Rabbi Yossi Ben Shimon - Mexico - Part 1

00:19 Speaker 1 Yossi Ben Shimon, a shliach of the Rebbe shlita, Melech HaMoshiach, in Isla Mujeres. Right, Yossi? Am I saying that correctly—Isla Mujeres, Mexico? It’s an island visited by hundreds of thousands of travelers, and there’s also something of a community there. Yossi, we spoke earlier today and agreed that, rather than start by telling us about your life, you’d tell us about one of the interesting things happening there in Isla Mujeres: building a mikveh. From what you’ve told me several times, it’s one of the most magnificent mikvehs in the world, and there’s a particular reason why it should be magnificent. It’s an amazing story, so go ahead—tell us how the idea began and how it took shape. Tell us, Yossi. L’chaim, l’chaim, Yossi. L’chaim, Yossi.

01:21 Speaker 2 L’chaim and blessings.

01:23 Speaker 1 That’s your cup. The cups you gave us for l’chaim. L’chaim, l’chaim.

01:34 Speaker 2 With the national drink, tequila.

01:37 Speaker 1 The national drink of Mexico, of course. Couldn’t be anything else.

01:40 Speaker 2 Of the country.

01:42 Speaker 1 Amen. We can say amen.

01:46 Speaker 2 L’chaim and blessings.

01:48 Speaker 1 L’chaim, l’chaim.

01:48 Speaker 2 L’chaim and blessings—may it be revealed immediately.

01:51 Speaker 1 Amen, amen.

01:53 Speaker 2 With the help of our teacher and Rebbe, Melech HaMoshiach, forever.

01:57 Speaker 1 Yechi Adoneinu Moreinu v’Rabbeinu Melech HaMoshiach l’olam va’ed. See you, we’re with you.

02:03 Speaker 2 We arrived in Isla about a decade ago, and I was a bochur then—I was a kid, in my third year after my year at 770—and we opened the Chabad House. For now, I’ll focus on the story of the mikveh. But after I got married and returned to Isla, I understood personally why a mikveh was needed. I understood the mitzvah and the importance of a mikveh—how a mikveh for family purity is one of the most important mitzvos in Judaism—and the emphasis the Rebbe placed on building a mikveh wherever there are Jews. In fact, halachah even says that if a place has a Sefer Torah but no mikveh, the Sefer Torah is sold to build one. A mikveh ensures the continuity of the Jewish people. That’s where Jewish life begins; through the mikveh, Jewish life itself begins and takes shape. So over the years, beginning with our first years here, many couples came to us, mainly couples in the early years of marriage, traveling on their honeymoons. They would ask where...

03:33 Speaker 1 You’re talking about young travelers who got married, went traveling around the world and reached you.

03:39 Speaker 2 Right.

03:40 Speaker 1 Some of them observed the laws of family purity and were looking for a mikveh somewhere nearby.

03:45 Speaker 2 Yes. Especially in those years, the focus of our work was young Israelis after the army and Israeli couples on their honeymoons. Again, they might be on their honeymoon or a year or two past their wedding and setting off on a trip. They were the main focus of our work, which is why I’m talking mainly about them. They would come and ask about a mikveh: “Where is there a mikveh? How can we go to a mikveh?” At the time we didn’t have one, and the requests kept growing. Some women weren’t willing to travel a long way to go to a mikveh.

04:27 Speaker 1 Where was the closest mikveh to you?

04:30 Speaker 2 Back then, the closest mikveh was in Playa del Carmen.

04:36 Speaker 1 What did that involve—a flight?

04:37 Speaker 2 About half an hour by boat, then another hour or a little more by taxi or car. And then you had to travel back.

04:54 Speaker 1 Yossi, let’s remind everyone that your Chabad House is on an island some distance from the mainland—about half an hour away by boat?

