The Rabbi Everyone Knows, From the Town Few Have Heard of: Rabbi Dovid Eliezrie

00:00 Speaker 1 The day he was diagnosed, I was also supposed to sign the contract for building my building.

00:04 Speaker 2 That's Rabbi Dovid Eliezeri. In the late '80s, one of his sons was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia. He and his wife, Stella, were also helping another son recover from cancer, and they were in the middle of plans for a new building in Yorba Linda that they hoped would be the cornerstone of their outreach efforts to local Jews.

00:25 Speaker 1 And I was in a moral dilemma what I should do, and then I decided if I don't build the building, then I've given up on my shlichus.

00:35 Speaker 2 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 the 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. You might say that Rabbi Dovid Eliezeri was born to move.

02:08 Speaker 1 I grew up in a few places. I grew up in LA till I was about 14. I went to a modern orthodox day school in Los Angeles, Hillel Hebrew Academy. Then my family moved to Montreal, where I lived for two years, and when I was 16, I attended Lubavitch Yeshiva. If it was maybe six blocks another direction, maybe I would've gone someplace else.

02:29 Speaker 2 But he didn't, and it was there that the young Eliezeri was introduced to the concept of Jewish outreach.

02:35 Speaker 1 You know, I looked at the yeshiva bochurim and the things that they were doing and their sense of passion and dedication, and that began to inspire me.

02:43 Speaker 2 Then in the mid-'60s, Eliezeri came to the Rebbe for the first time, along with his Montreal yeshiva classmates. What he experienced was a master class in sensitivity and unconditional love.

02:56 Speaker 1 And we had a group of high school kids that come to New York in honor of Yud Shvat, which is the yahrtzeit, the anniversary of the passing of the previous Rebbe in 1950. And we were there for Shabbos, and we had had a private audience with the Rebbe.

03:09 Speaker 2 Eliezeri says he doesn't remember much about that meeting, but he does remember what he did on his last night in Crown Heights.

03:17 Speaker 1 So I was in 770, and I wanted to get into Meriv, to the evening service, and the room was packed, so I decided to stand in the lobby, the small lobby between the Rebbe's office and the shul. And the Rebbe walked in front of me, and then holding the door open was the Rebbe's chief of staff, and I didn't know anything about Hasidic protocol. You know, you got Buckingham Palace and you got Chabad protocol, and the protocol was that the Rebbe would walk in, and the door was still open a- as he walked in, so I figured I'll walk in also, which is like I was breaking all the rules. At that point, he's closing the door on me. I'm half in, I'm half out. It's like the deer caught by the lights in the middle of the night on the highway, and the crowd is motioning with their hands I should go out, and I'm not sure what to do, and there's a tumult, and the Rebbe turns around and sees a confused kid who doesn't look like a Chabad kid, who's just, you know, a, a young teenager, and he motions to his secretary to open the door, and he motions to me to stand by his side. And I stood next to him. He didn't say a word to me and davened next to him. He saw somebody who didn't fit in, and instead of saying, "What are you breaking the rules?" He said, "Come stand next to me."

04:28 Speaker 2 Eliezeri carried that lesson with him. In 1967, when he was 16 years old, Eliezeri and his family moved to Israel, where, at the suggestion of the Rebbe, he attended Tomchei Tmimim in Kfar Chabad.

04:42 Speaker 1 And this idea was imbued into us. It was really a central tenet of Chabad education, and the question was, how are you gonna spend your life? Is it going to be something that's only gonna be for your benefit, or are you going to do something which is going to have an impact that transcends your own self and changes the destiny of the Jewish people? The real moment of transformation was once I began to really understand what Chabad was talking about, what was the philosophy, what was the theology, and it really touched my heart and soul. I was hooked.

05:17 Speaker 2 Eliezeri's parents were disappointed at first that their son hadn't finished his secular high school education.

05:23 Speaker 1 But they, I think they were, uh, as they saw me mature and find my place, I think they were very, very happy with it. They were very supportive.

