Borscht Belt Meets Bible Belt: Rabbi Yosef & Bina Goldwasser

00:00 Speaker 1 Rochelaya Fry was born a Jew, but she was raised a Southern Baptist.

00:05 Speaker 2 I remember being six, and in the church it felt frightening.

00:12 Speaker 1 But Rochelaya stayed in the church for several decades.

00:15 Speaker 2 When you know you're Jewish and you're crossing yourself in church, then you know you're a fraud, and I was a fraud, and I needed to stop, but I didn't know what to do about it.

00:29 Speaker 1 In 2016, Rochelaya and her husband moved to Alabama. There she met a friend who told her she should meet the Chabad Shliach in Mobile. She agreed, and Rabbi Yosef Goldwasser hopped into his car to meet with Rochelaya at her home.

00:46 Speaker 2 I'd never heard of Chabad Lubavitch. It was foreign to me, and I was so nervous. I was just shaking. I didn't know what to say or what to think of this rabbi wearing tzitzit and a hat. But I said to him, "Rabbi, are there many Chabad Jews here?" He said, "I don't pigeonhole Jews." All of a sudden, my neshamah began to rise in me. That changed my whole life. My whole life.

01:25 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. 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. Yosef Goldwasser was a dedicated shliach, even when he was just a 13-year-old Pittsburgher.

03:00 Speaker 3 As soon as I was bar mitzvahhed, there were shluchim nearby, within like a two-hour drive, different shluchim that needed bochurim to come for a Shabbos to make a minyan, to learn some Hasara, and I used to like going and, uh, helping out and do whatever I could.

03:17 Speaker 1 Goldwasser grew up in a Chabad family. His father and mother, Rabbi Meyer and Rebbetzin Rivka Goldwasser, taught and still teach in Pittsburgh yeshivas. So he knew all along about helping other Jews.

03:31 Speaker 3 From early on, I really liked the whole concept of not just going and helping other shluchim, but eventually one day being able to open a Chabad house.

03:43 Speaker 1 Bina Goldwasser, who's originally from Miami, also focused on shlichus from an early age.

03:49 Speaker 4 When I was old enough to go away to help shluchim in day camps, I did that, and I really wanted to have what they had.

03:58 Speaker 1 Bina's upbringing in a Chabad family, as well as her experiences in seminary in Tzfat, made her certain that Jewish outreach was in her future. In 2009, Yosef Goldwasser was studying for Smicha. Bina, who was teaching in Buffalo, went to New York to meet him. That was around Pesach. They married that summer.

04:21 Speaker 3 We both really wanted to open a Chabad house, and we were living in Crown Heights for about five years trying to fulfill our life dream of finding a place where we were going to open a Chabad house.

04:33 Speaker 1 Despite the Goldwassers' eagerness, it took a while for them to figure out where that should be. After a few years of parenthood and teaching online, the young couple still hadn't found a place for their shlichus.

04:46 Speaker 4 We did check a few different cities. In one city, we were there for about a week, hardly found any Jews. One city, we were there for a few weeks, super busy, but there was a few Chabad rabbis, and we felt like it was being, you know, well taken care of. We really wanted somewhere we could really feel like we were needed in what we were doing.

05:05 Speaker 1 So the Goldwassers did some research.

05:07 Speaker 3 We started searching cities that had 1,000 Jews that didn't have a shliach there yet.

05:13 Speaker 1 They saw a few possibilities, but they also noticed that the city of Mobile met all their criteria: a small city with a Jewish population of just over 1,000. There was no permanent Chabad presence there, and it was growing.

05:29 Speaker 4 You know, you take that as a sign that if the city itself is growing, then the Jewish population will be growing.

05:34 Speaker 1 So the Goldwassers talked with Rabbi Yossi Posner, head Chabad shliach of Alabama.

05:40 Speaker 4 We offered him a, a few cities that we saw, and he picked Mobile out of, I think it was three cities, and said, "You know, that's something that I've been thinking about, why don't you go check it out?"

05:50 Speaker 3 In a few weeks is Hanukkah, why don't you try it out for Hanukkah?

05:55 Speaker 1 So in late 2013, the Goldwassers visited Mobile for the first time, armed only with their excitement and a list of about 10 names compiled by Yeshivah Bochurim who had made sporadic visits. They hadn't had time to plan any events. Instead, they drove around Mobile with a car menorah blazing away on the roof. People noticed.

06:18 Speaker 4 The first thing that we noticed is that people are really friendly in the South. Southern hospitality is a real thing.

06:25 Speaker 3 And we spent about a week over here meeting up with a nice amount of Jews. It seemed very exciting.

