Dancing Through the Streets with the Torah in the Heart of Tel Aviv

by Yaakov Ort – chabad.org

It’s a steamy midsummer night only a short walk from the Mediterranean beaches, and Israel’s city that never sleeps is wide awake. The City Center neighborhood is beating with bright, youthful energy. Swarms of bicycles and electric scooters zip by the packed cafes along Bograshov Street, and the designer shops around Dizengoff Square are filled with stylish customers eyeing themselves in the latest European fashions.

But something different is happening tonight.

The avenues are blocked off by police, and loud thumping beats of Chassidic music fill the air. Pedestrians stop in their tracks as people stare out the windows of the shops. Children gape. Everyone is smiling, phones out, snapping pictures of their neighbors joyously dancing through streets of Tel Aviv with Chabad on the Coast’s just-completed new Torah scroll.

While Tel Aviv may be the nation’s most quintessentially modern Israeli city in its architecture, art and attitude, it also remains a city of new immigrants, mainly well-educated and ambitious young Jewish men and women from the four corners of the earth who are drawn to the city’s booming high-tech and financial centers. Chabad on the Coast was started just six years ago by Rabbi Eliyahu and Sara Naiditch to be the first Chabad-Lubavitch center in Tel Aviv dedicated to serving the city’s English-speaking residents and visitors.

“See, we’ve already outgrown our shul!” shouted neighborhood resident Shaun Backer over the noisy din of the crowd overflowing onto Bar Kochva Street. “The Naidiches are among the select few who truly reach out with love to their fellow Jews,” says Backer, a businessman who emigrated from South Africa seven years ago. “Both Rabbi Eli and Sara are warm, brilliant teachers,” he says, pointing out that shul is packed to capacity every Friday night.

“Did you know that Tel Aviv has more synagogues than Jerusalem, but most are now closed or barely active?” asks Backer, saying that as far as he can see, it’s mainly Chabad that is taking active steps to reach out and grow Tel Avivians’ experience of their Jewishness, especially among young families.

Typical of those young families are Frans-Jan and Jordana Meiten, who recently moved to Israel from Holland with their infant daughter, Leah. The Meitens sit chatting with some newfound friends while nibbling on an abundant supply of finger food as the Naiditches guide a line of visitors eager to help the sofer inscribe the final letters in the new Torah scroll.

It is the Meitens’ first time at Chabad of the Coast. He’s a global account manager for one of Israel’s most successful recent start-ups, Monday.com, and they say they have always been drawn to the warmth of Chabad wherever they have lived and in their business travels around the world.

“We heard about the event and thought we’d see what Chabad here is like,” says Jordana Meiten. “We want to have a strong Jewish education for our daughter, and we’ve heard great things about the Garden School,” the first bilingual English/Hebrew Jewish preschool in Tel Aviv, founded by the Naiditches.

The Torah completion and celebration, says Meiten, is in marked contrast to the rampant anti-Semitism they had been experiencing in Rotterdam.

“This is so beautiful,” she says.

Sara Naiditch points out that the preschool is a vitally important part of their work. “As our community grows, we are here to provide authentic Yiddishkeit, so when our young professionals started to get married and were looking for a high-quality preschool with Jewish values at the core, we created it!”

‘A Special Warmth to the Neighborhood’

Chabad’s activities in Tel Aviv predate the founding of the modern state in 1948. In the 1930s, Lubavitcher refugees from the Soviet Union began establishing yeshivahs and social services centers in the city for their fellow immigrants from around the world. In the following decades, Chabad institutions flowered under the active guidance of the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory.

Today, Chabad’s network of 50 centers under the direction of Rabbi Yosef Gerlitsky serve the city’s residents and visitors—from early childhood education to senior care. In addition to its focus on native Hebrew speakers, in recent years Chabad of Tel Aviv has expanded with new centers primarily serving those whose first languages are Russian, French and English.

For neighborhood resident Marissa Sarfatti, Chabad on the Coast is a rich addition to increasingly booming Jewish life in northern Tel Aviv. “Ten years ago, there were only a handful of kosher restaurants and not a lot of services for people like me,” says Sarfatti, an executive leadership coach and native of South Africa. “Chabad has brought such a special Jewish warmth to the neighborhood.”

For the Naiditches, who are also part of the Chabad Young Professionals international network, having Chabad’s very own new Torah scroll is one more important step in the evolution of their efforts in the community, which began in 2015 with Shabbat dinners and classes in their home.

“The Rebbe always pushed for us to do more—to bring more light and love to our communities, to realize that we are lamplighters, here to pave the way when it seems dark out,” says Sara Naiditch. “We feel that in Tel Aviv. It’s a beautiful, vibrant city, full of innovation and creativity, and Judaism is just that.

“When we connect with G‑d and His Torah, we can reach infinite blessings in our own lives,” she continues. “Tel Aviv is two feet on the ground, head in the clouds, and I think that’s a push that the Chabad movement has—always think of ways to bring Judaism to the forefront, in a way that is authentic, creative and caring.”

From Generation to Generation

The Torah dedication was especially moving for Rabbi Eli Naiditch and his mother, Goldie Naiditch, a writer and Torah teacher, as the scroll was dedicated by the Naiditch family in Israel and abroad in honor of the rabbi’s late father, David Naiditch.

“We can’t think of a more fitting place for this scroll to reside than a Chabad House, so we can pass along to future generations the wisdom and beauty of the Torah as our father passed it along to us,” says the rabbi.

Soon after the procession returned to the Chabad center, 9-year-old Leah Karepov and her 5-year-old sister, Yonit, had their picture taken under the chuppah with Naiditch, the Torah scroll and their grandfather, Eran Tamber. The girls live right down the street with their parents, Dr. Yevgeny and Dr. Sharon Karepov.

Yonit and Leah’s father is a brain and spinal-cord surgeon who had served in military intelligence, and her mother is a biomedical engineer and graduate of Tel Aviv University who was in the air force, Tamber proudly explains. The grandparents had taken the girls out for a walk before bedtime when they saw the event and stayed.

“As you can see, we’re not so religious, but it is very wonderful what Chabad does everywhere,” beams Tamber, as he lifts up his granddaughters one by one so they can kiss the new Torah scroll.