Finding the Frozen Chosen: Rabbi Mendy & Chaya Greenberg

00:00 Speaker 1 "God, I wish I could just have some kind of a sign. Why can't I have a sign?"

00:04 Speaker 2 That's Julia O'Malley Keyes remembering what her terminally ill brother, David, was telling her during a conversation they had over eight years ago in Big Lake, Alaska. David was expressing his desire to connect with a higher power, and he was frustrated that he didn't know how. But then...

00:25 Speaker 1 Knock, knock, knock. So I go over to the door, and I open the door, and I see these two young rabbis. David said, "Tell them to come in."

00:35 Speaker 2 The young rabbis had been sent by Rabbi Mendy Greenberg and Rebbetzin Chaya Greenberg, the Rebbe shluchim to Alaska's 23,000-square-mile Matanuska-Susitna Valley to look for Jews. They found one who needed them very badly. Their mission changed David's life. 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. Back to our story in a moment, but first, I'd like to tell you about a great opportunity. You can partner with Lamplighters in sharing stories of Chabad emissaries doing amazing work all over the world. Please consider dedicating an episode. You can email us at podcast@lubavitch.com to explore dedication opportunities. That's podcast@lubavitch.com. You can also let us know how we're doing and about the shluchim you think we should consider for upcoming episodes. Please rate and review Lamplighters to make it easier for other podcast listeners to find us. Lamplighters is a project of Machne Israel, the social services arm of Chabad Lubavitch.

02:28 Speaker 3 Yeah, well, actually, I was born in New York.

02:30 Speaker 2 That's Rabbi Mendy Greenberg. When he was just one year old, his parents, Rabbi Yosef and Rebbetzin Esther Greenberg, were sent by the Lubavitcher Rebbe to Anchorage, Alaska to open a new Chabad house there.

02:43 Speaker 3 Just a few days before we moved, we went by dollars on Sunday to the Rebbe in, I think it was March 1991, and my father was holding me in his arms, and the Rebbe looked at me with a big smile and said, "Er fart eikh it in Alaska?" "Is he also traveling to Alaska?" And then gave me a second dollar and said, "Abgeben af tzedaka in Alaska," "Give this to charity in Alaska."

03:05 Speaker 2 The young family went to Alaska, and they gave their dollars for tzedakah. During their first year there, they came back to Crown Heights twice to be with the Rebbe.

03:15 Speaker 3 And both times, again, when the Rebbe saw me, he said, "Er fart eikh it in Alaska?" "Is he also going to Alaska?" Gave me another dollar for charity in Alaska. So three times altogether the Rebbe asked that question about me.

03:28 Speaker 2 On the face of it, the Rebbe's repeated question seems unnecessary. Why wouldn't young Mendy go with his parents? But as Mendy was to later learn, the Rebbe's apparent questions were really statements. Mendy was energized as a young Alaskan shliach. One day when he was about seven years old, there was a knock on the door of his father's office. It was a man with a question.

03:57 Speaker 3 My father wasn't there, but I was there, so I said, "Maybe I could help you." And he said, "I would like to put on tefillin." So I said, "Oh, okay, I can put on tefillin with you." And I found a pair of tefillin there, and I got up on a chair, and I- he had to bend his head down so I could put the tefillin on his head, and he was crying there with me, and he hugged me, and he thanked me very strongly. And ever since then, he always talks about that moment as a very powerful moment to him.

04:20 Speaker 2 That also had an impact on Mendy.

04:22 Speaker 3 As a child, I, I always felt that everything my parents were doing, I was doing. It was also my thing. Uh, I don't think anything else was ever in my mind. It was, it was obviously to be a shliach, to be a emissary of the Rebbe, to do this work.

04:35 Speaker 2 Mendy Greenberg left home to attend cheder in Chicago at nine years old. He attended yeshiva in Chicago, Kfar Chabad, Israel, and in Crown Heights. Then he went out on Merkos Shlichus, the Chabad program that dispatches hundreds of rabbinical students each year to Jewish communities around the world to help establish Chabad houses. Mendy could have gone almost anywhere, but he decided to return to Alaska. But why?

