ICYMI: Rabbi David Eliach, the Yeshivah of Flatbush High School, and the Death of the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish Community
David Shasha
Rabbi David Eliach, the Yeshivah of Flatbush High School, and the Death of the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish Community
To be perfectly honest, when I learned of the passing of Rabbi Eliach, I was not intending to say anything about it.
Until I read the following tribute by SAR Rabbi Binyamin Krauss in The Times of Israel:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/remembering-rabbi-dr-david-eliach-zl/
The complete article follows this note.
Veteran SHU readers will recall my effusive tribute to Eliach’s wife Yaffa back in 2016:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jRpOayymYBKLaiCp_QuCxlcOiDjqR9B14IoS1oB4XDY/edit
In that tribute I enthusiastically noted her admirable concern for the Eastern European Jewish tradition, and the laudable commitment of the YOFHS in enabling her work.
But when I read the Krauss tribute to her husband it was impossible for me to remain silent in the face of the larger problem of YOFHS Ashkenazi racism and White Jewish Supremacy.
Over the years, I have presented the Flatbush problem and its relation to the Continuing Death of the Sephardim:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/UZ9tN7Z2TAY/m/8pk5tGyNP4sJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/jJ47QpSjZ4w/m/qfwHMoTm6MEJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/FIS0m_ZMxE4/m/WNFCgC4z0qgJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/A0jS1MK9gMM/m/VbfTL1EH3qYJ
In 2015 the school dedicated its annual Book Day to a massive program on the Holocaust, led by a reading of Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic novel Maus:
Sifting through the presenters and sessions we find the head of YU’s putative Sephardic Studies program, Rabbi Moshe Tessone, presenting the Arab Jewish Refugee David Project HASBARAH scam:
https://www.jimena.org/resources/forgotten-refugees/
We will naturally recall a very young Bari Weiss’ participation in The David Project and where that has led us:
The 2015 Book Day was designed to deal with the Holocaust, and it had no noticeable Sephardic content. But scattered throughout the program are a number of SY community members and SY teachers in the school; all of whom have committed themselves to the YOFHS mission, and its deplorable Anti-Sephardi cultural bias.
The school’s committee recently invited Scourge of the Sephardim Rabbi Meir Soloveichik to deliver a ZOOM class to mark the installation of its new Board of Trustees:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E_IlYH_2eGWV6KlgtvMBvSxeNZvVNR8n/view?ths=true
It is unclear whether they are familiar with his “distinguished” oeuvre:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_fs8wonYLfhONdKPKTgFt_aoi6GPoJ2uhDFcWOfKuTk/edit
And his close connection to perhaps the most prominent Anti-Maimonidean of our time, the late Michael Wyschogrod:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vkNZusv09KazmHUp3BNcBGIe9TEZEMcKsZXfbBFMm4Q/edit
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ytYVvsu-He-LACFKWcSsYGguR5uX33u9/view?ths=true
Or maybe they are!
The Tikvah connection can be also seen in the group’s student alumni list, which links the SY community and YOFHS to the notorious Neo-Con Straussians:
https://tikvahfund.org/hs/tsp2021/alumni/
Of course, the larger YOFHS context is that of YU and the Washington Heights Anti-Sephardi racism that I discussed in my “Idiot Sephardim” article:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fUx-B5XHPIrr7b_7xS4ZpmiEmvo_qBy0pKqOAtmJ5WI/edit?usp=sharing
Disdain for Sephardic history and culture permeates YOFHS, as it has for many years been confirming the thesis of Haym Soloveitchik, who offensively claimed that the boorish Sephardim had no relationship to Modernity:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NBCYyz07l0iTs34hfKZuCZ9croAiB8Mb-JK4Gx9BOFE/edit
This false and repugnant thesis was blithely supported by Rabbi Joseph Dweck, now in London, but still a part of the Brooklyn SY community during his summer vacations:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d9D5dXU_9WgFa2Chna1m_byzPUe1WaW3VbR1Qk_zQWs/edit
No figure in the YOFHS hierarchy represents this Ashkenazi Supremacy more than Dr. Joel B. Wolowelsky, close friend of Rabbi Marc Angel:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/XW1C3sHijbA/m/6ZBHvPgjAQAJ
The idea is to elevate Ashkenazim, as Sephardim continue to be degraded and erased from the Jewish cultural map.