05:03 Speaker 2 Yes. The boat ride itself is actually twenty minutes, but boarding and disembarking, the limited departure times, and the fact that boats don’t run twenty-four hours a day make traveling to a mikveh very, very difficult, especially when it’s far away. Getting to the other city and back the same day is a little difficult. Over the years, during that period, we wrote many letters to the Rebbe about all kinds of subjects. In letter after letter, the Rebbe wrote to us about the mikveh, about a mikveh for family purity, and about the need for one. He wrote that it should be a beautiful mikveh—in both senses of the word—and that there was no need to go on at length about it: we simply had to build a mikveh. My wife also wrote letters to the Rebbe and received the same responses, or very similar ones. We understood how important it was to build a mikveh. We understood that we wanted to build one, and that the Rebbe wanted us to build one here. We wanted to take action. But finding a property in Isla, let alone buying one, is no simple matter. You can’t just decide to buy a property tomorrow and have one the next day. In just the last six months—we’re talking about the year 5782—at least fifteen people came here, friends and acquaintances who had decided to invest in Isla. They came with plenty of money, determined to buy, and left anywhere from a week to three months later empty-handed. Even though they very much wanted to buy a property, a house or a building, they couldn’t find one or manage to buy one. It’s simply very, very difficult. The central area where we are is only about a kilometer long and somewhere between two hundred and four hundred and fifty meters wide. So it’s just four streets running lengthwise and another four or five across. That’s the whole area.

07:10 Speaker 2 If someone owns property there, that property is worth its weight in gold. You can’t build on the sea. There are a hundred plots, not a hundred and one, so everyone feels that their plot is the most important and the most expensive in the area. Properties here cost roughly three or four times as much as in the city across from us, Cancún—which is itself one of the best-known cities in the world. But here it’s very, very expensive, and beyond the cost, people simply don’t want to sell. They’re not interested. But the Rebbe says we need to build a mikveh. So we thought and thought: What do we do? How do we move forward? We said, “All right, let’s start with the plans.” We went to a local architect.

08:10 Speaker 1 So you still didn’t have a property, but you said, “Let’s draw up plans”?

08:15 Speaker 2 Yes. Let’s start preparing. Suppose we get a property tomorrow—at least we’ll already have plans in hand. But what dimensions? What size? How do you draw up plans without measurements? We said, “All right, let’s use an average-sized property. Say the mikveh will be eighty or ninety square meters. We’ll have an entrance room, a waiting room, some kind of storage room, an immersion room...” We started imagining it, thinking about it and looking into how to do it. We looked at various mikvehs around the world and started picturing it in our heads. We called an architect and paid him a few hundred dollars. We told him, “Listen, here’s our plan. Our property is—”

08:47 Speaker 1 Yossi, which mikvehs around the world did you look at?

08:52 Speaker 2 We looked at mikvehs in Israel—a large mikveh in Haifa, a mikveh at a Chabad House. We saw pictures of a mikveh in Moscow and of a large, prominent mikveh built in Miami. We called several shluchim, who told us about the layouts and sizes of their mikvehs. That was what we were trying to work out at the time: how big ours would be, what we would include and how many rooms it would have. Once we’d decided on that, we called the architect and paid him a few hundred dollars. We said, “Listen, these are our plans. This is what we want.” He asked, “Okay, where’s the property? Show me the property so I can draw up plans for you.” We told him, “There is no property.” He couldn’t understand what we meant—what plans, what property?

09:34 Speaker 1 Asking an architect to draw up plans without property measurements is like asking a cook to prepare a meal without pots, right? Something like that.

09:43 Speaker 2 Yes. He thought we were joking with him and got up to leave. We said, “Listen, [unclear]. Our property is eight by ten meters—eighty square meters. The entrance is here. Run with it.” He said, “Wait, how much can you build? Is there a yard? Is there an entrance?” We told him, “Listen, your job is to give us an interior plan for an eighty-square-meter property. Go ahead, get started. Let us know when it’s ready. If anything comes up, we’ll let you know. If you have questions, ask us, but that’s the—”

10:15 Speaker 1 Yossi, who was the architect you worked with?

10:18 Speaker 2 A local architect who lives here in town.

10:21 Speaker 1 Oh, a non-Jew.

10:22 Speaker 2 He brought him to us.

10:23 Speaker 1 Some non-Jew.