06:32 Speaker 1 The Goldwasseres took this as a sign that Mobile was their intended destination. They were eager to move.

06:40 Speaker 3 I got back to New York. I called Rabbi Posner. I was all, I was all excited. I said, "Rabbi Posner, uh, we're ready to move." And he said, "Not so fast. Now why don't you go check it out again?"

06:51 Speaker 1 Posner wasn't sure that the Goldwasseres had gotten the complete picture in just one visit. So a few weeks later, in the midst of winter, Rabbi Yosef returned to Mobile. His plan was to spend two or three days and learn more about the needs of the city's Jews. But-

07:09 Speaker 3 For some reason, it was very hard. I was trying to meet with Yidden, and like I barely met anyone. And I called my wife. I said, "Yeah, I don't think that, uh, this is happening."

07:20 Speaker 1 Goldwasser was disappointed as he prepared for the drive to New Orleans to catch his flight back to New York.

07:26 Speaker 3 And I get a notification that there's a blizzard in New York, and basically, they're canceling the flight.

07:34 Speaker 1 The next flight out of New Orleans would be in another two or three days.

07:38 Speaker 3 But instead of staying in New Orleans, I said, "Let's just stay in Mobile. Let's see what I can do. Let's see if I could meet anyone else over here." So I stayed in Mobile another two days, and Baruch Hashem, I met a nice amount of Yidden over here, and I'm very happy that, uh, you know, Hashem arranged this, uh, snowstorm to help us make sure that we stay here.

07:55 Speaker 1 The Goldwasseres made a third trip just to make sure. They ran a very successful Purim event, and with the approval of Rabbi Posner, the Goldwasseres moved permanently from Crown Heights to Mobile, Alabama in late summer 2014. They marked their arrival with a kickoff barbecue.

08:14 Speaker 4 Maybe about 10 people. Some people who had recently moved. There was someone who had been here for a while. There were some Israelis that worked at the mall. There was you know, like a little sprinkling of a few different people, but we wanted to right away be able to show ourselves and say, "This is who we are. We're not intimidating. Chabad is all welcoming."

08:35 Speaker 1 The Goldwasseres engaged their new community with sensitivity and care. It's largely made up of people whose immigrant ancestors had come right off the boats from Europe to the port city of Mobile. That's reflected in the city's two non-Orthodox synagogues, which were established in the late 1800s.

08:55 Speaker 3 When we first moved here, people were telling us, "Where 60, 70 years ago there was a shochet. Schwartz's Deli. There used to be a mikvah over here many, many years ago." And you know, it's in the history books.

09:07 Speaker 1 Through decades of boom and decline, most of Mobile's Jewish community remained affiliated and very close-knit. It's accustomed to a traditional synagogue model, but not much else. So the Goldwasseres made it a priority to let members of the community know that they hadn't arrived to change their affiliations or their traditions.

09:29 Speaker 4 And kind of dispel the myth that we are either in competition with other synagogues or out there to make everybody Chabad and religious. It doesn't matter where you're affiliated, if you're not affiliated.

09:41 Speaker 1 The Goldwasseres also realized that Jews living in the Bible Belt faced certain challenges. On the one hand, many Christians in Alabama express support for their Jewish neighbors.

09:54 Speaker 3 It's a very Christian state, very religious state. It's hard for me to go to the store without somebody coming over to me and saying, "Oh, you're Jewish. We pray for Israel. We pray for the Jews." There's lots of respect for the Jewish people here.

10:09 Speaker 1 On the other hand, some misunderstand who Jews are and what they stand for, and sometimes Jews are pressured to adopt the majority religion. So the Goldwasseres realized at the outset the importance of working with each individual to strengthen their sense of Jewish pride.

10:28 Speaker 4 So that was the first thing, was really just making the personal connections, getting to see what is and isn't already being done.

10:37 Speaker 3 Trying to get a feel of what the community wants, where they would appreciate more Judaism.

10:42 Speaker 1 The Goldwasseres ran Shabbos meals, followed by high holiday services and celebrations. They hadn't had a lot of time to plan for those, but they did for Hanukkah.

10:53 Speaker 3 We reached out to the city, and there's a, a big city square in downtown called Bienville Square. We invited the mayor, and Baruch Hashem, we had more than 200 people for that first Hanukkah.

11:06 Speaker 1 The holiday celebrations drew larger than expected turnouts.

11:10 Speaker 4 Purim, Shavuot, Lag BaOmer. It was a beautiful turnout from the community and something that maybe wasn't traditionally celebrated, and we can show how it could be celebrated in a really fun way.

