Rabbi Itzik Kopcik - Bolivia - Part 2

00:19 Speaker 1 Since... a person’s character really begins to take shape when they’re born and growing up, and shlichus, too, is based to a large extent on the messages a person absorbs as a child. So tell us a little about your childhood, about the beginning of the journey, so to speak. We have time. Tell it in detail, every little detail. That’s perfectly fine.

00:44 Speaker 2 Okay. What you said is very true: it starts in childhood and... what they call the subconscious nowadays. So this idea of shlichus was instilled so deeply in us. First of all, we see that we actually merited to go out on shlichus. But I don’t remember what suddenly brought back this childhood memory. I was probably about seven. I remember the Rebbe wasn’t feeling well then, and we prayed for the Geulah to come. It was probably after 27 Adar or something. I remember praying. On the one hand, I wanted Moshiach to come, for the Rebbe to be revealed, for the Geulah to arrive. On the other hand, as a child I had this thought in my head: if Moshiach comes, I won’t get a chance to go out on shlichus. So I don’t really want him to come, because I’ll miss out on that.

01:43 Speaker 1 A dilemma. A difficult dilemma.

01:46 Speaker 2 A difficult dilemma. Later I saw that the Rebbe says shlichus won’t end. The Rebbe spoke at the time about Satmar chassidim throwing stones at a mitzvah campaign vehicle, or something like that. So the Rebbe said, “Fortunate is the one who comes here with his learning in hand”: when Moshiach comes, each person will come with what he’s accustomed to doing, what he’s learned to do. So the Chabad chassidim will, let’s say, bring people tefillin, and the Satmar chassidim will be given stones to throw at them—and what a shame that will be. But I suddenly realized how deeply they had instilled this idea of shlichus in us at such a young age—the desire to go out on shlichus, and the awareness that it’s something special, something sweet and good. As a little boy, I knew that if Moshiach came, I’d miss out. So I suddenly saw that this wasn’t something new; it was something instilled in us from a very, very young age. Even though we grew up in a community, in Tzfas, our home was always steeped in shlichus. My parents opened a Chabad House in Rosh Pina. Later there was Moshiach in the classroom in Oslo[?]. Then there were my father’s trips to India, and after that the whole family moved to India. But even when we lived in Israel, in a community, we always knew we were shluchim. And at school, it meant always looking for the children who had a harder time socially, befriending them, helping them with their studies, and seeing how we could have a positive influence. That started at a very, very young age.

03:44 Speaker 1 Yes.

03:47 Speaker 2 Even now that I’m already—

03:48 Speaker 1 Where did you study when you were young?

03:50 Speaker 2 I studied at the Chabad schools in Tzfas, and then... my parents went to India when I was already in yeshiva ketanah.

04:00 Speaker 1 The yeshiva ketanah was in Tzfas too, of course.

04:02 Speaker 2 No, there wasn’t a yeshiva in Tzfas then. I studied in Netanya.

04:06 Speaker 1 Oh, right, right. It was in Netanya then. Yes, yes, yes. Right. The yeshiva in Tzfas actually opened a few years ago, and it took off all at once.

04:20 Speaker 2 It had closed around when I was... about two years before I left for yeshiva, its earlier incarnation closed.

04:29 Speaker 1 At Beis Levi Yitzchak.

04:31 Speaker 2 Yes.

04:32 Speaker 1 Where your father was, and actually worked at one point.

04:37 Speaker 2 My father was at Beis Levi Yitzchak when it had, apparently, several divisions. There was a yeshiva ketanah, a yeshiva gedolah, and the Beis Levi Yitzchak school, which was for children who weren’t from Anash. Even now, I send children to Israel to study there. So I explain to them, too, that their shlichus hasn’t ended or stopped. They continue their shlichus in yeshiva or at school. On the contrary, people look at them as children of shluchim, so they need to represent the shlichus in every area: in shlichus itself, noticing who around them needs them, and also in how they learn, how they behave, how they daven. People see how a shliach’s child behaves.