05:31 Speaker 2 Eliezeri met his wife, Stella, in Israel. Stella had grown up in LA in a traditional Jewish family, and graduated from Machon Gold, one of Israel's few religious Zionist seminaries for English speakers. But she had also attended programs at the UCLA Chabad house. In the late '60s, as a 17-year-old, she helped Rabbi Avraham Levitansky run a Chabad day camp, and she developed a love for Jewish education and outreach. Dovid Eliezer earned Smicha in 1974, and they were married in Crown Heights later that year. So the question arose, where are we going out on Shlichus? Eliezer noticed that many of his classmates were moving to college campuses, including Rabbi Yisroel Deren at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

06:22 Speaker 1 I wanted to go into campus work, and an opportunity came up to start Chabad at the University of Miami, and I said, "That sounds great."

06:29 Speaker 2 The Eliezeres moved to Florida and prepared to serve University of Miami students. But there was a challenge at the outset. Eliezer says other Jewish campus organizations saw Chabad as a competitive threat.

06:44 Speaker 1 They didn't throw out the red carpet.

06:45 Speaker 2 The director of one prominent organization made it clear that Chabad was not welcome.

06:51 Speaker 1 And when I arrived, he told the university I'm a member of a cult, and he said, "I represent all the rabbis of Miami." And I said, "Well, you don't represent the Orthodox rabbis." You know, the attitude that I had to deal with was one of tremendous hostility and trying to establish our credibility, number one, with the students, number two, with the universities, and number three, with the broader Jewish community to support what we were doing.

07:13 Speaker 2 By 1974, Chabad Shluchim had officially been on US campuses for about five years, so by the time you and Stella got to Miami, was there an established method for engaging students?

07:26 Speaker 1 No. This was like a guy starts a business and he has no credit, no money, no customers. We got the credit, we have a few rubles, and we've got a lotta, lotta customers. Now we gotta run a good store.

07:38 Speaker 2 Programs for University of Miami students began with Shabbos dinners and Torah study. Eliezer always remembered how the Lubavitcher Rebbe had made him feel important, and he strove to foster that same environment for every person he and his wife met. He remembers one of the first Shabbos dinners they hosted with a little bit of help.

07:59 Speaker 1 The first person that was involved with our Chabad House, she was a student that had been a little bit involved with Chabad before, so she told nine guys to come for dinner Friday night, and that's how we had a Minyan.

08:12 Speaker 2 A few years ago, Eliezer got a surprise at one of his speaking events in Boca Raton.

08:17 Speaker 1 And I got up there, and she's there sitting with her 18 or 20-year-old granddaughter, and I told the story how the grandmother had invited nine boys to a Friday night dinner, and that's how we started Chabad at the University of Miami. So we've had many wonderful stories. So I think it's a question about building real relationships with people which can have an impact on their lives, and while they're in college, they're beginning to develop their identity and their direction in life, and they're grappling with many issues. And I think Chabad Shluchim on campus are in a very special place because they can help set their tone and direction for decades to come.

08:53 Speaker 2 Eliezer estimates that he and Stella came into contact with hundreds of Jewish students during their years at the University of Miami, and the other campus organizations eventually warmed to the Chabad presence. The Eliezeres loved their work, but despite their success, by the early '80s, they felt that UMiami students needed Shluchim who were closer in age to college kids.

09:17 Speaker 1 The change was that every year we got a little older and the students got a little bit younger, and I guess that we began to change and I guess our interest changed a little bit. We felt that we didn't have that same rapport with the students as we got a little bit older.

09:32 Speaker 2 The Eliezeres consulted with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and the Rebbe agreed that the Eliezeres should move on to community work. They knew where they wanted to go.

09:41 Speaker 1 We had a lot of connections in Los Angeles. I grew up in LA. I knew the community. My wife grew up in LA, and it was like coming home.

09:48 Speaker 2 But rather than relocate to bustling Los Angeles, the Eliezeres wanted a more tranquil nearby location.

09:55 Speaker 1 And, uh, Orange County is more suburban, more sedate. We were very familiar with the area.

10:01 Speaker 2 Rabbi Mendel Duchman had opened a Chabad House in Irvine in support of a group of South African Jews who wanted an Orthodox shul there. That was the first Orange County Chabad House, so the Eliezeres focused on Anaheim in support of Israelis working in Orange County's booming defense industry.

10:21 Speaker 1 And they wanted a rabbi, and they went to Chabad, and I was the lucky winner. And I came to a operation in somebody's garage where they had a Shabbos Minyan, and we started from scratch.

10:32 Speaker 2 The Eliezeres rented a storefront, which became their base of operations.

