Where What When

On the Front Lines of Kiruv with Pinky Bak

When I last wrote in these pages, in the article "Revisiting the Mishpaha," Feigi and I were living in Yerushalayim and we had just celebrated the birth of our first child, a daughter. Feigi's parents, Chester and Rosalyn Siegel, arrived a day before she gave birth, an example of perfect timing. I remember the kiddush we gave in our apartment in Kiryat Sanz, which is next to Kiryat Mattersdorf. My mother-in-law and I went shopping in Meah Shearim. Then we took our baby, Chaya Sara, to Tipat Chalav, which is the well-baby clinic. We also received home visits from Amalia to teach us how to take care of our little girl. Everyone was very nice to us and, as always, we felt that everyone in Israel, secular and religious, was mishpacha.

We had decided to return to America, and I contacted Torah Umesorah, the National Society for Hebrew Day Schools. The Machon Teachers Institute at Ner Israel was under the direct control of Torah Umesorah in those days, and I had previously developed a close relationship with Dr. Joseph Kaminetzky and Rabbi Bernard Goldenberg, who headed the organization. We were not returning to the United States until after Tisha B'Av, which is late in the hiring season, but that is not always as big a problem as it appears. Sometimes, positions open up that were not available months before.

Back in 1971, I had no shortage of opportunities. I got a letter from Rabbi Shnayer Lewis, who was the principal in Seattle. He sent me a list of questions, and I responded by mail. Then I got a letter from a school that had not been under consideration, the Vancouver Talmud Torah, which is a day school on Canada's west coast. What happened was that by the time my letter arrived in Seattle, Reb Shnayer had already filled his opening and he passed on my reply to the principal up the coast in British Columbia.

Not wanting to make a decision precipitously, I decided to wait until returning to America and survey all the opportunities. I visited the offices of Torah Umesorah in New York, and they presented a number of cities that were seeking a teacher. In fact, several principals were in their office that day doing interviews, and they were ready to sign me up on the spot.

The choices were TA in Baltimore, which offered $6,000 per annum for a "challenging class." I got the distinct impression that this class quickly disposed of new teachers and ended their careers in chinuch, so I did not pursue it. Then there were two positions in the South, Atlanta and Dallas, whose principals were present to interview me. These were established schools, and the salaries were good, about $12,000.

Why then did I pick Vancouver, the most distant of the possibilities? I have to thank Rabbi Bernard Goldenberg for selling me on Vancouver. He had been my teacher for Jewish history in the Ner Israel Machon, and he had previously been the rabbi of Congregation Schara Zedek, the Orthodox shul in Vancouver. He showed me a map with pins on it for every day school, and he convinced me that I could accomplish the most for Yiddishkeit in this faraway city and really make a difference.

What mostly convinced me were my several telephone conversations with the principal of the school, Pinky Bak. His zeal and commitment and his description of the revolution he was causing in Vancouver made me want to join a winning team. (Pinky, whose name was Pinchos, was the son of Rabbi Binyamin and Muriel Bak of Baltimore.) Pinky impressed me as being on a different plane, another madreiga, than any other principal I had met. He didn't talk about teaching as a job but as an opportunity to change lives. And he was succeeding.

* * *

Feigi and Chaya Sara stayed with her parents in Baltimore, and I went to Vancouver to find an apartment and get ready for my new job. Pinky picked me up at the airport, and I stayed in his house until I found an apartment right behind the shul, a few blocks from the school.

You may wonder how I could call Pinky by his first name. The students called him "Mr. Bak," but that did not take away from his total control of the situation. You see, Pinky had never intended to be a principal of a day school. He was on the West Coast studying for a degree in English literature and was serving as the youth director of the NCSY in Berkeley, California, when Rabbi Marvin Hier, the rabbi of Schara Zedek saw him in action. Rabbi Hier is very astute, one of the most astute people I ever met. He immediately recognized that this very young man was just the dynamic "pied piper" that Vancouver needed, and he convinced Pinky to put aside English literature for chinuch.

He then convinced the school to hire him, even though he was young, inexperienced, and Orthodox. Prior to his arrival, the Talmud Torah was a community day school, and it was certainly not geared to "Orthodox outreach" as one may call kiruv. That soon changed.

When I first arrived in Vancouver, in 1971. Pinky and Rabbi Hier were a dynamic duo. The Rabbi made sure that the principal got the material support he needed, and the principal created and led the NCSY and turned it into the youth group that teens wanted to join.