This is the history of YOF from the time it was founded by Joel Braverman in 1927 as a flagship Jewish Day School in the Religious Zionist tradition:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UsVG9-Jcau1JEg-tofJsDVm8tBm0UaH5/view?ths=true
A critical factor in the current configuration of the YOF student body is the Isaac Shalom factor.
Shalom’s toxic leadership of the Brooklyn SY community alienated many people, and led them to YOF as an alternative to his far less prestigious Magen David Yeshivah.
Daniel Harari has discussed the repugnant Shalom in the context of the Kassin family, more about which later in this article:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Sa4YGX4v5w3BRWFS6WfGVwICemodsyPVfmu2gt6_IJA/edit
Critical to Shalom’s dismantling of the Sephardic heritage was his dismissal of Hakham Matloub Abadi; the most important rabbi in the immigrant community:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fO_WyLY2gnqUOvbpDQ7KzsS82UOwW35j-ACCPi7sBDQ/edit
In this sense it is quite interesting to note that immediately upon his passing, the Sephardic Community Alliance, a loyal exponent of the Self-Hating Modern Orthodox Shalom SYs, posted a very heartfelt tribute to Eliach:
https://www.facebook.com/345586748829891/photos/a.1573001312755089/4207144432674084/
This was to be expected, as the SCA is firmly committed to eliminating the classical Sephardic heritage and our literary-intellectual traditions.
It is worthwhile to recall that the SCA hosted a program with noted Anti-Maimonidean Moshe Halbertal, which reflected its Anti-Sephardi bias:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb3stzud3ik
If you watch the video, you will see the aforementioned Rabbi Joseph Dweck on the panel:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hUyDltsH4cb5OJ1lcKgWjZkZfpwWl14B9qUcAV8injY/edit
Indeed, as a I recounted in that article, Dweck has partnered with Halbertal in classic SCA fashion to bolster the Anti-Maimonidean nature of his Habura project:
The YOFHS process has been deeply tied to the incestuous Jewish institutional world and the way in which it doles out rewards and largesse.
We can see this in the case of SY Sally Grazi-Shatzkes, a proud member of Wolowelsky’s “Mixed Marriage” contingent, where I assume rice would be prohibited at Passover, who interviewed Eliach in 2019:
Both Eliach and Grazi-Shatzkes were winners of the prestigious Covenant Award for Jewish educators:
https://covenantfn.org/award-person/david-eliach/
https://covenantfn.org/award-person/sally-grazi-shatzkes/
The Covenant Foundation website posted the following biography of Eliach, which is quite illuminating from a number of vantage points:
David Eliach was born in Jerusalem on September 13, 1922, to a Chassidic family that had lived in Jerusalem for six generations. He was sent to a cheder until the age of eleven, when his father, in an unusual move, transferred him to a public school (beit seier amami) where he continued to study in a secular environment through high school. As a young man he was a member of the Haganah and also one of the seven founders of the Yeshivot Bnei Akiva. The Bnei Akiva schools incorporated an entirely new concept in Jewish religious education: a “yeshiva high school” where the synthesis of high-level Torah and secular studies could be achieved. After completing his college education, Rabbi Eliach studied at Teachers’ College in Jerusalem and was ordained at the Rabbinical College of the Hevron Yeshiva. In the 1940’s he began teaching at Meshek Yeladim Moza, an institution for child survivors of the Holocaust, and after two years he became its director. In 1949 he became principal of Kfar Batya, where he established a comprehensive high school for a village of 400 child survivors.
It provides an excellent entry point into the YOFHS world, and the reason that Eliach is so beloved in the Modern Orthodox community.