10:24 Speaker 2 Yes, a non-Jew.

10:25 Speaker 1 Meaning, he doesn’t know what a mikveh is. Maybe he got instructions from you?

10:30 Speaker 2 He doesn’t know what a mikveh is, and we didn’t ask him to draw up plans for a mikveh either. We told him, “There’s a pool here of such-and-such a size, and that’s it.” We didn’t want anything beyond that. It was just so we could get started, have something to hold on to.

10:46 Speaker 1 What about showers? What about bathtubs? A changing room? What about—

10:52 Speaker 2 We told him, but our idea was to start with something tangible and say, “Listen, we have a site, we already have plans. We need to raise money and buy the site.” We told him, “Make the first room a sitting area, with some kind of screen, a bathroom, a place to wash hands. In the second room we want a bathtub, a place to wash hands, space to get ready, and a shower. The third room should be for immersion, a separate immersion room, laid out like this. And between all the rooms there should be working doors, so you can go from one room to another.” Those were the requirements we gave him. We didn’t explain too much, and we didn’t expect or want him to be the architect who would actually build the mikveh later on.

11:39 Speaker 1 You just wanted a visualization to help you raise the money? Is that the idea?

11:45 Speaker 2 We wanted to start feeling like we had a mikveh, like we already had plans and only needed to find the site, and then we’d build. After that, we’d raise the money, get it together, work it out—it would be fine. Let’s have something to hold on to. We’d already done every possible search, and there wasn’t—

12:05 Speaker 1 When you say “we,” do you mean you and your wife, or were there... I know your brother is also involved in construction. Did he help you too? How exactly did it work?

12:17 Speaker 2 At the time we were at the Chabad House, working together with the Leon family, may they live and be well. We had a kind of daily rotation: one day I’d make the rounds, the next day you would; you’d look, I’d look. I’d go to someone and ask if he wanted to sell his house. He’d tell me no, and the next day my partner would go and ask him if he wanted to sell his house. We kept checking. Maybe suddenly someone would put a sign on their house or on a plot of land. That way we’d be first, stay up to date, see what was happening.

12:54 Speaker 1 I see. Very nice. In short, you were working on this intensively.

12:58 Speaker 2 Very much so. Once we had the plans and the architect had started working, we became even more intensive. Instead of going around once a day, we did it twice a day. Instead of pestering one person, we started pestering more people to help us find a place. We even started trying to persuade people to sell us just one room in a house, or maybe their backyard, so we could build the mikveh there, because we simply couldn’t find anything. And all the while we were writing updates to the Rebbe. We were making progress: we had plans, we were working on them, the Rebbe was giving a bracha, and with Hashem’s help we would add a house of Torah and mitzvos and move forward. We asked for brachos for the mikveh. There were so many letters throughout that whole period, so many letters.

13:43 Speaker 1 Letters to the Rebbe.

13:45 Speaker 2 Yes.

13:46 Speaker 1 Very nice.

13:46 Speaker 2 One day my partner, Mendy, was walking down the street and reached the edge of the area we’d set for ourselves. We’d picked a point and said, “Up to here is a reasonable distance for people to walk to the mikveh, even on Shabbos.” It was only about a kilometer from the Chabad House, from the center, where the Chabad House is today. We said we’d start searching there and work our way along, back and forth. One morning Mendy was walking there and saw a man putting up a sign at the entrance to a plot of land. It said “Se vende”—land for sale, in Spanish. Mendy went over to him and said, “Listen, you can take the sign down. I’m buying the land.” The man said, “What do you mean, you’re buying it? I haven’t even hung the sign yet!” Mendy told him, “Don’t worry, I’m buying it. Let’s make a deal.” The man didn’t really understand what was going on, but here was a buyer. Mendy asked him to take the sign down, and he really did. From then on, we started talking and negotiating with him about the land.

14:48 Speaker 1 How big was the plot?

14:49 Speaker 2 The entire plot was 138 square meters.

14:57 Speaker 1 That’s what you’d call a treasure, a real treasure there in Isla Mujeres, right?

15:01 Speaker 2 Absolutely, absolutely.