05:33 Speaker 1 What’s the situation with the people you’re in touch with? Are they from the community, or are they travelers, or how does it work? Because I understood from what you told me last time that there are travelers in one area and a Jewish community in a completely different area.

05:54 Speaker 2 Yes. So what’s the question? I didn’t understand what you’re asking.

05:58 Speaker 1 I’m asking... Are there minyanim? How exactly do you work with the community? How do you work with the travelers? How does it work?

06:05 Speaker 2 It’s changed over the years. When we first arrived, the community had its own chazzan, and I would come to help people put on tefillin. I’d come to the services and help people put on tefillin. There was a meal after the service, unfortunately not kosher. And...

06:26 Speaker 1 Is the shul Orthodox?

06:30 Speaker 2 Well, what counts as Orthodox is also a question.

06:33 Speaker 1 Is there a mechitzah? Is there actually a mechitzah?

06:35 Speaker 2 No, there wasn’t a mechitzah, and they were opposed to one on principle. There had been a shliach before us, probably twenty years earlier, who left them because one of the points of conflict was the mechitzah. I asked about it, and I was told that as long as there were no women in the shul, I had no problem davening there. If women came, I should leave. Most of the year, women didn’t come to services, and if a woman did come, I would simply leave. They knew that. They didn’t... And you also have to seek advice from those with experience. So at the time I spoke with Rabbi Blumenfeld in Lima and described the situation. He told me, “Listen, don’t start—don’t fight with them over a mechitzah. Tell them your wife needs to come and daven. She needs to... Seat her at the back of the shul and put a mechitzah around her. People will naturally come into the shul and sit near her, and after a time or two they’ll tell you, ‘Come on, let’s put up the mechitzah properly.’” So I wasn’t coming to tell them how to run things, but I needed it in order to daven in the shul. My wife needed it so that she could... If they could provide a mechitzah for her. And that’s what we did. One of our children was born—I don’t remember which—and we said my wife needed to come and say Hagomel, although that isn’t exactly the Chabad custom. My wife came to the shul, we put a mechitzah around her, and within two or three weeks the mechitzah had moved to the middle of the shul. There’s been a mechitzah ever since.

08:13 Speaker 1 Very nice.

08:14 Speaker 2 Someone came a few months later and wanted to change it, but by then he was scolded: “What do you mean? There’s a mechitzah here, that’s how it’s been established, and you shouldn’t change the arrangements.” So then I saw, too—

08:28 Speaker 1 Your relationship with the gabbaim, with the community leaders—how exactly does that work there?

08:33 Speaker 2 That’s just it. We always approached them as people who weren’t coming to change them.

08:41 Speaker 1 Who are the community leaders there? Can you give me the names of some of the people?

08:47 Speaker 2 The community here is basically what remains of the community that used to be here. After the Holocaust, people arrived here; there were ten thousand Jews in the city.

08:55 Speaker 1 Ten thousand Jews.

08:57 Speaker 2 Yes. There were several shuls here—for the Polish Jews, the German Jews, the Romanian Jews—divided both by background and by where they lived in the city. Gradually the community shrank until just one shul remained.

09:15 Speaker 1 What do you mean by “gradually”?

09:17 Speaker 2 Over the years, we—

09:19 Speaker 1 Decades.

09:20 Speaker 2 What?

09:21 Speaker 1 It took decades.

09:23 Speaker 2 Yes, decades.

09:24 Speaker 1 Why? I mean, did people in the community leave for Israel, or did they move elsewhere?

09:30 Speaker 2 Some left for Israel, some for other places—Chile, Argentina, Peru, the United States. I saw a report written to the Rebbe in 5745 and 5746, or 5746 and 5747. Some bochurim from Merkos Shlichus came here from the yeshiva in Venezuela.

09:49 Speaker 1 Yes.