05:03 Speaker 3 I'm gonna go back to my state, so to speak, and, uh, really get to know the state. Like, this place is humongous.

05:11 Speaker 2 Mendy had worked alongside his parents in Anchorage, Alaska's largest city, for about two decades. But he hadn't seen too much of the rest of the state, which covers over 655,000 square miles. Greenberg looked for and found Jews living in Southeast Alaska, Fairbanks, and the Kenai Peninsula. Mendy received smichah in 2014. Around that time, Chaya Greenberg was wrapping up her seminary studies in Tzfat at Beis Chana. Chaya is the 11th of 12 children of Chabad pioneers Leibel and Chavi Altin. Her father is widely known as an expert in Chasidus with many books to his name. Even more than that, he worked directly for the Rebbe for about 20 years, preparing hundreds of the Rebbe sichas, or discourses, for edit. Chaya's mother was principal of Bais Rivkah Elementary School for more than two decades. 10 of Chaya's siblings are Chabad shluchim in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, South Africa, and Bogota, Colombia.

06:24 Speaker 4 I grew up visiting my older siblings who had married and moved on shlichus, and I visited them one after the other growing up and got to participate in it with them.

06:33 Speaker 2 Wow, so I'm guessing Bogota, Colombia was your favorite place to visit, right?

06:40 Speaker 4 She was always my favorite before she even moved there.

06:45 Speaker 2 Seeing firsthand how Jewish outreach is done reinforced Chaya's commitment to becoming an official shlucha. Chaya met Mendy Greenberg in late 2013. They were married the following January and discussed different shlichus opportunities, but they felt an almost magnetic pull from Alaska. To begin with, the young couple knew all about the amazing work Mendy's parents had done in Anchorage and beyond as Alaska's very first Chabad emissaries. Now, Yosef Greenberg was telling them-

07:20 Speaker 3 There has to be a Chabad House in the Valley

07:22 Speaker 2 The Valley is the Mat-Su Valley, named for two major rivers there, the Matanuska and the Susitna. According to the elder Greenbergs, many Jewish Mat-Su residents often made the hour-long drive, much longer in bad weather, for holidays and events in Anchorage. So they called a meeting at the Palmer, Alaska offices of Chesed Alaska, a non-profit dedicated to educating all people about the Jewish Bible. The group's leader, RuthAnn Crosby, had been very involved in the Lubavitch Jewish Center in Anchorage.

08:00 Speaker 3 And a big part of this organization is education, but also giving back and helping the Jewish community.

08:07 Speaker 2 So the Greenbergs, senior and junior, attended a meet-and-greet at the office of Chesed Alaska. They wanted a better idea of how many Mat-Su residents wanted to help them build a stronger community and support a new Chabad house. Randi Perlman, a Brooklyn expatriate, was one of them.

08:26 Speaker 5 The word got around, and I would say there was about 30 or so people maybe, and the rabbi came, Rabbi Mendy with Chaya, and they spoke, mostly Mendy. And he was so earnest and so sincere, and he just spoke beautifully, and at the end asked what did we think. Would the community like them to come and begin a Jewish center out there? And it was a unanimous yes, everybody in the room.

08:51 Speaker 2 The Greenbergs now had the answer and the initial financial support they needed. They moved from Brooklyn to Wasilla just before the high holidays in 2015. To their amazement, remember Alaska is a big state, Mat-Su's Jewish community would more than triple shortly after their arrival. Chaya says it was the Rebbe's blessings that cleared the way for their permanent presence in what the locals call the Mat-Su.

09:20 Speaker 4 My husband has a few dollars from the Rebbe given to him when the Rebbe asked his parents directly if he's also traveling to Alaska, and was given an extra dollar for his trip to move to Alaska with instructions, «מך תרצרון» to make it warm. And it felt like the Rebbe's sending you here, like we had a pretty clear directive where to go.