It is indeed quite ironic that one of the bastions of Religious Zionism, as was the case with many of the teachers he hired for YOFHS, was what Israelis contemptuously call a YORED, one who leaves Israel to live in the Diaspora:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerida
Eliach’s background is fascinating, as he made the transition from the Hasidic tradition into the Israeli military and the Bnei Akiva school system:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnei_Akiva
As the Krauss TOI article states:
Once, when visiting my class, he observed that, while I was teaching in Hebrew, I allowed a student to ask questions in English. He called a meeting of all faculty to immediately address this observation, which, thankfully, he found in many of the classes he visited that day. He reminded us that Ivrit b’Ivrit was both a pillar of the values of the school, as well as a contractual obligation on the part of the teachers, and implored us to stay the course. He was sure that the long-term benefits of Hebrew proficiency far outweighed the short term discomfort of teachers and students. Generations of Modern Orthodox adults credit this “obsession” with Ivrit for their success in Jewish learning.
What Krauss does not note here is the shift, noticeable in Sephardic circles, from the classical study of Hebrew based in grammar, to the modern study of Hebrew as a Western language in morphology and syntax:
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/eliezer-ben-yehuda/
Like Eliach, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda came out of the Hasidic tradition and became a proud proponent of the Hegelian vision of Jewish Nationalism:
Ben-Yehuda found further inspiration in European nationalist movements. In the 19th century, Italy and Greece — both countries with ties to ancient lands and languages — became independent nations. In 1877, the year of Ben-Yehuda’s graduation from high school, the Russo-Turkish war began and brought prominence to the Bulgarian national movement that sought independence from the Ottomans.
***
In Jerusalem, the secular Ben-Yehuda tried to use Hebrew to attract religious Jews to the nationalist cause. He and his wife wore religious garb — he grew out his beard and payot (sidelocks), and his wife wore a wig — trying to pass as observant. But the ultra-Orthodox Jews living in Jerusalem, for whom Hebrew was used only for holy purposes such as studying Torah, saw through Ben-Yehuda’s guise. Sensing his secular-nationalist intentions, they rejected him and his language. They went so far as to declare a herem, excommunicating Ben-Yehuda.
Unlike Hakham Matloub Abadi, the founder of the Magen David Talmud Torah (Kitab) who was sent packing by Isaac Shalom, Eliach’s vision of Hebrew was not rooted in the classical Sephardic grammatical tradition; hence, leading to a very weak understanding and promulgation of the language among students.
The following Wikipedia entry on Jonah ibn Jannah, dean of the Sephardic grammarians, provides a sense of the richness of the linguistic science in our tradition and the importance it has taken over the centuries. Note well the close ties between Hebrew and Arabic in the standard Andalusian manner:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_ibn_Janah
The students in Hakham Matloub’s Kitab were trained in this linguistic tradition, but, of course, because of Shalom they were unable to advance beyond the elementary grades. Their children and grandchildren did not receive even this rudimentary education in the Hebrew language, and continue to display the negative effects of this lack.
Indeed, in my own teaching – and in my own personal experience as a YOFHS graduate – I can attest to the extremely poor command of Hebrew, particularly in terms of reading comprehension of classical Jewish texts and contemporary academic scholarship, among its graduates.
Tellingly, both Krauss and Grazi-Shatzkes provide a similar Mr. Rogers-style take on Eliach’s pedagogy.
Krauss:
He taught the importance of teaching each child according to their way. His approach to education went beyond just teaching text to students; he taught us that our responsibility as educators is to also teach our students how to become better people and that in order to effectively reach our students, we must find a way to connect with them. Rabbi Eliach believed that Jewish education lived beyond the classroom, and introduced chesed projects as a requirement for graduation, the concept of shabbatonim, and the post-high school “gap” year in Israel. He was an innovator who stimulated not only Jewish education, but the Jewish world, yet the most modest man.
Grazi-Shatkes:
“Zion was taking pictures of us while we were talking,” Grazi-Shatzkes explained. “We were learning a piece of Torah together, and we were also talking about my son, who has special needs. Rabbi Eliach was talking about the importance of treating each child according to their way. It had been a really hard day for me, personally, and he probably didn’t realize what an impact our conversation had.”
“To me, the most important approach in education is to be a human being, a nice person,” Rabbi Eliach shared. “You cannot only teach text to your students; you have to also teach them how to become a better person. That is the main goal of education.”
Krauss also points out the importance of the Gap Year in Israel to the Eliach system, as well as to the Shabbaton concept. I would add to those innovations the famous YOFHS Rosh Hodesh program, replete with celebratory Ashkenazi Zionist dancing, Riqqudim; a mandatory program for every student which was held in the gym.
