A Searching Teenager Becomes a Rabbi in his Hometown: Rabbi Yitzchak Mendel Wagner

00:00 Speaker 1 Yitzchak Mendel Wagner was born in the late '70s. He grew up in a small city in the west of Germany.

00:06 Speaker 2 It's called Krefeld. If it's easier, you can call it Kreplach or something.

00:11 Speaker 1 No, I think I've got it, Krefeld. So what was it like to grow up in Krefeld?

00:16 Speaker 2 I really liked our town, and people even from bigger cities came to Krefeld to go shopping and just en- enjoy, uh, our town.

00:25 Speaker 1 Wagner describes his former self as an unaffiliated Jew. But when he was just a teenager, he felt a strong desire to connect in a stronger way to Judaism. With the help of what might now be called ancient technology, he discovered that an organization dedicated to building Yiddishkeit in the four corners of the globe, even the darkest ones, had just put down roots in Berlin. It's called Chabad. What happened next set off a chain reaction that today inspires Jews all across Germany to rebuild what the Nazis had tried to destroy forever.

01:01 Speaker 2 That Jews are there in Germany today is the biggest revenge you could have. If you have proud Jews in Germany dancing on the Brandenburger Gate around the Hanukkiah together with the president of Germany, that's the biggest revenge. That's the worst nightmare for Hitler, Yemach Shemo, and all the Nazis to see something like this, and I think that's a very, very inspiring message.

01:29 Speaker 1 I'm Gary Wolk, and this is Lamplighters, stories from Chabad emissaries on the Jewish frontier. Life as a Chabad emissary is often joyous, but it can be unpredictable and even dangerous. Chabad has become a ubiquitous presence in every corner of the world, but behind every Chabad house are emissaries, regular people striving to transcend their circumstances, and a community that supports and relies on them. These are their stories. Around 1997, when Yitzchak Mendel Wagner was just 18 years old, he went to the internet.

02:13 Speaker 2 You remember American Online? First hour American Online cost like five Euros, five dollars to be in the internet, and it had something amazing, the AOL Messenger. When you put in the search certain words, it was scanning all the profiles of all the members of AOL, and when you put in the word Chabad or you put in the word rabbi, you would get a lot of, uh, rabbis.

02:39 Speaker 1 That special feature enabled the curious teenager to connect with Chabad rabbis and pepper them with his burning questions.

02:47 Speaker 2 And that's the way how I found Rabbi Teichtal in Berlin.

02:50 Speaker 1 In 1996, just the previous year, Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal and his wife moved to Berlin and established a Chabad house there.

02:59 Speaker 2 And, uh, when he heard my story, he said it would be a good idea to go to yeshiva to Israel.

03:04 Speaker 3 Because we felt that here's a man that's greatly interested in learning and knowing more.

03:09 Speaker 1 That's Rabbi Teichtal.

03:11 Speaker 3 And therefore, we felt he should go to a place that will give him the real deal, the real inside message, will help him build up a structure in order to approach it in the right manner.

03:20 Speaker 1 Wagner moved to Israel in 1999, and began to split his time between Mayanot, a Chabad yeshiva for young men, and a civil service program sponsored by the German government.

03:31 Speaker 2 I was working together with disabled adults, religious Jewish adults in Yerushalayim, taking them on trips and helping them and cooking, so this was a very nice part of my life.

03:44 Speaker 1 Wagner learned Torah, Gemara, and Chabad Hasidus at Mayanot for one year. Rabbi Teichtal kept in touch.

03:51 Speaker 3 Mayanot was definitely the right choice. He thrived, and he grew, and he developed.

03:56 Speaker 1 Wagner's Jewish spark was kindled into a roaring flame. After a few more years in Krefeld and philosophy studies at a university, Wagner joined a Jerusalem-based online program. He received rabbinic ordination in 2007. In doing so, he became the first German-born rabbi since World War II. Wagner, who's as humble and understated as he is soft-spoken, wanted no fanfare.

04:25 Speaker 2 I didn't even tell my community that I did the Semikhah. They didn't even knew about it.