11:22 Speaker 1 At first, the Goldwasseres ran programs out of their home, and then out of a rented office space.

11:28 Speaker 3 Lots of people came out to celebrate Judaism for the first time in their life.

11:33 Speaker 1 And so the Goldwasseres knew that they had been sent to the right city. There's one very special woman who, under the care of Chabad of Mobile, began to celebrate Judaism for the first time in decades.

11:49 Speaker 2 I live in Daphne, which is across the bay from Mobile.

11:54 Speaker 1 That's Ruchele Fry. After she was born, Ruchele, who has no recollection of her biological father, lived with her mother and three sisters up and down the East Coast. When she was six years old, her family moved to Pensacola, Flor- By that point, her Jewish mother had adopted another faith

12:14 Speaker 2 ... Southern Baptist, and she raised us Southern Baptist. I remember being six and in the church at the end of a service, they invite you up to accept Jesus as your savior and blah, blah, blah. I was so terrified. I finally at six walked up there and said yes and was baptized, but it never felt right. It felt frightening.

12:42 Speaker 1 Rochel Leah says the only Jewish observance she and her sisters had was through their grandparents when they would visit them on Crown Street in Brooklyn.

12:52 Speaker 2 And they would take us to temple every Saturday. They were careful to teach us things like, uh, my grandmother would always, always light Sabbath candles, and she kept a kosher home.

13:07 Speaker 1 Rochel Leah says she loved her grandparents and always cherished the Yiddishkeit she learned with them. She also loved her mother, but her mother's embrace of Christianity left her confused.

13:20 Speaker 2 I just knew that something wasn't right, but I didn't know what to do about it.

13:26 Speaker 1 Rochel Leah quit church when she was 15, but that wasn't the end of her confusion. She married a young Navy flyer in Pensacola when she was 18, and joined the Air Force two years later as an official journalist at Washington DC's Bolling Air Force Base. Her husband was a non-Orthodox convert to Judaism, which led to some Jewish observance with their two children, but not much.

13:53 Speaker 2 I did take my children to Hebrew school. He wasn't really interested in going to services, so mostly I just took my children to Hebrew school.

14:03 Speaker 1 The couple were married over 16 years until Rochel Leah's husband took his own life.

14:09 Speaker 2 And it took me 10 years to get past that suicide.

14:15 Speaker 1 Rochel Leah remarried. Her current husband, Lee, is not Jewish. They spent a fair amount of time church hopping together, but that didn't feel any better to Rochel Leah than it had when she was younger.

14:28 Speaker 2 When you know you're Jewish and you're crossing yourself in church, then you know you're a fraud, and I was a fraud. I felt like a fraud, but I didn't know how to stop because when you are raised as a Southern Baptist, it leaves you with such confusion. The confusion is that you know there's something Jewish that you need to be doing, but you keep going to church, and you keep feeling like a fraud. And I needed to stop.

15:00 Speaker 1 Rochel Leah didn't know who to reach out to for help, and a deep feeling of regret had taken hold of her.

15:06 Speaker 2 I wasn't taught the right things. I missed out on so much.

15:13 Speaker 1 In 2016, Rochel Leah and Lee moved to Alabama, and she met a woman named Carol Zimmerman.

15:19 Speaker 2 Carol would gather Jews. She would gather Jews.

15:25 Speaker 1 Carol and her informal group called themselves the Eastern Shore Chevera. They met once a month in a local restaurant or to watch a movie. Sometimes Rabbi Goldwasser gave a monthly Torah talk, which the Chevera appreciated. So when Carol learned of Rochel Leah's inner struggle, she got an idea.

15:44 Speaker 2 She said, "I think you need to meet Rabbi Goldwasser."

15:48 Speaker 1 Carol called him.

15:50 Speaker 3 And she said, "There's a woman in Daphne. She wants a rabbi to come meet with her." I called her up. She said, "Yes, I want to speak to a rabbi."

15:59 Speaker 1 Goldwasser made the half-hour drive from Mobile across the bay and over to the Eastern Shore to visit Rochel Leah at her home in Daphne.

16:09 Speaker 2 I'd never heard of Chabad Lubavitch. It was foreign to me, and I was so nervous. I was just shaking. I didn't know what to say or what to think of this rabbi wearing tzitzit and a hat.

16:28 Speaker 1 Rochel Leah says Rabbi Goldwasser sat quietly on her couch, patiently listening to her story and about her negative feelings toward the church.

16:37 Speaker 3 She tells me that, "I'm going there for all these years. This is not me. This is not who I am. I don't want to go there anymore. Rabbi, I want to come home."

16:45 Speaker 1 Goldwasser patiently answered every question she had.

