So, these two rabbis travel Arkansas … and bring blessings

Linda Sweizer of Hot Springs had been praying for someone to help her teach her grandchildren what it means to be Jewish.

Then she read in her newspaper that two rabbis were in Arkansas as part of a New York based program that sends rabbis on summer trips to areas where Jews are isolated. So she called them.

Sweizer and her family are among Jews across the state who had a visit from rabbis Menachem “Mendy” Margolin and Yosef “Yossi” Kopfstein as they spent two and a half weeks crisscrossing Arkansas as part of the Jewish Community Enrichment Program, informally called the Traveling Rabbis.

They are members of the Chabad Lubavitch movement within Orthodox Judaism. They have rabbis on both coasts, Margolin said. In between, not so much.

The pair worked with Rabbi Mendel Greisman of Chabad of Northwest Arkansas in Fayetteville and Rabbi Pinchus Ciment of Lubavitch of Arkansas in Little Rock, who gave them names and phone numbers of people who called for help.

In Eureka Springs, they met a grandmother whose daughter needed something important for her newborn. “We helped her choose a proper Jewish name,” Margolin said. The baby girl was named Shoshana.

“It means rose,” Kopfstein said.

“No, not rose,” Margolin said.

“Flower?” Kopfstein said.

Margolin thought.

“Petal.”

The two met at rabbinical school in Australia. Kopfstein, originally from England, is continuing his study in New York City. Margolin works in graphic design in Norfolk, Va.

“We go in pairs,” Margolin explained. “You find somebody you don’t think you’re going to get into fights with.”

Margolin, about 5 feet tall from his sensible black shoes to the tip of his yarmulke, is the more talkative. He knew a bit about Arkansas because his brother Levi came here for the same program.

“I thought Arkansas was a flat desert place,” he said. “I have to say Arkansas lives up to its name as the Natural State.”

In Hot Springs Village, they met with a group interested in starting a synagogue. “We expected two people,” Kopfstein said. “When we got there, there were eight.”

In Jonesboro, they called a doctor who asked them to come in an hour. When they got there, they learned he had recently lost his wife. “We did a whole service with him,” including saying standard prayers for the dead, Kopfstein said.

On Tuesday they called a Rogers woman who wouldn’t normally have been home at that moment. She had just moved to a new home and was worried about finding someone to properly bless it.

“We came just in the nick of time!” Margolin said with a smile.

“We see a lot of divine providence in our time here,” he said. They had a loose schedule, but some meetings came about by chance. “We feel like God’s hand definitely guides us.”

They performed a housewarming ceremony and sold her a new “kosher pure mezuzah,” he said.

A mezuzah is a scroll in a protective case, attached to doorways and gates in Jewish homes and synagogues. Its text comes from the most important prayer in Judaism, which instructs loving God with all one’s heart, soul and might.

She had one, but “it had issues,” Margolin said. Bugs had gotten in and rendered it impure.

The mezuzahs the pair carry have tight plastic seals to keep rain out. The parchment scroll inside is also plastic-wrapped. To make them kosher, the words are handwritten in black ink with quills, but never metal quills, because metal is used in instruments of war, Kopfstein explained.

“I think they’re from pigeons,” Margolin said.

“No, not pigeons. Chickens?” Kopfstein said.

“No, not chickens.”

They replaced it, “and then said l’chaim,” Margolin said. “We made it into a Jewish house.”

Linda Sweizer and her husband have lived in Hot Springs for five years. Neither of them drives, so “we really hadn’t made any contacts with any Jewish people,” she said. Originally from Michigan, they also felt isolated as Jews when they lived in Pago Pago, American Samoa.

She called the pair and invited them to her home. Her 10 year old twin grandchildren, Joshua and Sarah, came over with their parents.

They had never met an Orthodox rabbi. “They were thrilled,” said Sweizer, who was raised as a Christian but later learned about and reclaimed her Jewish heritage.

“We all had so many questions,” she said. The meeting lasted three hours. She bought Torahs and storybooks for her grandchildren and several books for herself.

“They were both really gracious, lovely men,” she said. “We felt like it was really a blessing to our home.”

The Sweizers had had a mezuzah in Samoa, but somehow the scroll had gotten lost.

“When they brought those, I snapped one up,” she said. “They put it on and said a blessing over it. I look at it every time I come in.”

The traveling rabbis said people sometimes ask them what they think of the current fighting between Israel and Lebanon. They answer by explaining a concept of “extra deeds” that shifts the focus away from the news and toward one’s own environment.

“You do something good for someone else,” Margolin said. “That brings a new energy in the world. It brings about peace.”