04:30 Speaker 1 But the word soon got out. A German newspaper published an article about Wagner's ordination. The community board contacted him, insisting that he be appointed immediately as Krefeld's official community rabbi. He accepted. In 2007, shortly after his rabbinic ordination, Wagner married his wife Rochel, a Ukrainian immigrant he'd met in Krefeld.

04:55 Speaker 2 It's a match made in heaven. I got to know her in the Jewish community in Krefeld, which is like a lottery ticket to find somebody.

05:04 Speaker 1 The Wagners are official Chabad shluchim, but they don't have an official Chabad house. They use space in a local synagogue for their services. In that way, they're similar to Chabad emissaries in other German cities, like Hamburg, Offenbach, and Ulm. On their early forays into Krefeld, the Wagners began to meet people right away, especially at the local funerals he'd officiate at Krefeld's old Jewish cemetery.

05:29 Speaker 2 Because during the funeral, the people are in a certain emotional stage and quite open when you talk to them from the heart. And I met a lot of people, and I told them during the funeral that they have to come to Shul to say Kaddish, and they started to come, and this group grew.

05:46 Speaker 1 That group included a family from Ukraine.

05:49 Speaker 4 My name is Eliyahu Borodin.

05:51 Speaker 1 Eliyahu Borodin was born in Odessa in 1990. He and his family moved to Krefeld when he was six years old. When he was 16 or 17, Eliyahu, then Ilya, met Krefeld's new rabbi, Rabbi Wagner, who asked him to join his Shabbos Minyan.

06:08 Speaker 4 And I was part of that Minyan. I like to be part of it, uh, to contribute, and, uh, that's how it started.

06:14 Speaker 2 When I saw that he's, uh, warm and he's interested in Judaism-

06:18 Speaker 4 Rabbi Wagner, he connected me to Chabad

06:22 Speaker 2 He was a friend

06:24 Speaker 1 But Wagner was also a mentor. He encouraged Borodin to embrace Jewish learning, and when he was 18 years old, Borodin had a bris. Wagner could see that Borodin's passion for Yiddishkayt burned as brightly as his own.

06:39 Speaker 2 Then, uh, I said, "Okay, we should take it to the next step and send you to yeshiva." And from then on, everything went beautifully.

06:46 Speaker 1 Borodin studied for short stints in England, the US, France, and Israel, and then for four years in Berlin. He was one of the first students at the Teich Tal Yeshiva. Rabbi Wagner stayed in close touch throughout. He sensed that Borodin also had something special to share with German Jews. But there were many other Jews in Krefeld who needed the Wagners' support. Early on, Rabbi Wagner started a chevra kadisha, or Jewish burial society, and a shatnez lab in Krefeld so Jews in the region could observe the mitzvah of not wearing clothing combining linen and wool. And the Wagners established a goal to personally reach out to every one of Krefeld's 1,000 or so Jews every year.

07:30 Speaker 2 So we take out the list of all the names, and then we go, like, from A to Z, from Z to A, or through the zip codes. And, uh, I take a Hanukkiah, I take a newspaper, I take the new calendar. I don't call before. I just go to the house, I ring the bell. I say I'm from the community, I want to give you a present, and then shalom aleichem. And we grew. We doubled the minyan, and we got to know a lot of people.

07:52 Speaker 1 Krefeld is a city of about 53 square miles, so that's a lot of walking. But many of the Jews he reaches out to live in a high-rise building not far from the Wagners' home.

08:03 Speaker 2 And it has about, I think, 70 Jewish families living over there. So this m- makes life really easy, because I'm producing a newspaper, it's called Kesher, every week, and the idea of the newspaper is that I go around and I put it into the mailboxes of about 100 people every Friday. Like this, I try to grow a little bit the minyan and the community.

08:27 Speaker 1 I have to ask you, during weekdays, do you take the stairs, or do you use the elevator?

08:32 Speaker 2 The good thing is that all the mailboxes are, like, when you enter the building. You just go there and put it in, and since there's so many Jews, you always meet somebody who's going to the elevator.

08:42 Speaker 1 But the dynamic changes quite a bit on the Sabbath. Like the times Wagner needed one high-rise tenant to be the 10th man in the morning minyan.

08:50 Speaker 2 And he's living on the 12th floor. And I told him, "When you're not on time, you know, I come up and I, I, I, you know, I escort you to shul." And two, three times, I walked up all 12 just to knock his door in order to bring him to minyan.

