone to prove me wrong.
On the other hand, we have to realize the great miracle that has
happened here, something newcomers can’t begin to understand.
The Rav used to say, “People view yiddishkeit today like an old lady.
We have to put modern clothes on her and make the message
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