09:50 Speaker 2 One of them lives in Crown Heights—Zalman Karp, who teaches there—and with him was a shliach who is now in Kharkiv, Ukraine. I can’t remember his name right now. They were here and wrote reports to the Rebbe. Those reports really describe a much larger community, with several thousand people.

10:16 Speaker 1 Right.

10:17 Speaker 2 And even then, when they came, the community didn’t have a rabbi who really held it together. In my opinion, that was also one of the things that caused the community to break up. It was both an economic issue and a Jewish one. Anyone who wanted to maintain a Jewish education, keep kosher, and so on had to leave.

10:37 Speaker 1 Right.

10:39 Speaker 2 They kept kosher here until the shochet passed away, for example. In other words, there were circumstances on the ground that caused the community to decline.

10:50 Speaker 1 In any case, who are the community leaders now? What sort of people are they?

10:53 Speaker 2 Well, today there’s a community president here. He’s a doctor, a gynecologist.

10:59 Speaker 1 What’s his name?

10:59 Speaker 2 The community president. His name is Ricardo Hodler.

11:03 Speaker 1 Ricardo?

11:04 Speaker 2 Ricardo Hodler.

11:06 Speaker 1 What’s Ricardo in Hebrew?

11:08 Speaker 2 Uh, what’s his Hebrew name? Every time I call him up to the Torah, I have to ask him again. No, I can’t remember it offhand.

11:18 Speaker 1 Ricardo is Richard or something like that. Reuven.

11:21 Speaker 2 No, sometimes I remember the names by heart, and sometimes they slip my mind. So they have a sort of communal infrastructure. There’s a WIZO women’s organization here. There used to be a Maccabi organization for children, and… there was a nursing home, a home for the elderly, and a school, of course. A chevra kadisha.

11:51 Speaker 1 How do they see you? What do the people in the community think of you?

11:56 Speaker 2 Well, the truth is that at first there was a certain lack of trust, because there had been several shluchim here before me. I remember one man, actually an Israeli who married a woman from here and moved here. He kept saying to me, “Well, in another six months you’ll leave. In another six months you’ll leave,” because he figured someone else would come next.

12:16 Speaker 1 They know your type, as they say. They know your type.

12:18 Speaker 2 I remember when I started giving out challahs and Shabbos candles to people in the community. There are a lot of people who don’t come to shul, and you don’t see them except maybe on Yom Kippur or Simchas Torah. And even then, they come to daven, and often you don’t get a chance to talk before they leave. So we decided to bring them Shabbos candles, challahs, and a sheet about the weekly parsha.

12:42 Speaker 1 How did you get their addresses?

12:45 Speaker 2 Slowly, over time. It took a long time to learn the city, learn the neighborhoods, find out where everyone lived, and put together a driving route. But I remember: the first week, someone got the challahs. The second week, he was surprised again. When he realized it was a regular thing, after about a month, he suddenly began to appreciate it. I saw that people really appreciate something consistent, something that doesn’t stop. It took them a long time, though. For one thing, given where we were located in the city, we were mainly around the travelers. And at first there wasn’t a particularly close relationship with the community. I would come to davening, put tefillin on with them, talk to them, but there wasn’t a connection…

13:36 Speaker 1 They probably daven at eight in the morning on Shabbos, right?

13:41 Speaker 2 Well, yes. When they had their own chazzan, they were an hour and a half’s walk from us, so I didn’t go there on Shabbos.

13:49 Speaker 1 Ah.

13:50 Speaker 2 But after a while, the chazzan left, or they could no longer afford to keep him, or something like that. So I started walking there every Shabbos.

14:01 Speaker 1 So you leave home at six-thirty.

14:05 Speaker 2 On an ordinary Shabbos, services started at nine, so it was easier; I’d leave at seven-thirty. On holidays that fell on weekdays, some people had to hurry to work afterward, so they needed to start at seven-thirty.

14:23 Speaker 1 Ah.