09:06 Speaker 1 In 2015, the Wagners opened a new mikvah in Krefeld, and every year since 2009, the Wagners have run Hanukkah events, including one at the town hall with Krefeld's mayor in attendance. Last Hanukkah's town hall menorah lighting was especially poignant.

09:22 Speaker 2 And this year, we do a big Hanukkiah on the spot where the Nazis burned the shul, uh, 1938, exactly there, and we're dancing on the spot to show that it's important to remember what happened, never to forget, but also to show everybody Am Yisrael Chai, and it's not just about the Holocaust, and it's also about, uh, living Jews

09:45 Speaker 1 Including the ones who are pouring in from war-torn Ukraine. Wagner says that's where his wife, Raquel, who speaks Russian and Ukrainian, shines.

09:56 Speaker 2 She is from, uh, the Ukraine. Uh, she's from the Dnipropetrovsk, as we call it, the Rebbe's city. And my wife is translating, is doing a lot of translating.

10:06 Speaker 1 Raquel Wagner has been instrumental in assisting many Jewish refugees relocate.

10:11 Speaker 2 She is busy with that every day. And the new refugees are a bit of a game changer, at least in our community, because new people are coming, and it's a blessing for the community.

10:23 Speaker 1 Rabbi Wagner counts one of those new people as one of their many success stories. He's from a Ukrainian refugee family that arrived in Krefeld just last year.

10:33 Speaker 2 They have a non-Jewish husband, a Jewish mother, and two Jewish children. The boy was born 13 years ago, and when they came, she was thinking of doing a circumcision with the boy. And, uh, she went to a different rabbi, and she told him that she doesn't know what to do. And, and the rabbi told her, "You know what? It's better not to do it. Wait for the child to grow up. He should decide himself. Don't do it." So what they did, they took the child to church, and they baptized him. So every Chabad rabbi who hears this, all the hairs are start standing up, and said, "Okay, so listen, we have to repair this mistake." And, uh, a mohel came. He did the circumcision. He had his bar mitzvah. He put tefillin for the first time. We even got him tefillin. He's still putting tefillin every morning, and he's coming to the minyanim, and, uh, the family is very involved in the community. So this is, uh, quite a success story we had, uh, lately from the refugees.

11:35 Speaker 1 After 15 years of work, the Wagners are seeing how their efforts have impacted the lives of the Jews of Krefeld.

11:42 Speaker 2 And Baruch Hashem, those people who were very far from Judaism, now they all have a circumcision by now. They all, uh, have children learning in yeshiva, or they have, uh, family all over the world, and it all started on a small Jewish old cemetery in Krefeld.

12:06 Speaker 1 Rabbi Wagener feels it's important to tell the world about the work he and others are doing in Germany. He's lectured about that in Israel, Montana, New Mexico, California, New Jersey, and even Postville, Iowa.

12:18 Speaker 2 And even there, the rabbi told me that he would have never believed that somebody can speak in this shul for an hour and a half and everybody is quiet. People are very interested in what's going on in Germany today. Jews in Germany is a very emotional topic for many people.

12:35 Speaker 1 Rabbi Wagener, you've made a strong case that there's reason to be optimistic about the Jewish future in Germany, but Germany has an extremely dark past when it comes to Jews and Judaism, and antisemitism is on the rise in many places around the world. So what's it like on the ground in Germany now?

12:54 Speaker 2 Um, that's a big topic, and it's very difficult.

13:01 Speaker 1 Wagener's had some run-ins with some of Krefeld's citizens, but he's very careful about labeling all negative encounters as antisemitism. But he says that he knows it when he sees it.

13:13 Speaker 2 Years ago, a German court ruled that it's illegal to do circumcision to a baby in Germany, and it was in all the newspapers. It was on all the talk shows on television. Everybody was speaking about it, and I could feel and see how they were hiding their antisemitism behind the argument, "I have nothing against Jews, but how is it possible what you are doing to your babies?" And I could see that they used this argument, and they were hiding the antisemitism behind the argument.