09:47 Speaker 2 Right away, the Greenbergs were awed by the sheer beauty of their new home.

09:52 Speaker 3 We're surrounded by mountains. I mean, just walk out of my house, it's very, very beautiful.

09:56 Speaker 4 It's absolutely beautiful. We're surrounded by the Talkeetna Mountains, the Chugach Mountains. You can see the Alaska Range. Incredible beauty in all directions.

10:10 Speaker 2 And there was the sheer size of the area in which their community lives.

10:14 Speaker 4 The Mat-Su Valley is the same size as West Virginia. It's huge, and we know people in all directions. And we are pretty central to the Valley, but still could be a good hour drive or an hour-and-a-half drive for someone to get to us.

10:30 Speaker 2 When the Greenbergs settled in Wasilla, they immediately offered several programs out of their tiny two-bedroom 1,200-square-foot home.

10:39 Speaker 3 We're inviting people for Friday night dinners. We right away started every Shabbos Torah class and the Shabbos lunch. We started a Hebrew school. We did bar mitzvahs. We had women's events, holiday events. I mean, everything that a, that a shliach does, uh, everything was happening out of our dining room or out of our garage.

10:57 Speaker 2 Within a short time, they realized they needed more space for religious services, so they converted their four-car attached garage into a sanctuary.

11:07 Speaker 4 And we pulled the cars out, cleaned it up, slapped down a carpet, painted the walls, and that was our Chabad house for three years.

11:16 Speaker 2 Morning minyan and oil change.

11:21 Speaker 4 Halevai. We actually had our first minyan there two years after we moved.

11:25 Speaker 2 There was no oil change that morning, only a dual bar mitzvah. Not long after that, Chaya was helping a local 12-year-old, the sister of those two boys, prepare for her bat mitzvah.

11:38 Speaker 4 And the first thing that she told me when we sat down to study was, "My mom's Jewish, but I'm not. I'm Christian." And she had no idea that her mom being Jewish meant that you're also Jewish. And that first conversation more than anything is the one where I have an incredible responsibility here to make sure she knows who she is, and that she should make sure that she passes that on to her children as well. And that was the first conversation. That was how it sparked, and that's how it started.

12:08 Speaker 2 But that's not where it ended for the girl who chose the name Sarah or her two brothers.

12:14 Speaker 4 Today she's a college student, and she regularly attends the Chabad on campus there. Her older brother not only attended his Chabad on campus where he went to school, he is very much involved in the Jewish community. We're just so lucky that we get to be the ones to let these kids know that you are Jewish, you have a neshamah, and you have a reason for being here.

12:40 Speaker 2 The word quickly spread about the tiny new Chabad house in the 23,000 square mile Mat-Su Valley, and before long, the Greenbergs had a Jewish community of their own that numbered over 100. That might not seem like a lot for many parts of the country, but it's a huge number for remote Alaska.

13:01 Speaker 3 We were finding people left and right, new people that we're connecting with. It was amazing.

13:06 Speaker 2 One of those was the aforementioned Randi Perlman, the former Brooklynite. Randi says that when she was a girl, she and her family were minimally observant, though she was aware that she was from a Jewish family.

13:19 Speaker 5 Most religious holidays, my grandparents did observe them, so we knew about them, but we were not immersed really in Judaism. We just knew that we were. We were proud that we were.

13:29 Speaker 2 Years later, she left the Northeast for Alaska because she loves the great outdoors. What she didn't know was that the arrival of the Greenbergs would arouse her Jewish spark. Randi's relationship with them grew quickly.

13:43 Speaker 5 And right from the start, it was a beautiful thing. Suddenly, there was a place you could go and congregate with other Jewish people, you know, Passover Seders and Shabbat dinners, and just things that none of us had been able to attend locally, you know, ever there. Uh, just to be able to be there and come whenever I could and always feel welcome was just an amazing thing, and I learned a tremendous amount just by osmosis.

14:09 Speaker 2 That, Randi says, has also inspired her to do more mitzvahs, especially the mitzvah of charity, or tzedakah.