15:03 Speaker 1 In other words, it was as if Hakadosh Boruch Hu was saying to you guys, “I’m with you. Here’s the land.”

15:08 Speaker 2 And it’s a small plot, an unusual one. It’s triangular. Finding that particular plot, with its size and its price, was really extraordinary. The price was wonderful. The man was only asking $120,000 for the land, which was an unbelievable bargain. Who could find land in Isla Mujeres at that price? There’s no such thing. Land isn’t available to begin with, and certainly not at prices like that. So we started negotiating, arrived at a figure, and told him, “Okay, we’re buying the land. In the meantime we’ll do our checks and see what’s what.” We realized we needed to raise the money. What do we do? We have to start fundraising, but we don’t have the land yet—

15:54 Speaker 1 Raise money, yes.

15:56 Speaker 2 Right. We already had plans. We now had a site in mind, and we needed to start raising money. We turned to a good friend of ours—your son Shmuel, may he live and be well, Shmuel Harel. We hired him. He helped us as the Chabad House’s general adviser and guided us through the whole process of building and purchasing the property, right from the start.

16:23 Speaker 1 How wonderful.

16:24 Speaker 2 And we started planning all the steps: how it would work, what would happen, what the first stage would be, what the second stage would be. We began figuring out how to move forward. Then, around the month of—this was in Cheshvan, in mid-Cheshvan, we launched—

16:45 Speaker 1 Roughly what year are we talking about, Yossi?

16:49 Speaker 2 We’re talking about—today it’s 5782—5778.

16:57 Speaker 1 Seventy-eight.

16:59 Speaker 2 5778. Yes.

17:01 Speaker 1 Four years ago.

17:03 Speaker 2 Yes.

17:04 Speaker 1 Okay.

17:06 Speaker 2 We started the mikveh project and made a plan. We said, “The land costs $100,000. For the construction, we need to build a total of 100 square meters—less than 100 square meters, actually.” Everyone in the area told us construction costs $1,000 per square meter. Even allowing a little extra, we figured $100,000 to buy the land, $100,000 to build, and that would be it. All good—we’d launch a campaign. We needed $200,000 to buy the land and build the building. The day we decided to get the project going, a good friend of the Chabad House named Yitzchak Igri approached me. His daughter had been with us on shlichus in Rechovos. He said, “Yossi, I heard you’re starting this project, and I want to—”

18:01 Speaker 1 What was his daughter doing with you on shlichus?

18:04 Speaker 2 She was a kindergarten teacher for the children.

18:07 Speaker 1 You opened a kindergarten there, for the shluchim’s children. Right?

18:11 Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

18:12 Speaker 1 Okay.

18:14 Speaker 2 So he approached us and said, “Listen, I want to help and give you that initial push. I’ll arrange an evening for your friends. I’ll publicize it and arrange the hall, a singer, a band, food—everything you need. You just come, bring your friends, and it’ll be a good launch for you.” And he really did arrange a hall for us in Rechovos. He invited Mendy Jerufi[?], brought in a band and a sound system, and provided dinner after Shabbos. We held a Melaveh Malkah with friends, supporters, and other people who were there.

18:48 Speaker 1 If I remember correctly, I was at that evening. I even won an airline ticket.

18:55 Speaker 2 That’s right. That was at the end, at the end of the event. With Hashem’s help you’ll get to use it too, and we’ll have the privilege of having you come visit us.

19:01 Speaker 1 With Hashem’s help, with Hashem’s help. Yes, of course.

19:07 Speaker 2 And that evening, the project—the campaign itself—went live, with all the fundraising efforts involving family and friends.

19:17 Speaker 1 How much was pledged that evening, Yossi?

19:20 Speaker 2 At the event itself, the pledges totaled something like $40,000.

19:32 Speaker 1 Which was a little less than what you needed then. Yes, of course.