16:48 Speaker 2 I said to him, "Rabbi, are there many Chabad Jews here?" He said, "I don't pigeonhole Jews."

16:57 Speaker 3 So I said, "You know, the rebbe said that there's no types of Judaism. There's no Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Ultra-Orthodox. You were born with a neshamah. You have a neshamah. You're Jewish."

17:08 Speaker 2 All of a sudden, my neshamah began to rise in me. That changed my whole life, my whole life. When he said those words, I knew I was a Jew. I mean, I knew m- I was Jewish because my mother was Jewish. I knew that, but that didn't mean anything to me until he brought me into the fold with those words, those beautiful words, "I don't pigeonhole Jews." All of a sudden, I knew there was something I could learn and something I could grow with.

17:47 Speaker 3 And she was very excited about that, and she wanted to get involved. She wanted to do as many mitzvahs as she could.

17:55 Speaker 1 Rochel Leah began with weekly Torah study. After five years of studying with Rabbi Goldwasser over Zoom, she recently finished the entire Tanya and has moved on to Pirkei Avos. She affixed a mezuzah on every door of her home and lights Shabbos candles every Friday night.

18:14 Speaker 2 It's so important to me to do that.

18:17 Speaker 1 She's also learned to make six-braid challah and Havdalah blessings

18:22 Speaker 3 And it's just so amazing and so inspirational to see how involved she is and how excited she is to practice Yiddishkeit.

18:29 Speaker 1 Rochelah Fry has written 19 articles on chabad.org, and she contributes to the Chabad of Mobile newsletter, The Lower Alabama L'Chayim. She says she wants to share with others everything she's discovered, even though she can't always put her feelings into words.

18:47 Speaker 2 The joy I have found in growing as a Jew, there's nothing, nothing that can explain it. Nothing that I can say would make you understand how important it is to me to know that I am a Jew, and God loves me as a Jew.

19:07 Speaker 1 Rochelah says that she feels less regret about what she did or didn't do in the past.

19:12 Speaker 2 I missed so much, but I'm, I'm gaining on it. But oh, am I grateful to be where I am now. When Rabbi Goldwasser gave me the opportunity to be the Jew that was inside me, it was like a flower blooming. It was like a whole garden.

19:41 Speaker 1 Chabad of Mobile also makes possible Jewish connections with the city's younger people, like 18-year-old Ben Siegel. Until a few years ago, Ben and his family lived in Florida. Ben says his schoolmates there never ostracized him for being a Jew, but just before his freshman year of high school, the Siegels moved to Fairhope, Alabama, a small city on Mobile Bay's eastern shore. Things were different there.

20:08 Speaker 5 I was the first Jew that many people have ever met, so I got a lot of people saying inconsiderate things because they didn't know what a Jew was. They didn't know what to say, what not to say, and they just didn't know. And I was feeling very alone.

20:24 Speaker 1 Ben says he struggled to maintain his Jewish pride and observance, but he and his family met the Goldwassers very shortly after moving to Fairhope.

20:34 Speaker 5 The whole Goldwasser family, they're amazing people, and Rabbi Goldwasser, he is absolutely one of the wisest people I've ever met, every single day with a smile on his face. That's something that has inspired me, definitely.

20:48 Speaker 1 Soon, Ben and family were part of the greater Mobile Jewish community. Rabbi Goldwasser asked Ben a couple times if he'd like to attend the annual C-Teen Shabbaton in New York, but Ben twice declined. In early 2024, in the middle of Ben's junior year, Rabbi asked again.

21:10 Speaker 5 I was like, "You know what? Yes." And I thought I would just go, make friends, feel a little bit of connection.

21:17 Speaker 1 That February, Ben Siegel and Rabbi Yosef Goldwasser made the trip together.

21:22 Speaker 5 We land in New York, and we take a taxi straight to the Ohel. Once we got there, I wrapped tefillin for the first time since my bar mitzvah. I obviously didn't remember how to do it, so he helped me.

21:34 Speaker 1 Ben wrote a pan to the Rebbe and davened outside the oil. Then they headed to Crown Heights.

21:40 Speaker 5 We went out, just the two of us, down Kingston Avenue, and he taught me so much about the culture of Crown Heights, and that was just an amazing feeling. I was like, "This is so cool."

21:53 Speaker 1 Ben says he was barely prepared for what he'd experience over Shabbos. It began with a beautiful dinner.

22:00 Speaker 3 Lots of good kosher food, lots of Jewish teens, and for him was like Candy Land, being able to meet so many other Jewish kids his age. And he was just, like, running around, meeting so many other kids. I was very happy. He's getting to meet so many teens.