Such ideas provided a very rigid sense of Jewish identity which had absolutely no room for the classical Sephardic heritage, but which provided the existential link to Israel and Zionism as a product of Ashkenazi culture.
My own experience in the school led to a clash with the head of the Jewish Philosophy department Yehuda Kronman, who flunked me in my Senior year; denying me my Hebrew Studies diploma.
Though I had no idea about the Sephardic heritage at the time, I suppose I intuitively sensed there was something wrong with his program.
My article “Modern Jewish Philosophy as White Jewish Supremacy” was written very much with Kronman and his deep-seated racism in mind:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mjPboUYJIFK3e5HeU0xUzvMcdlpcLxoQdRwqFI3guuw/edit
I was also informed on good authority that the head of the Jewish History department, the aptly-named Mr. Wyzkowsky, claimed that he did not teach Sephardic History because Sephardim “had no history”!
Given how far I’ve come since then it is all cruelly ironic – and a sign of how screwed up the YOFHS pedagogy under Eliach really was.
It is thus interesting to note that the SCA’s timely tribute to Eliach was matched by its complete avoidance of any mention of my teacher Rabbi Jose Faur when he passed:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T5hwSK5C4N8Vd50UYMptCy1jmk5LSyJbIUEh-Lq6_s8/edit
David Eliach presented both a teaching staff and curriculum that insisted on Ashkenazi Supremacy, as it dutifully demanded a rigid adherence to Religious Zionist values at the expense of Maimonidean Humanism.
As the SY student body of the school increased over the years, Eliach himself was stymied by the complications of Sephardic Self-Hatred; an identity-formation that I do not think he really recognized.
I was struck by the way in which Krauss marked Eliach’s career as an educator:
As a young semicha student at RIETS, I registered at the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education & Administration as part of my semicha (ordination) requirements. The first class I took was the famous class taught by Rabbi Eliach. There, each week, a different student would present a model lesson and it was broken down, methodically, respectfully, but firmly, by Rabbi Eliach.
Eliach sought to present the Washington Heights system in a lucid and vigorous manner, emphasizing the interests and capabilities of each individual student.
But as was the case with his Israeli YORDIM teachers and the Ashkenazi-centric rigidity of the curriculum, YOFHS presented many internal contradictions when it came to openness and liberalism in education.
In this sense it is important to note that, unlike MDY and many other Orthodox yeshivas, Flatbush made it a practice to hire only Jewish teachers – even in Secular subjects.
Also critical to the Eliach legacy was the hard line that was often taken with SY parents who were dealing with the often-thorny matter of the school’s disciplinary policies as it applied to their often spoiled, pampered, and recalcitrant children.
I have heard many stories about parents being bullied into making additional financial donations to the school beyond tuition, in order to save their children from disciplinary action, or even expulsion.
The SY-YOF union was a prophetic mismatch, as the SY community, in most cases unbeknownst to itself, was going through an extremely complex and often painful transition out of an older tradition of Sephardic Jewish Humanism into the far more contentious and fraught ideologically-dogmatic world of Washington Heights Da’as Torah along the lines of Joseph B. Soloveitchik and the internal battles waged in the dysfunctional Ashkenazi tradition.
I addressed these complications in my article “A Broken Frame: Sephardi Occlusion and the Repairing of Jewish Dysfunction”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZZLhopNWNnqMb0GW2OQGcripP8SnZojsmxamctBLDzU/edit
The article was originally submitted to the aforementioned Self-Hater Marc Angel who, in the YOF spirit, firmly rejected it.
It was eventually published by Tikkun magazine – not a Washington Heights favorite:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TjFku-0Z8bD2BD4QuDxv6OWK5Lubd8Uj/view?ths=true
It was not until I left YOFHS, despondent and disillusioned about myself and my Jewish identity, that I came to study the Sephardic heritage, ridding myself of the many psychological blocks and pathologies that had been implanted in me by Eliach’s benighted pedagogical vision.
Though it is not something I usually do, I think it would be helpful to recount my own personal YOFHS story and how it fits into the argument I am making here.