Right away, even before school started, Pinky put me on the staff of the YU Torah Leadership Seminar in Washington State. There, I got to meet the kids who were turned on to Yiddishkeit. I also learned the new culture - that we existed to spread Judaism, to open our homes and our hearts to the kids and help them on their path to finding Torah. I want to emphasize something that was self-evident to me at the time: neither Pinky nor I nor any of the other teachers were paid for working with NCSY. It wasn't a job, it was an opportunity and the main reason we were there.

I remember writing a letter to Dr. Joseph Kamenetzky, the head of Torah Umesorah. I described to him that in my new job I gave a gemara shiur to 15 boys in the ninth grade (in Canada, they say "grade nine"). Of these, only one came from a shomer Shabbos home, but at least nine of them were shomer Shabbos. He wrote me back that I must have made a mistake, as this just can't be true. But it was. There were similar numbers among the girls.

The hashpa'a, influence, was not necessarily in the school. It was mainly the personal relationship of the kids with Pinky. His home was full, overflowing with teenagers every Shabbos. It got to the point that there were just too many for Karen, his aishes chayil, to fit into their small dining room. So, Rabbi Hier arranged for a free luncheon every Shabbos at the shul for all the youth who wanted to come. There were at least 50, and maybe more some weeks. Kids from the Conservative shul came to the Schara Zedek, because that is where the cool kids were. Mark Belzberg was the president of NCSY, and other kids who were leaders made it the "in place."

Irving Stone of Cleveland once spent Shabbos in Vancouver. He was there for the annual meeting of Carlton Cards, which was the Canadian branch of his greeting card company. He ate with Pinky Friday night and with me for lunch. He was totally amazed by our youth, speaking with them, and seeing their love for Torah. He was even more amazed later when I told him that none of these kids came from a shomer Shabbos home.

I remember our first Simchas Torah in Vancouver. Rabbi Hier and Pinky moved the hakofos outside into the street. Never before had Vancouver seen a throng of young people singing and dancing like that. It was something to experience. Pinky's favorite song of that period was "Shmelky's Nigun" by Rabbi Shmuel Brazil. He could belt it out, and everyone joined in.

I taught fourth, sixth, eighth, and ninth grades, and Feigi had a part-time job for a few hours teaching the older girls. We didn't even buy a car for the first half of the year, as we were so close to everything we needed. Supermarkets in Canada delivered the groceries to your door in those days. Our lives centered around the school and the kids, and we found Vancouver a very nice place. (In Canada, as soon as a pedestrian steps into the street, the cars all stop.)

Most of the parents were from traditional backgrounds. Many were Holocaust survivors, and some of those who were born in Canada came from places like Winnipeg and Montreal, where there was more Yiddishkeit. They used to say that Canadian Jewry was one generation less assimilated than American Jewry - even if the most common name for the girls was Heather. (I must have had six Heathers in my class.)

If everything was so good, was there any downside? The main one was that we were very far away from family. In those days, people actually wrote letters and did not call as often. Travel took a long time, and we only went to Baltimore once a year, at most. Although there were many shomer Shabbos teenagers, there were only a small number of balabatim who were strictly observant. Many of them were much older than we were, and we had a limited number of friends.

On the other hand, when you are thousands of miles from home, you become family with the few other frum people in the town, which can lead to some interesting situations. Once, I got a call from Karen Bak in the middle of the night. Pinky was away at a Shabbaton, and she went into labor; she asked me to take her to the hospital. When I took her into the admissions area of Vancouver General Hospital, a nurse recognized me. I had been there several weeks earlier when Feigi gave birth to our second daughter Estie. The nurse innocently asked me, "Weren't you here a couple of weeks ago with another woman?" Without any guile, I replied, "That was my wife; this is my friend." Karen told me this story many years later, and we laughed about it. I had no idea at the time how my answer sounded.

We had school Shabbatonim, and we went to California each year for the combined YU Seminar followed by the West Coast Regional Convention of NCSY. In my first year, I led a busload of kids from Vancouver to Palm Springs, California. The bus stopped off in San Francisco for breakfast at Rabbi Traub's shul. The only glitch was that there was a lot of snow in Oregon and Northern California, and we arrived for breakfast around 5 p.m. The ladies of the shul had been waiting for us all day, and we were grateful for the food.