10:36 Speaker 1 I started off with a preschool, and Hebrew school, and you know, the regular programs of Chabad. At that time, Chabad itself was less structured. The support that exists today didn't exist then, so we were all very much on our own trying to figure out what we were doing.

10:52 Speaker 2 In creating the area's second Chabad House, the Eliezeres needed to find a way to connect with Jews who weren't so sure what they wanted.

11:00 Speaker 1 The Jews of California are very different than Jews of the East Coast. The Jews in LA are less rooted in their traditions. They're also less educated about Judaism. There's higher rates of assimilation, higher rates of intermarriage.

11:12 Speaker 2 But the pintel Yid is always ready to blaze. Eliezer loves to tell the story about how that happened with one man in Anaheim.

11:20 Speaker 1 I was struggling very hard to raise money. Our operation was very limited. But there was a man called David Feder. Every time I had to cover a payroll for my preschool, whatever it was, I'd run to him and I'd borrow the money, I'd give it back to him, and back and forth. So one day I said to him, "Why are you giving me all this money all the time? Why are you bailing me out?" And he said, "When I was a kid, I grew up in, in Poland. My father was the head of the Jewish community in Warsaw, and I saw whenever a Jew had a problem, he came to him, so therefore, I decided that if you're coming to me, you must need the help."

11:52 Speaker 2 Most of the time, Chabad Shluchim arrive in a location and stay there for the rest of their lives. But even with the support of community members like David Feder, the Eliezeres realized that they couldn't stay in Anaheim much longer for the opposite reason they'd left Miami.

12:08 Speaker 1 And I sent out some questionnaires and I made some phone calls, and I found out that the area where I was in Anaheim was getting older- And the younger Jews were moving either toward the southern part of Orange County or the Anaheim Hills and Yorba Linda and Villa Park and those neighborhoods. So I realized that there was not much of a future

12:26 Speaker 2 So in the late '80s, the Eliezris decided to move about 11 miles east to the Anaheim Hills/Yorba Linda area. In 1988, they learned of a property, a former farm, that was available. They wanted it, but they didn't have the money for it up front. They looked for money from anyone who could help. When it came time for the down payment, Eliezri took a big risk.

12:49 Speaker 1 So what happened was I wrote the check for the escrow on a Friday, and I found the money on Sunday and put it in the bank Monday morning. Thank God, uh, checks didn't clear so quickly in those days, and I was able to eventually get into the property.

13:02 Speaker 2 As if relocation and purchasing a new building wasn't enough of a challenge, the Eliezris were hit by another simultaneous test. Two of their sons were diagnosed with cancer.

13:16 Speaker 1 It was the most trying experience of my life.

13:18 Speaker 2 The older son was quickly treated and went into remission. The younger was diagnosed with a much more serious condition when he was on Merkos Shlichus in Vilnius, Lithuania, in support of Rabbi Shalom Ber Krinsky.

13:31 Speaker 1 They put him on a plane. He came home on a Thursday. On Shabbos, the doctors turned to me and told me he may not live another hour. He was intubated. He was very seriously sick. The day he was diagnosed, I was also supposed to sign the contract for building my building, and I was in a moral dilemma what I should do. And then I decided if I don't build the building, then I've given up on my shlichus, and I felt that will be the spiritual response to him being in the hospital. So during the day, I worked on building the building, and during the evening, I would spend my time with him in the hospital. It was a very difficult thing to balance.

14:05 Speaker 2 Stella was her son's full-time medical advocate.

14:08 Speaker 1 And she was in the hospital every day, you know, making sure he got the best medical care. And so he went through a series of chemos, and then they discovered a bone marrow donor in Israel that saved his life, and she was the medical advocate that really saved his life.

14:25 Speaker 2 Eliezri also credits Stella with building a community in a way that only a Jewish mother can.

14:31 Speaker 1 She brings care to many different people, a sense of what is a normal Jewish home, what is the warmth of Yiddishkeit that you can feel in a Jewish home, and I think that's one of her most important responsibilities. We had a bunch of miracles, and eventually we built a beautiful center with help from the whole local Jewish community. Today we have a beautiful campus in Yorba Linda, California, two acres, 30 parking spots, the whole nine yards.

15:00 Speaker 2 The Beth Meir HaCohen Building houses a shul, education center, and a mikvah. Eliezri estimates North County Chabad serves several hundred Jews in and around Yorba Linda, and the community is constantly growing. Iris Goldman is an architect and designer living in Orange, California, with her husband and daughter since 1997. They started out at a different synagogue.

