The Forum News
Steiner, left, and Chesky Rothman figure out where they are going next during a visit to Fargo this week. Using names from previous Chabad-Lubavitch rabbinical student visits and their rental Jeep’s Global Positioning System device, the pair went door to door to talk to area Jews. They traveled throughout North Dakota and South Dakota for three weeks.

Abraham Ungar was at work in his apartment when he heard the familiar Jewish greeting over the door intercom. Shalom.

He greeted the two bearded men at the front door and chatted in Hebrew as he led them to his apartment.

“Why are you here?” Ungar asked the rabbinic students in English once they’d settled in the living room. “I’m very glad to meet you, but why are you here?”

Shalom, Fargo

The Forum News
Steiner, left, and Chesky Rothman figure out where they are going next during a visit to Fargo this week. Using names from previous Chabad-Lubavitch rabbinical student visits and their rental Jeep’s Global Positioning System device, the pair went door to door to talk to area Jews. They traveled throughout North Dakota and South Dakota for three weeks.

Abraham Ungar was at work in his apartment when he heard the familiar Jewish greeting over the door intercom. Shalom.

He greeted the two bearded men at the front door and chatted in Hebrew as he led them to his apartment.

“Why are you here?” Ungar asked the rabbinic students in English once they’d settled in the living room. “I’m very glad to meet you, but why are you here?”

It’s a question often posed to the young men in their travels, as their destinations are places with small Jewish populations.

Yudi Steiner responded with a story he’s told many times.

Another young rabbi, when asked that question, once compared himself to a traveling scribe – a man who would go from one small town to another repairing the Torah scroll. The rabbi traveled to fix Jewish souls.

But the rabbi’s leader corrected him. The Jewish soul is never broken. Rather, sometimes it needs dusting off.

That’s what Steiner and Chesky Rothman, who are studying Chabad-Lubavitch rabbinics in Brooklyn, N.Y., say they’re here to do. They recently spent three weeks traveling North Dakota and South Dakota.

Door to door

Hundreds Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis and rabbinical students go on this mission every summer, visiting Jews abroad and in the United States.

“Sometimes it takes an outside force to remind us we’re Jewish,” Rothman says.

Steiner, from Toronto, and Rothman, of Pittsburgh, went from one city to the next in a rented Jeep Laredo, hauling their kosher food in a large cooler.

Each day, they tracked down local Jews, navigating their way around town with the rental car’s GPS device.

Names are jotted down on folded pieces of paper tucked into a crisp white shirt’s pockets. Sometimes they’re referred to someone by another Jew. And occasionally, it’s a matter of looking for Jewish-sounding names in the phonebook.

They don’t usually call ahead, but just show up at people’s offices or homes, like they did with Ungar. He was the first person they found at home after an early afternoon spent driving from a south Fargo home to a bagel shop, to a downtown apartment, and then to a doctor’s office.

One mitzvah

The purpose of their visit is to reach out to Jews and help unite them, Steiner says. In no way do they want to convert people.

They also encourage Jews to perform at least one mitzvah a day, such as lighting the shabbat candles, giving to charity or hanging a mezuzah on the doorpost.

“Every little bit of light dispels a lot of darkness,” Rothman says.

Mitzvah is a Hebrew word that means commandment. But Chabad-Lubavitch, a Hasidic tradition, describes it as a connection to God instead.

They ask Ungar if he would like to put on tefillin, a Jewish wrap. Two black leather boxes containing scrolls of parchment are strapped around the arm and head.

Steiner wraps the straps around Ungar’s left arm, then hands him a Hebrew prayer to say.

Afterward, they compare different children’s songs of that prayer.

Ungar, who attended Fargo’s Orthodox synagogue until it closed (its last high holy services were held in 1999), asked the rabbinic pair if they could find him a Jewish friend in the city.

“I am very glad because I don’t have a chance to meet Jews in this town,” Ungar says. “I enjoyed talking to them.”

Steiner says they are especially glad to meet unaffiliated Jews, like Ungar.

“It means they have nothing and we’re here to bring them something,” Steiner says.

“Sometimes we meet people who don’t feel they need us,” he says. “This is someone who felt like the only Jew.”

Local reaction

Janeen Kobrinsky, lay rabbi of Fargo’s Temple Beth El, a Reform Judaism congregation, says most people don’t know much about Hasidic Judaism and that can be problematic.

She says the Chabad-Lubavitch sect follows a dynastical leader – the most recent, Rabbi Mendel Schneerson, died in 1994 – and the visiting rabbis are trying to get Jews to be Torah-observant as they define it.

“We really don’t have a dialogue with them,” Kobrinsky says. “It’s apples and oranges.”

She says she does not care to meet with the yearly visitors.

Bev Jacobson, president Temple Beth El, met with Rothman and Steiner while they were in Fargo. It’s the third summer she’s met with a pair of rabbis from the program.

She says one of their messages was the Jewish spirit is one, whether Reform, Conservative or Orthodox.

“We always welcome speaking to other Jewish people even if they’re not Reform,” Jacobson says. “I think it’s a good thing.”

11 Comments

  • shliach from afar

    It’s always unsettling when a Reform leader feels threatened by Chabad and refuses to meet with us, even though we are not out to "convert" (if that’s the inexact word). And it’s a thrill when the lay leaders welcome us in, as they know we are not out to "take over" anything.

  • i was a camper in parksville

    nice to see you yudi i was on your team in color war last year my best summer ever.
    thanks

  • Another shliach

    to shliach from afar: why is it unsettling? Aderaba – they should feel threatened! And as for ttaking over, I think that would be a great idea. I am also a shliach from afar, and though I have a great relationship with the local reform and conservative, I know that the damage they have cause to authentic Yiddishkeit is immeasurable, R"L.

  • north dakota born and raised

    Hopefully, the rabbinic students learned what I have known all my life: That North Dakota is the greatest place in the world! Every time I read on this site about the crime in Crown Heights, I always think, "Why don’t they just move here?" Lots of room to roam, low crime rates and all the lefse you can eat!

  • Nachas

    Chesky, Yudi. You guys are class acts. Clone yourselves a couple of times and Kovod Harrebe/Kovod Lubavitch may yet become a realizable dream.

  • to rabbi yudi stiener

    "they have nothing" i hope you didnt mean that in the way it seems. they have a neshama- your there to just dust it off and polish it. i hope thats wat you meant. as much as the rebbes work is a big honer etc.. we must be humbled too. and not look at ourselves as worlds biggest hero and everyone else is a zero and your there to save them. as mucha s they are naive about yidishkeit we all have our own personal strugglesto deal with as well. they do have everything – you jsut needto reveal it. thats our joba s chassidim, not to bring something to someone who has nothing as far as your concerned they may have a very high neshama – higher than your or mine.
    shkoach!

  • Ilan- Abraham Ungar-s son from Israel

    My father sure looks happy to have received the two of you in his Fargo apartment.
    In his visits to Israel he shares the bus with tens of Hassidiks daily. But in the Judaic desert of his Fargo home, I’m sure your visit presented to him a treat.

    Ilan