14:23 Speaker 2 So I’d leave at six. I remember one Shavuos night, I asked my rabbi whether I should say Tikkun Leil Shavuos, because I wouldn’t finish until seven or eight in the morning, and I already had to set out at six.

14:37 Speaker 1 Right.

14:37 Speaker 2 So he told me… First of all, he enjoyed the question. He told me to say it on the second night—that is, to start and then continue on the second night. But I remember setting out… For us, Shavuos falls in winter. It was before sunrise, cold, with ice on the road in some places. At first they didn’t understand. It didn’t occur to them that I came on foot, because someone who doesn’t keep Shabbos doesn’t think of that. Then suddenly they realized and said, “What, you walk here?” One man offered me a ride because he lived near the Chabad House. He said, “I’m driving anyway.” But when it became a regular thing, and I came every Shabbos, whether it was raining or sunny, whatever the conditions, they realized what I was doing. Suddenly they had a great deal of appreciation for it.

15:37 Speaker 1 Ah.

15:38 Speaker 2 I remember when they wanted me to be the chazzan, they asked, “What are your terms? What salary do you want?” I told them, “Listen, I’ve been here four years already.” They said yes. I asked, “Have I ever had an argument with you?” They said no. I said, “That’s why.” They asked, “Why?” I said, “Because there’s no salary. The moment there’s a salary…” They laughed. I told them, “You can make a donation. If you want to donate to the Chabad House, you can, but I don’t take a salary.” They asked, “So what are your conditions?” I told them there had to be a mechitzah in accordance with halachah, no microphone on Shabbos or Yom Tov—not that there was one, but a previous chazzan had occasionally used one on holidays—and that only someone whose conversion was recognized by the Chief Rabbinate could be called to the Torah or counted in a minyan.

16:29 Speaker 1 Uh-huh.

16:30 Speaker 2 I knew that was a sensitive issue here. There are a few people whose fathers are Jewish and whose mothers aren’t, and who’ve been through one kind of conversion or another. I wasn’t going to decide who was Jewish. I told them, “There’s a Chief Rabbinate. You have a chief rabbi in Israel; he’ll decide.” They agreed to that. Then a month or two went by. The community’s board had agreed to it at a meeting, but one day a man named Johnny Weinberg was there. It’s a very, very Jewish name, and I too thought he was Jewish until I found out that his father was Jewish and his mother wasn’t. Of all his siblings, he was the only one who chose Judaism. He had undergone some sort of conversion, but it wasn’t valid. Suddenly there were nine people in shul, plus him, and they asked me to start davening. I told them there was no minyan. They said, “But there is—look, there are ten of us.” So I told them that one person wasn’t Jewish, and it caused an uproar throughout the community. Someone wrote in the WhatsApp group, “Who is this rabbi anyway? What kind of rabbi is he? He doesn’t get to decide who’s Jewish and who isn’t,” and so on. My wife said to me, “Listen, first of all, don’t answer. If you answer, you’ll just add fuel to the fire. As it stands, how many more messages can he write? One, two, three, and it’ll end. If you answer, he’ll keep writing.” So I didn’t answer. And I told them, “Okay, no problem. If you want to count him in the minyan, count him. But you can’t force me to count him. If you want to drive a car on Shabbos, that’s one thing, but you can’t make me drive a car on Shabbos. This is halachah. I’m a Jew who observes Torah and mitzvos. So do what

18:20 Speaker 2 you want, but you can’t force me.” For about a month, the atmosphere wasn’t very pleasant. Then came the event marking seventy years of the State of Israel. The whole community was invited, and well over a hundred people came. There was also a halachic question about whether we could attend such an event, because the food wasn’t kosher, but they asked me to set up two tables with kosher food. I consulted rabbis; there were opinions on both sides. In the end we came with the kosher food and a very clear sign, and everyone wanted to see what the kosher food was like. It gave us a real boost.

19:03 Speaker 1 What was the attraction?