* * *

While in Palm Springs, I visited my father's oldest sister, Aunt Celia (Tzivia) Bear. I had only met her once before, when she visited from Pensacola, Florida. Aunt Celia was the first to come to America and she brought my father to this country, so I owe her appreciation for that. I remember that when I first met her, my mother had warned me that Aunt Celia was somewhat "particular" or strong-minded. Aunt Celia was what they used to call a "free thinker"; she was probably a socialist, too, in her earlier years. Later, she moved to California, where she lived part of the year in Palm Springs in a motor home (we called it a trailer in the olden days) and part of the year in Yosemite National Park.

I told Aunt Celia that I was there with a convention of hundreds of Jewish teenagers, and I wanted to take her over to show her that observant Judaism was still existent. She declined my offer. Aunt Celia could have been still resentful for what her father did before World War I. He had come to New York but decided that America was "treif," that one could not be a frum Jew in this country, and he decided to move back to Poland. He picked Celia up at the dock, took her to her grandfather, whose last name was Oberstein and who was a rabbi in Brooklyn, and left her there. He did not tell her that he was going back to Europe on the same ship that she had come on. She felt abandoned.

I don't know all the circumstances, and all this happened a century ago. It is hard to judge anyone. especially when we don't really understand their circumstances. I do know that Celia's daughter sent my sister Elsie a postcard she found that had been sent by my grandfather to Pensacola asking that his children bring their old, sick father to America. He wrote, "what can be better than a Jew who sits and learns all day. One father can take care of four children; can't four children take care of one father?" This is all we know of the episode, but they didn't bring him to America, and he died before the Second World War in Poland. I do know that they suffered poverty growing up, and the fact that their mother died and their father was absorbed in learning and left their upbringing to his second wife did not endear my Uncle Kiva and my Aunts Elka and Tzivia to the Old Country and what it represented to them. Only my father chose a different path, because he married my mother.

* * *

I tell this story to draw a comparison between what Orthodox Judaism meant to some kids growing up in World War I-era Poland and some other kids growing up in North America of the 1970s. I don't know if Pinky could have had the same hashpa'a on the poverty-stricken children up in Tiktin that he had on the affluent children in Vancouver. I do know this: it is 37 years since I first met Pinky Bak in Vancouver, and I have never met his equal.

What happened, in short, was that Rabbi Steven Riskin wanted to start a high school in New York. He searched the country for the right person, and he personally came to Vancouver to recruit Pinky. He convinced him that what klal Yisrael needs is a way to synthesize Torah and the modern world, to produce bnai Torah who have a zest for learning and who are not afraid to benefit from all that the modern world has to offer. As Pinky explained to me, "Yaft Elokim leyefes veyishkone be'ohalei Shem." This is the verse that is interpreted to mean that one can benefit from all the beauty of Greece while remaining firmly planted in the tents of Judaism. Rabbi Riskin had a vision, and he felt that Pinky would develop a modern Orthodox yeshiva that was full of passion and zeal and able to attract thinking people who wanted to be a part of modern society and who had yirat Shamayim. It was a tall order and harder to actualize than to imagine.

Tragically, Pinchos Bak died of an aneurism while dancing with his students in Riverdale on Purim night. No one can know what he would have accomplished for klal Yisrael. Neither the school he left behind in Canada nor the one he founded in New York was the same without him.

* * *

I visit Vancouver from time to time. While it is true that the Bak era has never been duplicated, there is much positive going on. In the past few years, a group from Chofetz Chaim Yeshiva came to town and started a branch. They are having much success. The community has benefited from good leaders over the years, and there are actually more observant balabatim today than when I lived there. The world goes on, new methods are developed, and Judaism grows. Rabbi Hier went on to found the Simon Wiesenthal Center and is now a world-famous Jewish leader.

Pinky and Karen had visited us for Shabbos just a few months before his passing, from their home in Monsey. At that time, we were living in Allentown, Pennsylvania. We received the bad news about Pinky early Purim morning and went to the funeral on Purim day in Lincoln Square Synagogue. A few months later, Feigi gave birth to our second son. We named him Eliezer Pinchos for my mother's father, who lived into his nineties, and for Pinky, who was called to his Maker at the tender age of 32.

Elly, of course, never met Pinky, but in a certain way he is living out that vision. He just finished his residency in internal medicine at Temple in Philadelphia, and is going to start a fellowship in oncology at Columbia in one year. But first, he, his wife Cecily, and their three daughters have moved to Yerushalayim for a year of learning Torah lishmah.

As Pinky would have said, "Yaft Elokim leyefes veyishkone be'ohalei Shem."

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Article List - November 2009