13:52 Speaker 1 Occasionally, Wagener and his family have needed a personal bodyguard on walks to and from shul. But Wagener says nine times out of 10 that they're stopped on the street has been a positive experience.

14:04 Speaker 2 Our job is to tell the people that the best way to fight antisemitism is to be a proud Jew, and always to tell them what Rabbi Sacks, alav ha-shalom, always said, that non-Jews, they respect the Jews who respect themself. This is the best way to counter antisemitism, and it's happening every week. Somebody is stopping us every week just to tell us that he's so happy to see Jewish children with a kippah on the streets of Germany. It gives them a good feeling.

14:35 Speaker 1 Similarly good things are happening about 300 miles away in Nuremberg. Nuremberg is infamous for Nazi rallies held there from 1933 to 1938, and as the site of the trials and executions of Nazi war criminals in 1945 and 1946. Eliyahu Borodin, inspired by the Waganers in Krefeld a decade and a half ago, recently received his rabbinic ordination. He and his wife Chana moved there, and now bring their passion and commitment to Chabad of Nuremberg under the direction of Rabbi Eliezer Chaitrik. Rabbi Borodin, Nuremberg has a very dark past. Did you hesitate when the opportunity arose for you and your wife to do Jewish outreach there?

15:22 Speaker 4 Not really. It's for me an honor to, to serve in Nuremberg, where there was the darkest of the darkest moments in Jewish history, to light it up and try to help as much as we can. Programs for youngsters, Chabad on campus, chavruses, learning, teaching, creating possibilities.

15:42 Speaker 1 Because there's a dearth of holy Jewish texts in German, Borodin also saw an important opportunity. He's translated Chumash and Tanya, the foundational work of Chabad Hasidis, into German. Borodin says he and Chana are already seeing Nuremberg change for the better.

16:00 Speaker 4 You can feel the power of this place. It's in the atmosphere. The people, they want to learn. They want to be in touch with Judaism. I don't feel any negative backsides to that story.

16:15 Speaker 1 Rabbi Wagener, Borodin's mentor from Krefeld, is watching proudly from afar.

16:21 Speaker 2 So we invested, so to say, in him, and it paid back in a positive sense, uh, to us.

16:28 Speaker 1 Teichtal is also watching from Berlin.

16:31 Speaker 5 Thank God he's developed into a beautiful, wonderful teacher and dynamic personality. He and his wife Chana are fantastic people, and we're very proud.

16:43 Speaker 1 And that's the lesson of the stories of Rabbis Borodin, Teichtal, and Wagener as they play out in Germany: continuity that inspires a faith in the Jewish future in the very place where the plan was to make sure that there would never be one. Borodin is encouraged by this, but since he's a Chabad rabbi, he's not satisfied with it.

17:05 Speaker 4 I hope that we can create even more opportunities in Germany, and I'm looking for ways to combine that manpower, that thought power, to create an even bigger impact.

17:19 Speaker 5 That is the example of the Jewish people, answering darkness with light. And Rabbi Yitzchok Mendel Wagener and Rabbi Eliyahu Borodin are examples of this. And there's no greater place in the world where that comes to light than in Germany, a place that epitomized the darkness and the evil of how low humanity can fall to. That very place becomes a source of light and energy and positivity and Jewish continuity, children learning Torah, learning Mishneh, learning Chumash, living Jewish lives, building Jewish families, having Jewish children.

18:03 Speaker 2 As Hitler, yamach shemo, tried to get every Jew with hate, we have to get everybody with love. And if Hitler couldn't sleep because there was one Jew alive somewhere in Denmark, we shouldn't also be sleeping if there's one Jew who doesn't know Aleph Bet in wherever. So that's our goal, to reach every Jew, to find everyone.

18:32 Speaker 1 I'm Gary Wollek. Thanks for listening to Lamplighters: Stories from Chabad Emissaries on the Jewish Frontier. We welcome your questions and comments about what you've just heard on Lamplighters. Please email us at podcast@lubavitch.com. And if you know of a great story involving Chabad emissaries or the people they inspire, please let us know about them. That's podcast@L-U-B-A-V-I-T-C-H.com. To subscribe digitally to Lubavitch International Magazine or to receive it at your doorstep, please visit lubavitch.com/subscribe. This is a Lubavitch International podcast.