14:16 Speaker 5 The act of kindness in everything you do is what the Chabad movement is all about. You know, it's all about goodness and kindness and light.

14:27 Speaker 2 Randi had found the Greenbergs on her own, but the Greenbergs went out looking for Alaskan Jews from the outset, which has led to some mind-boggling divine providence stories. Here's one of them.

14:42 Speaker 1 I am Julia O'Malley Keyes. I am the older sister of David O'Malley Keyes of blessed memory.

14:51 Speaker 2 Julia is a highly regarded painter known for her work as a contemporary realist. She lives on Cape Cod, but she grew up in Connecticut and had relatives in New York City. Her father was Irish Catholic and her mother a non-practicing Jew. They provided their children with lots of travel experiences and education, but not with much in the way of Jewish life. In fact, for a time, Julia attended a Catholic girls school.

15:21 Speaker 1 I'm not a person that has a history of being involved in organized religion, although I'm very, very spiritual.

15:29 Speaker 2 Of her seven siblings, Julia says she always felt the strongest kinship with her brother, David.

15:36 Speaker 1 He was an exotic bird, he really was. He was multi-talented, yet massive brainpower. He was an accomplished blues musician. He had a radio program for a couple of years in Seattle. He was a world traveler. He was absolutely fearless.

15:57 Speaker 2 But David wasn't even sure what being a Jew meant. David moved to the West Coast sometime in the '70s.

16:04 Speaker 1 David wound up there because he wanted to sort of be left alone to his own devices. He was just a really eccentric kid.

16:12 Speaker 2 That eccentric kid eventually took a high position with an oil company running an Alaskan oil pipeline. He worked, traveled, played blues guitar, visited his daughter and granddaughter in Seattle, and lived the way he wanted to, until late 2015.

16:30 Speaker 1 He was having a problem swallowing, and he said, "If I jump around, it goes down." Well, he finally decided to go in and have it checked. It was stage four esophageal cancer.

16:41 Speaker 2 David and his doctors fought the disease for about a year. When it became clear that David was terminal, Julia moved out to Big Lake, Alaska in early 2016 to help her brother.

16:53 Speaker 1 He was really sick, Gary. Really sick.

17:01 Speaker 2 Knowing that he was losing his physical battle, David turned to the spiritual. He shared his concerns with his sister. They would talk for hours every day for months. One day that summer, David said...

17:15 Speaker 1 "I don't know what's next, and I wish I could understand, and I wish I could be shown a sign." And we continued on, but it was the third time he's made that statement while we're sitting in the living room. "God, I wish I could just have some kind of a sign. Why can't I have a sign?" Knock, knock, knock. There's a knock at the door. David is sitting in the couch. Now, at this stage of the game, he's having great difficulty getting around because he's that sick. So I go over to the door, and I open the door, and I see these two young rabbis. What are the chances? Just out of nowhere, just out of nowhere, these two young rabbis appear.

18:04 Speaker 2 The two roving rabbis were Sruli Treitel and Levi Levertov, both cousins of Rabbi Mendy Greenberg. Mendy had asked them to visit Alaska and look for Jews. On this day, they had no list. They were just knocking on doors.

18:19 Speaker 1 This is out in the middle of nowhere, you know? So, um, they were telling me that they were on a missionary trip, and then one of the young men said, "Is anybody in the house Jewish?" That's when David said, "Tell them to come in."

18:38 Speaker 2 They talked with David about what it means to be a Jew.

18:42 Speaker 1 He was listening, asking for explanations. "How do I demonstrate this faith? Please show me what to do. I want to. I can feel it."

18:54 Speaker 2 The young rabbis knew exactly what to do, and they got right to work.

18:58 Speaker 1 They asked him if he had been bar mitzvahed. No.

19:02 Speaker 2 Out came the tefillin, and David was wrapped in a jiffy. And David O'Malley Keyes said the Shema for the first time in his life. Here's audio of that meeting.