22:14 Speaker 1 After dinner, there was a farbrengen led by Rabbi Binyomin Abrams, the Boston University chemistry professor featured on Lamplighters in October 2022.

22:25 Speaker 5 That was the turning point of the Shabbaton for me. It started at 9:30, and I was like, "I'll sit down. I'll, uh, see what he has to say. Seems like a cool speaker." Well, that sit-down for a little bit turned into, like, 3:00 in the morning.

22:40 Speaker 1 Abrams talked about Judaism and science, and the value of a mitzvah, especially the connection to God through wrapping tefillin. Deep into the farbrengen, the boys were asked if they wanted to make resolutions about Jewish practice.

22:55 Speaker 5 So after around two hours, I finally broke, and I said, "I wanna start wrapping tefillin every single day." That was the best decision I've ever made. That was the big change right there.

23:08 Speaker 1 Ben returned home energized. Rabbi Goldwasser wanted to make sure Ben's enthusiasm didn't wane.

23:15 Speaker 3 So I wanted to create a virtual community where Ben could feel that he has a community where people are putting on tefillin. And basically, we made a WhatsApp group, Southern Alabama Telfies. Instead of a selfie, it's a telfie, a picture with tefillin on.

23:31 Speaker 1 At first, the only members of the Southern Alabama Telfies group were Ben and Rabbi Goldwasser, but it soon grew.

23:38 Speaker 3 After a few days of first just me and him posting a picture every day, he says, "Rabbi, my father wants to join the group." My father said, "What? My son's putting on tefillin, and I'm not putting on tefillin?"

23:49 Speaker 5 So from that point on, my dad, he started wrapping tefillin every single day.

23:54 Speaker 1 The Siegels' dedication to the mitzvah led to 12 more men joining the Southern Alabama Telfies group. This summer, one of them successfully inspired 97 members of the Mobile community, some first-timers, some not-in-a-long-timers, to put on tefillin in honor of the 97th anniversary of the previous Rebbe's liberation from prison. Everyone acknowledges that Ben was instrumental in making that happen. Ben's now a freshman at the University of Alabama, studying music performance, attending Chabad on campus events, and wearing his yarmulke and tzitzit openly and proudly.

24:38 Speaker 5 Before, I wouldn't show that I'm Jewish, but now I don't care what others think. You don't have to hide anymore. You don't have to be afraid to do what is truly meant for you to do.

24:55 Speaker 1 Mobile's Jewish community is increasingly proud and open. Since the Goldwassers arrived in 2014, it's doubled, partly because of the local economy.

25:07 Speaker 4 There's so much construction and growth, new neighborhoods, and if the city itself is growing, then the Jewish population will be growing.

25:14 Speaker 1 But that's happening because of the work the Goldwasseres are doing to make a qualitatively better Jewish life for Mobilean Jews. In 2022, they completed a new mikvah.

25:26 Speaker 3 And, uh, Baruch Hashem, very special to have within a, a four-hour or five-hour radius, the only mikvah.

25:34 Speaker 1 The following year, the Goldwasseres purchased a building with plenty of space for their growing community. Chabad of Mobile now has an online market offering kosher food for Mobile residents, and helps cater the occasional Jewish Federation event, and there are homemade meals for travelers and vacationers.

25:54 Speaker 3 Recently, we got a chef who prepares kosher food, very good food. People are passing through, they want a good hot kosher meal, so they're able to have that.

26:03 Speaker 1 Rabbi Goldwasser makes frequent trips to many stops along Mobile Bay, including Gulf Shores, a resort city an hour-and-a-half drive from Mobile, where Goldwasser runs a minyan and visits tourists and seasonal residents, often with the Goldwasseres' three children in tow.

26:21 Speaker 4 I'm really happy that we have more to offer the community now.

26:28 Speaker 1 There are just under 1,000 names on the Goldwasseres' mailing list.

26:33 Speaker 4 I know that there are more Jews out there that we haven't come in contact with, but my dream is I would love to know and have a connection with every Jew that lives in Mobile.

26:41 Speaker 3 When you build up those one-on-one relationships, that's the most powerful thingy. It has the biggest effect.

26:48 Speaker 6 Oh, the Rebbe was right. The Rebbe knew that people who were caring and non-judgmental needed to go places and gather Jews together and say, "You're welcome here. Come to my Sabbath table. Come to my Torah study. Let me put a mezuzah on your door."

27:11 Speaker 4 Every Jew counts, and it's not a tagline. It's real, and every Jew counts includes you.

27:22 Speaker 1 I'm Gary Wolk. 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@lubavitch.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.