15:26 Speaker 3 And then decided that we need a little more, and we ended up meeting with Rabbi Eliezri and the whole family and were amazed at their commitment to the community. You know, at the end of the day, I felt at home with them, and it was an easy transition.

15:43 Speaker 2 Iris says she and her family began with studying Torah, which over the years has led to more mitzvahs. These days, Iris and family are very involved with initiatives in the Jewish community, but as she's recently learned, that can expose Jews to hostile groups, like the one she and several hundred community members were confronted by at a rally following the October 7th massacre in Israel.

16:07 Speaker 3 It was anti-Israel and pro-Hamas group with flags of Hamas all over. They were noisy. They were aggressive. They were in your face. Very nasty.

16:18 Speaker 2 But speaking at the rally was Rabbi Dovid Eliezri, who implored his community not to be intimidated.

16:25 Speaker 3 And he was able to silence them and m- made a very clear point to the audience, which was amazing, and everybody left kind of feeling a little relieved that we're able to express ourselves as a community.

16:38 Speaker 2 Work as a local shliach for more than 50 years makes for a very full resume, but more than 25 years ago, Rabbi Dovid Eliezri also began developing a much wider presence.

16:51 Speaker 1 I deal with the major Jewish organizations in American Judaism for Chabad, on behalf of Chabad, and I sit on the board of the Jewish Agency for Israel and deal with global Jewish affairs. My responsibilities evolved in a very unique way. Not that I looked for it, but it just, like, happened.

17:05 Speaker 2 Eliezri is a go-to person when Chabad help is needed around the globe.

17:10 Speaker 1 When the war hit in Ukraine, I called up some of the key figures involved with Chabad in Ukraine. I said, "I think I can get you some funding." I went to Ukraine twice on missions that were organized by the Jewish Federations of North America, where they brought the representatives of the Joint Distribution Committee, it's an agency of American Jewry to help Jews overseas. And I went there, and we were able to get a few million dollars in funding to help the shluchim in Ukraine and to make a very, very big difference. So Baruch Hashem, that's the type of thing that I like to do, to do things that we know are gonna be direct. They're gonna be transformational.

17:46 Speaker 2 For the last two decades, Eliezri has represented Chabad as a key point person for crisis management, helping bring together different Jewish organizations to help with hurricane relief in New Orleans, Florida, New York, and most recently in Jamaica. Eliezri says he finds that work rewarding, not just because of lives saved. He says that breaking down barriers, real or perceived, that divide various Jewish organizations and movements creates its own positive energy.

18:22 Speaker 1 So when you deal with bigger issues, and you, you try to keep your eyes on the mission, and trying to figure out how do you have outcomes that are gonna build bridges between Chabad and other organizations, you can find commonality. And I think that we have to understand also that we, there's other groups out there that sometimes we agree with and sometimes we don't agree with, but we can cooperate with them.

18:44 Speaker 2 So how do you build those bridges while still holding onto Chabad's mission and maybe even Halacha?

18:51 Speaker 1 You have to hold your values, but you have to do it with Ahavat Yisrael to the person you don't agree with, and that really is the challenge of it. And that means when somebody wants you to do something which is wrong, you have to say, "I'm sorry, I believe in Halacha, I believe in Jewish law," or, "The Rebbe instructed me this way, and I'm not going to change." So what happens is you can have an honest relationship with people because you have honest disagreements. Just have communication across the theological divide with Jews of all kinds of backgrounds.

19:20 Speaker 4 David is somebody that I trust and I call upon, and we work together, and we use each other as a sounding board.

19:27 Speaker 2 That's Rabbi Pesach Lerner. He's founder and chairman of Eretz HaKodesh, an organization that advocates in Israel for Orthodox Jewish communities around the diaspora. He first met Eliezer around 30 years ago when Lerner was the executive president of Young Israel. Their relationship began with the successful resolution of a conflict between two Orthodox Jewish communities in a southern state.

19:54 Speaker 4 And that relationship built. I've been to his house, he's been to my house, and we all very, very often will say, "Okay, take off your Chabad hat and my Young Israel hat, and what's good for the Jewish people?" And we've been able to work together for the betterment of Klal Yisrael with that understanding.