19:14 Speaker 6 Shema. Shema. Yisrael. Yisrael. Adonai. Adonai. Eloheinu. Eloheinu. Adonai. Adonai. Echad. Echad. Baruch. Baruch.

19:23 Speaker 2 Julia looked on as her beloved brother became a bar mitzvah, a son of the commandments, and she noticed an immediate change in David.

19:33 Speaker 1 His whole body relaxed. His face relaxed, where he'd been really contorted in discomfort. And when they'd sang for him, it was really beautiful.

19:45 Speaker 6 Mazel tov. Mazel tov.

19:46 Speaker 1 Mazel tov.

19:49 Speaker 6 Mazel tov. Siman tov. Mazel tov. Mazel tov. Siman tov. Siman tov. Mazel tov. Mazel tov. Remember this from bar mitzvah? Yeah. Yei, v'avinu.

19:59 Speaker 1 His whole demeanor changed, and he's getting very involved with singing, and he wanted to get up and dance, and he asked for it, he got it.

20:11 Speaker 6 Right in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of nowhere. And it was actually- They say it's the way out.

20:16 Speaker 1 Those two young rabbis were the sweetest. They were so believable. They were so sweet and so kind to him. The two of them, they just radiated at him. It was like two angels. I wouldn't have believed it if I wasn't there.

20:40 Speaker 2 The Greenbergs invited David and Julia to experience the warmth and the beauty of a Shabbos dinner. Mendy and Chaya remember it well.

20:49 Speaker 3 We invited him for Friday night dinner. He came to our house just a few days later, and I had him say the story in front of the whole crowd. When he said the story, you were able to feel the energy in the room. It was so powerful.

21:01 Speaker 4 And everyone in the room was crying or just with goosebumps right then. And in that moment we had this feeling that we moved all the way here just for this.

21:16 Speaker 3 He wasn't able to eat, but he was telling me how much inspiration he's getting just from being in my home and, uh, being there at the Friday night dinner.

21:23 Speaker 4 He was saying, "My life is about to be over, and I'm not sure that my journey here is supposed to be over."

21:29 Speaker 2 And he was right. Julia drove her brother to the Mat-Su Center as often as possible, and David would sit for hours with Rabbi Mendy.

21:38 Speaker 3 I put on tefillin with him a few times, and he would say how he feels that the tefillin is like a spiritual gas station for him. And he would sit and talk to me. He would ask me to keep the tefillin on him for an hour, two hours.

21:48 Speaker 4 Every time he'd put them on, he would say, "I wanna keep them on for as long as possible. I feel like I'm recharging my neshamah."

21:53 Speaker 1 It made him happy, and in turn, that made me very, very happy. Very happy.

21:59 Speaker 2 David told Mendy that he hadn't even known he was a Jew until about 10 years before their meeting, when he watched a movie about the Holocaust with one of his brothers.

22:09 Speaker 3 And his older brother tells him, "You know, if you would've been there, you, you would've been on those trains." And he said, "What? What are you talking about?" He said, "You didn't know Mom was Jewish?" He said, "No, I never knew that." He's like, "Are you crazy? You didn't know that?" He had no idea.

22:22 Speaker 2 Now, David was desperate to know what that really meant.

22:29 Speaker 4 Every time he opened his mouth to ask a question or to talk, it was clear that he was looking for deep meaning and to make sure that every moment of his remaining days would be filled with connecting with Hashem, connecting with his neshamah.

22:44 Speaker 2 David and Mendy discussed the purpose of life and the Jewish perspective on life and death.

22:49 Speaker 3 And at one point we're having a conversation, he says, "Well, what happens to the body after life?" So I said, "Well, in Jewish tradition, we have to, uh, bury the body." He says, "Really? 'Cause I have it in my will that I'm meant to be cremated." So I said, "Well, you know, in Judaism you have to do a burial." So he says, "Okay." He picks up the phone, he calls his daughter. Picks up the phone and says, "Hey, I'm right now sitting here with the rabbi. The rabbi says that Jews have to be buried, so change my will right now. I'm going to get buried." You know, this guy didn't know he was Jewi- you know, it had nothing to do with Judaism till weeks ago, and just like that, boom, changes his mind, changes his plans, everything.