19:37 Speaker 2 For the building, yes, for purchasing the property. Of course, people pledged to pay over a year or two; each person would give their amount. From there we moved forward, and the next day we had to start working, making calls and actually raising the money. I arrived in Kiryat Malachi. We were based there and had set up our campaign headquarters there. I went to say hello to my mother at her workplace, and a woman pulled up beside my car. She said, “Are you Yossi? Are you Saridi’s [unclear] son?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “I’m Mrs. Kaykov. If you remember, three months ago I asked you to make a recording for my son, telling him a little about your shlichus and your Chabad House. His class had an activity where they had to bring stories of shluchim from around the world. You helped me, and my son was so happy and excited. I heard from Achla that you’re now doing a project for the mikveh, and I want to give you something small from me.” She reached through her car window, handed me a dollar from the Rebbe and said, “May this be a blessing for you as you begin. May your campaign be successful.”

21:02 Speaker 3 How beautiful, huh?

21:03 Speaker 2 I was very moved. Huh?

21:07 Speaker 3 You were very moved.

21:09 Speaker 2 I was very moved. This was literally about an hour before we were due to start this massive project—making calls and taking on an enormous workload. But that dollar was with us through the beginning of the journey and all the hard work. That evening—sorry, the evening before—we had said that anyone who contributed ten thousand dollars to the mikveh project would receive a dollar from the Rebbe as a gift. So alongside raising money for the project, we also had to start finding dollars from the Rebbe, because we’d told people we would give them one. The next day I remembered a friend who had studied with me in yeshivah, Moishy Vogel [unclear]. He had once said to me, “If you ever have a Chabad House and want a dollar from the Rebbe, call me.” We were kids then; it was just something he’d said. So I called him while we were—

22:13 Speaker 3 “If you ever have a Chabad House, call me.”

22:17 Speaker 2 So I called him and said, “Moishy, how are you? I don’t know if you remember, but I certainly do. You said to call when I had a Chabad House. Well, Boruch Hashem, I have one now. We’re raising money for a mikveh project, and I want to remind you what you said. Now’s the time. We need you with us.” He said, “What, really? I don’t know... But you know what? If you say I said it, fine. You’ve got it.” That was the second dollar we received for the project. For the third, Mendy Dayan’s father decided to give one of his dollars for the project too. Later there were quite a few more dollars, with stories we might tell another time. That was how we began moving forward and raising the money. We were happy, and it gave us a lot of strength to keep going and succeed. Eventually we returned to Mexico, to our shlichus, and the moment of truth arrived.

23:28 Speaker 3 How long were you here in Israel to raise the money?

23:32 Speaker 2 My wife and I were in Israel at the time because we had come for the birth of our son. He was born just before Cheshvan, right around the time of the campaign. We went back and said, “Okay, let’s buy the land.” Suddenly we discovered that buying land isn’t a matter of showing up the next day and buying it. You have to establish an organization, work out how to transfer the money, open a bank account. Where were we? We’d spent three months raising the money, getting organized, preparing, thinking and imagining it all—and we hadn’t established the organization. So we started the process. Meanwhile, the owner was waiting. Another month passed, then another. These things take time: approvals, paperwork. My brother in Mexico City really helped us handle the whole process of setting up the company. We had to fly to Mexico City to sign papers and then fly back. It’s a two-hour flight from where we are. Remind me of his name. Even within Mexico. Benny. Benny. I understand he helped you all along the way. Yes, yes, absolutely. He also handled the formal process of setting up the organization, the company, so that we could actually make the purchase. We hadn’t known anything about the process—how it worked or what we needed to do. He really helped and supported us throughout, so we could move forward. After a few months we finally completed the setup. The company was established, we were able to transfer the money into it properly and officially, and then we went to sign with the owner of the land. We received

25:36 Speaker 2 the approvals for the land. The owner signed all the papers, and the property was, so to speak, secured in our hands. Then it took another three months to sort out all the official approvals and transfer ownership of the property into the company’s name, so we could begin applying for building permits. What did you call your organization? Our organization was called B C I M 770. What? B C I M. B C I M. I M stands for Isla Mujeres. Ah, nice. Chabad House Isla Mujeres 770. 770. Yes. Ltd. Well, Yossi, now that we’ve reached the part where you bought the land, let’s pause here. We’ll continue this fascinating story next time.