20:15 Speaker 2 Lerner and Eliezer both serve on the board of directors of the Jewish Agency for Israel. Eliezer is also chairman of the Chabad International Crisis Committee, president of the Rabbinical Council of Orange County, board member of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, chair of the Chabad Partners Conference, and member of the advisory committee of the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute.

20:39 Speaker 4 That resume, it's a consequence of his actions, right? He was put on these boards and put on these situations 'cause he did things. He's an activist, he's a doer, he cares, and that comes across when you meet him and when you act with him. And I guess the saying goes, "If you want something done, give it to a busy person." Well, David is that busy person.

21:05 Speaker 2 I ask Eliezer how with all his international work he still manages to have time for Yorba Lindans who need the presence of a full-time rabbi. He credits the work of his wife and his daughter, Naomi Blasofsky, and her husband, Rabbi Levi, who run the schools and other local programs and help him pull off what he calls a balancing act.

21:26 Speaker 1 They're sharing the responsibility of the shluchus, my daughter and my son-in-law. I'm able to focus on some broader issues which are interesting and which can have an impact in a much bigger way for the Jewish people.

21:40 Speaker 2 Still, he says, sometimes local and international worlds do collide. When that happens, the Yorba Linda community doesn't always know he has both feet in a different country.

21:51 Speaker 1 I'll never forget, I was gi- giving a speech in Barcelona, and the phone rang at 3:00 in the morning, and it was a local guy who didn't know I was in Barcelona. He thought I was in California, who had a little bit of a problem, and I talked to him, and I acted, I didn't tell him I'm in Barcelona because I didn't want him to know he woke me up at 2, 3:00 in the morning.

22:10 Speaker 2 All who know Eliezer agree that his energy seems boundless. Rabbi Pesach Lerner lives on the East Coast.

22:17 Speaker 4 He's three hours behind me, and we could be on the ph- texting back and forth at, uh, 8:00 my time, which is 5:00 his time, so, uh, he gets a head start on all of us.

22:29 Speaker 2 But most of Eliezer's Jewish community knows he travels a lot and advocates for the Jewish people in many different international fora. Again, Iris Goldman.

22:40 Speaker 3 Do we worry about him traveling too much, uh, as he is aging? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but should he slow down? No. No, I think what he does is good for the community, for Judaism, for Zionism, all of the above. It's a blessing.

22:59 Speaker 2 Eliezer uses what little extra time he has to write. It started with op-ed pieces for various publications, then he moved on to books. His first, The Secret of Chabad, was published in 2015. His second, a biography of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, was published in November 2025. I asked him why he chose the previous Rebbe as his subject.

23:25 Speaker 1 Much of what you see Chabad today is the vision of the previous Rebbe and the realization of that vision by the Rebbe. When much of Orthodox Judaism turned inward and put up walls to protect itself, he went out with pride and with courage and with deep faith and said, "No, we're not going to hide. We're gonna go forceful, and we're, we're gonna be," as I call the book, "Undaunted. Nothing's gonna slow us down." It's a whole different way of dealing with the future of the Jewish people.

24:00 Speaker 2 Eliezer has seen some of that future unfold, and he can see the generational impact of Chabad shluchus, including his own.

24:08 Speaker 1 I'm still in contact with some of those students from 45, 50 years ago. Today, everybody's had a Chabad story. "My brother-in-law was in a hospital, and a Chabad rabbi visited him." "My sister's cousin is at University of, I don't know, Outer Mongolia, and he goes to the Chabad House over there." "My cousin in Israel was traveling in India, and they spent time with Chabad." Everybody today has a story about how we touched them.

24:32 Speaker 2 Remember, Eliezer has one of those stories too, about how the Lubavitcher Rebbe made room right beside him for the eager but unsure Yeshiva bocher on his first trip to Crown Heights. Eliezer's accomplished a lot in the last five-plus decades, but he's not satisfied.

24:53 Speaker 1 Well, first thing, we want Mashiach to come because we're all tired, and we've been doing this a lot, a lot of years. I think the most important thing is we can't be satisfied with our achievements, so I think we need to do even more. We have to be there for people. That's our ultimate responsibility. The purpose of the institution is to be there to care for them, and that, I think, is really the ultimate mission of a shliach.

25:21 Speaker 2 I'm Gary Wolik. 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.