23:25 Speaker 4 Mendy told him about the High Holidays and about Tishrei and about Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur and Sukkot. "And now I just wanna live till the end of the High Holidays. I just wanna live one set of High Holidays as a Jew."

23:40 Speaker 2 In late summer 2016, David and Julia moved to the Seattle-Tacoma area to be near David's son, daughter, and granddaughter. They made contact with Chabad rabbis there, where David celebrated Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah for the first and last time.

24:02 Speaker 3 He heard the shofar. He got an aliyah. He made a blessing on the lulav.

24:05 Speaker 4 I think he felt at peace that he managed to connect.

24:10 Speaker 3 He told me he never felt so happy. He said, "At my funeral, tell everybody it's never too late to be a proud Jew."

24:21 Speaker 2 David O'Malley Keyes, whose sister describes him as fearless, passed away on the last day of Tishrei 2016.

24:30 Speaker 1 The level of happiness that those two young rabbis brought to my favorite brother, I'll never forget them. I will never forget what they did for that boy.

24:53 Speaker 2 Rabbi Sruli Treitel now runs Chabad of Renton, Washington. Rabbi Levi Levertov works at Chabad of Austin, Texas. And the Greenbergs and their five children continue to support their rapidly growing community in the Mat-Su Valley, but they no longer have to cram community members into a garage. After a long search for a suitably house they could afford, Mendy Greenberg wrote a letter to the Rebbe asking for an answer on what to do. Not long after that, local philanthropists Dan and Charli Hardy, and Richard and Colleen Streikin got involved, along with the Rohr Foundation and members of the Mat-Su community, who raised over $150,000 in a capital campaign. In the spring of 2019, they purchased a 9,000-square-foot building in Palmer. It enables them to offer a wider spectrum of services.

25:51 Speaker 7 The Hebrew school, the preschool, the adult education classes, the coming over for a hug when you had a hard day, the dinners when it's, uh, been a long day and your kids are sick. For the single mom who's trying to manage everything, or for any connection with your community, that's why we're here.

26:10 Speaker 2 Just 10 years after they arrived, the Greenbergs are holding six different menorah lighting events each Hanukkah. Their main Hanukkah celebration attracts 500 people. Rabbi Mendy estimates that about 400 of those are non-Jews who support the Greenbergs' work in Mat-Su.

26:29 Speaker 8 I mean, a big, big part of how we're able to do what we do here is thanks to the non-Jewish community.

26:36 Speaker 2 With the continuing support from Chesed Alaska and Mat-Su's expanding Jewish community, the Greenbergs will continue to put 30,000-plus miles on each of their vehicles each year in search of that one Jew in a big, rugged, lonely, and often cold frontier. Rabbi Mendy will continue teaching six different classes every week. It's a lot of work, but the Greenbergs know how necessary it is.

27:04 Speaker 7 And we focus on the fact that we're so lucky that we get to do this every single day, that we get to wake up and know that we are doing the most meaningful work in the world.

27:13 Speaker 8 And in order for this great vision of the Rebbe, vision of Judaism, vision of God to come to fruition, to bring the coming of Mashiach, is by every one of us playing our part.

27:23 Speaker 2 If it wasn't clear what the Rebbe meant when he asked Yosef and Esther Greenberg if their son Mendy was going to Alaska with them, it certainly should be by now.

27:33 Speaker 7 That's really what the Rebbe was saying, that you could be in a place where you're the only Jew, and there's Jewish opportunity 'cause you're there.

27:39 Speaker 8 You just need to reach out to one other person, a friend, a coworker, a family member, and inspire them to live a more meaningful, godly spiritual life, to find a lost Jew in the middle of nowhere.

27:57 Speaker 2 I'm Gary Wolek. 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. Lamplighters is a project of Machne Israel, the social services arm of Chabad Lubavitch.