19:03 Speaker 2 Then a lot of people gathered around us. Eventually it was time for the community president to speak. He said this and that, thanked one person and another, and then said, “Many thanks to the Chabad rabbi, Rabbi Itzik, and his wife Chaya.” Then he said, “Actually, you know, a month ago—not all of you know this, but something happened in shul…” And he started telling the whole story. I turned red. I was thinking, “What’s he doing? He’s on our side, he’s my friend—why is he bringing this up in front of everyone?” He said, “It really makes us very uncomfortable that suddenly, in the community, some people are considered Jewish and others aren’t. It’s caused an uproar and made for an unpleasant atmosphere.” He went on listing my offenses, and I had no idea where he was going with it. Then he said, “But you know what? Do you know that every Shabbos he walks an hour and a half each way to shul? When he comes here with his children, they haven’t come by car. And when he finishes davening and makes Kiddush, he has to make that hour-and-a-half trek back. You know, that’s very inconvenient for him. And there are no schools here for his children, which is very inconvenient. And he doesn’t have kosher food.” He kept building his case. Then he said, “So I thought about it, and I realized that we’re uncomfortable with him, and he’s not all that comfortable with us. I think that makes us even. Each of us can sacrifice a little of our comfort, and we’d be very happy for him to stay here.” And with that, he basically silenced everyone.

20:40 Speaker 3 Listen, that was very clever. Beautiful.

20:44 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes.

20:46 Speaker 3 Listen—

20:46 Speaker 2 They’re Jews—

20:48 Speaker 3 That’s a very, very beautiful part of the story. Very beautiful.

20:51 Speaker 2 So... my approach to them all along was that I wasn’t going to change them. They were afraid of change. “You’re not going to tell us what to do.” Right, I’m not telling you what to do, but you also can’t make me do something against my faith. They respect that. I also gave them a way out. I told them, “Speak to the Chief Rabbinate.” My wife’s grandmother happens to be a convert, so I told them, “I’m not against conversion, but a conversion has to be done according to halachah and the rules.” Unfortunately, there are a lot of fraudulent conversions today, and I’m not such a great rabbi that I can tell which ones are fraudulent. But you can understand for yourselves that if someone doesn’t eat kosher or keep Shabbos, that’s a little problematic. They understand that. At the end of the day, they know what should be done, and even if they don’t practice it, they know what the truth is. If you’re asking whether the synagogue is Reform, there’s another community here in Bolivia, in another city, that is Reform. They’re staunchly Reform. There’s a dispute there between the Jews and the converts—a big dispute, I know. But with us, most of the Jews don’t keep Torah and mitzvos, yet the synagogue officially follows halachah. They didn’t always know what to do or how to do it. So they had non-kosher food in the synagogue. At one point they wanted me to come eat with them. I told them, “No problem. If I prepare the food, if the food is kosher, I’ll gladly sit with you.” And little by

22:39 Speaker 2 little, at first I would bring food from home. Eventually they understood. They dismissed the non-Jewish woman who worked there, we kashered the kitchen, and it became a kosher kitchen.

22:49 Speaker 3 Wonderful.

22:51 Speaker 2 But I didn’t come to them and say, “Listen, you’re not allowed to eat like this. Get rid of that.” You want me to come and sit down to eat with you? Okay, then. It’s all really for my sake. For my sake, they’re willing to give up some of their convenience. A person is willing to—I sometimes say this to travelers who don’t want to put on tefillin. I tell him, “Listen, if I asked you to carry this table, or work for an hour at the Chabad House, or wash dishes, you’d happily do it, right? You’re willing to give your time and effort to do something for me. So now I’m asking you: okay, you don’t want to put on tefillin for yourself, but it would mean a lot to me.” Some agree, and some don’t really understand that there’s something more to it. But what I’m saying is, the moment a person feels that someone wants to change him, he—

23:46 Speaker 3 He pushes back.

23:47 Speaker 2 He pushes back. But for someone else, he’s willing to change.

23:54 Speaker 3 Beautiful.