Chabad education center helps Jews break new ground

Ceremony marks community growth in Rockaway Twp.

All day on Sunday, Rabbi Asher Herson could not appear to sit still for even a moment.

The 42-year-old rabbi of the Chabad Center of Northwest New Jersey held hands with young children and danced around in circles to Jewish music. He shook hands with other men who gathered with him. He poured them drinks. He made his way through the crowd, stopping to say hello along the way to nearly everyone he saw.

“He’s very dynamic. He’s in constant motion,”said Alan Bader, a Rockaway Township resident and synagogue member.

“He’s always trying to get people involved. You can say no to him 100 times, and on the 101st time, you get tired of saying no.”

It was Herson’s persistence and that constant motion, most people said on Sunday, that helped propel the Chabad Center from a small, informal group of families that would crowd into the hall of a tiny VFW 18 years ago to what it has become today: a synagogue, a preschool and a Hebrew school that has already outgrown its 10-year home on Torah Way off Norman Road.

For the past five years, Herson said he has seen the need to obtain even larger facilities to accommodate a growing number of interested families.

In that time, he and Rabbi Mordechai Baumgarten have been busy working to buy small lots along Norman Road and Pawnee Avenue until they were able to obtain one piece of contiguous property about an half-acre large.

That property now will be the grounds for an 11,500-square-foot building dubbed the Chabad Educational Center, which will house all the educational programs of the center for children, teens and adults. On Sunday, with shovels and hard hats in hand, many of those original founding members dug a hole in the dirt and buried a cornerstone to signify the center’s groundbreaking.

This new building will include a preschool, a Hebrew school, a Hebrew high school, an adult education institute and a community mikvah. The current Torah Way building will serve as the primary worship area. The $2 million project will be paid for entirely through donations.

Over the full 18 years of Herson’s involvement in the center, from its birth to the groundbreaking of a second building on Sunday, Herson said he always suspected that the organization would gain momentum, but he never knew it would be like this.

“You do what’s right,” he said of his ministry to the Jews in this area.

“You plug away and God will send you the means. Your job is to sew the spiritual and the charitable, and God will somehow supply you with the means to facilitate those endeavors.”

The Chabad Center began as a tiny group of five families in the White Meadow Lake area in need of some spiritual guidance. They approached Herson’s father, Rabbi Moshe Herson, who is the dean of the Rabbinical College of America, and asked whether he could send a rabbi to hold some services with them.

Only 25 at the time, Herson’s son Asher was sent to Rockaway Township, along with Asher’s wife, Sarah.

“A lot of people didn’t seem to be connecting to their heritage in a way that they were able to relate,” Herson recalled.

“We live in a society where many people are on the one hand searching for some meaning, but a lot of times people are not that familiar with the foundation of their Jewish heritage.”

It started with just one Saturday service, but the people liked it so much that they asked Herson to come back the next week. Herson, his wife and their 6-month-old started to come more frequently. People would allow them to stay overnight in their houses on the Sabbath so the couple would be able to hold the services and eventually classes for children, men and women.

At times, though, it was a challenge. According to Jewish law, to hold certain parts of a service there must be a minyan, a quorum of at least 10 Jewish males.

Sometimes services would be delayed or put on hold as members — Herson included –would run outside and try to solicit men off the streets to come inside and join them. Herson was always on the move to grab people’s interest.

“There was this man walking his dog in shorts and a T-shirt, and he was so embarrassed to come in because he wasn’t dressed right,” Bader recalled.

“But he was so happy when he left — he knew he’d done a positive thing (by coming to the service).”

By 1990, Herson was able to buy a ranch house on Hibernia Road, where he and his wife lived, and held some small discussion groups on the downstairs floor. The plan was to convert the bottom half of the house into a permanent home for the Chabad Center, but before they could even get the approvals from the township, the location already outgrew itself.

Herson and his wife continued to use the VFW as a place of worship and educational classes until 1995, when they held the groundbreaking of the first building on Torah Way.

The couple still live in that ranch house down the street from the center.

“We have nine children, so right now the house is perfect,”Herson said with a laugh. “So it all worked out.”

All that while, Herson remained busy as he actively recruited more Jews to the center, drawing them from beyond Rockaway Township. The people who utilize the center for worship and classes are a mixture of Reform and more observant Jews, he said.

He and his wife would teach and hold services all throughout the day and night, but after the last class ended at around 9 p.m., he’d still manage to play basketball with some of the members, Bader said.

One year, Herson and several other synagogue members stood amidst a blizzard putting up a brightly lighted menorah across from the Christmas tree in Mountain Lakes, recalled Allan Heller, who attends the Chabad Educational Center.

And when a group of worshipers were in need of milk or spoons to stir their coffee during a fellowship hour, Herson would run over to his house and give them food or silverware from his own kitchen, said his wife, Sarah, who oversees many of the educational programs at the center and offers private tutoring.

“This is not a job — this is our life,” she said of the center and the work that she and her husband perform.

Now with 300 families involved at the Chabad Center of Northwest New Jersey, Herson said he knew five years ago when Rabbi Mordechai Baumgarten began helping him that a larger building was needed.

To obtain one piece of contiguous land, the center had to go around purchasing small chunks of unused open space that people purchased years ago in order to have access to White Meadow Lake. In all, they underwent 20 different land transactions for their new project.

“It’s unbelievable,” Baumgarten said of the center’s development. “I joined here because it was too much for one person to do.”

Herson credits his father as giving him much of the inspiration he needed to expand the center, even when times got tough and participation in services was low.

But members of the center noted that Herson has a gift with words that allows him to reach out to others, and that gift in part also helped the center become what it is today.

“I’m 25 years his senior and I feel comfortable talking to him,” Bader said.

“I feel comfortable, and my kids who are 15 years his junior feel comfortable talking.”

“He’s able to fit into a community, instead of a community fitting around him.”