I graduated at the top of my Magen David Yeshivah class, was one of the few students who passed what was then the YOFHS entrance exam – now given over the BJE, and was placed in one of the two Honor classes, the only SY student to do so.
But I was unable to acclimate to the rigid system the school presented, largely based on a slavish “teach to the test” mentality which was rife with cheating and rule-cutting, particularly the stealing of exams; anything to get that very important grade and build your GPA.
This can well be seen as a precursor to what has become the bane of our educational system – the lack of ample intellectual skills and the mindless embrace of empty facts to be regurgitated on exam papers.
I have discussed the matter more generally in my article on Diane Ravitch:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v5nq6euk-KpK4V_mudVJjg_V21rm5VALNRL_eYtcKCQ/edit
Within the Sephardic tradition such a rigidly circumscribed pedagogy remains antithetical to the value of content and book-learning.
In my Freshman English class, I actually read the book assigned and had difficulty on the test, while my fellow classmates – most were YOF elementary school graduates already well-versed in the corrupt system – were reading the “Monarch Notes”; a review book which summarized plot and theme into a convenient outline that provided all the “necessary” facts on the novel, as far as the test was concerned.
More than this, I discovered the existence of AMSCO review books that had more precise factual information that condensed the more verbose material in our textbooks. YOFHS teachers would often use the AMSCO books to prepare their exams.
The idea was to cut corners and avoid the difficult work of learning and thinking, which leads to ideological conformity and groupthink of a very dangerous sort; reinforced by the innovations Eliach set out in the area of Ashkenazi Zionist culture.
Indeed, if I could say anything about my YOFHS experience, it would be the cognitive dissonance that I felt in dealing with my teachers and their maliciously mercenary methods.
Although I continue to suffer as a thinking intellectual in a world of frauds and cheats – something that YOFHS has helped its students acclimate to – my pedagogical values remain consistent with a cosmopolitan Sephardic heritage that I had to discover by going outside the system, and which has served to personally stigmatize me as a marginal misfit in the White Jewish Supremacy world.
During my very difficult and painful first year in the school, I was unable to maintain my place in the Honor class, and was eventually demoted into the “dumb” SY class, as it was known back then.
If Eliach was as gifted an educator as his supporters are making out, perhaps he would have worked with a very frightened student to keep him in his class. Looking back at this formative period in my life, I could not think of a single moment when he tried to advise me as a true professional would. Such a thing was not part of the Flatbush method with SYs, notwithstanding my original promise as I entered the school.
I recall Eliach as a very nice man, who I now understand as being overmatched by the system he had created. His teachers, unlike him, were mean and bullying, as they presented rigid, identikit lesson plans in the most abusive manner.
It was Joel Wolowelsky who most precisely enforced this rigid ideological mentality, as he brought to students the harsh dogmatics of a system where critical thinking was frowned upon and where base conformity was required.
Those who accepted the terms of the arrangement were highly valued, but those – like me – who rejected it found themselves under water and out of the running when it came to a future in advanced education and the professions.
However nice a man he was, Eliach presided over the corrupt system which he had a critical hand in designing and implementing. I suppose that he really meant well, given his strict ideological predilections. But that can never change the reality of his debased creation.
It was only after I began to study with Rabbi Faur that I became aware of the richness of the Sephardic heritage, and better understood the racist process that was erasing it.
Ironically, it was when I finally began to study Judaism in a serious manner – something not afforded me when I was a YOFHS student – that I was actually able to understand and appreciate the work of Yaffa Eliach in restoring and promoting the value of the Eastern European Jewish heritage, as I wrote in my tribute to her:
She not only broke new ground in the emerging field of academic Holocaust Studies, but worked diligently on the creation of the now-famous museum in Washington, DC which prominently features the “Wall of Life”; a towering mosaic of photographs taken from her private collection.
Her seminal work brought together Jewish identity concerns with an impassioned concern for preserving the lost culture of the Eastern European Jewish tradition.
I have likened her scholarship to that of the great researcher S.D. Goitein, who was responsible for unearthing the texts of the Cairo Geniza and reconstructing the world of Medieval Judaism in the Muslim world.
A towering figure in Judaic Studies and contemporary Jewish life, Eliach was truly dedicated to Ashkenazi Jewish history and its preservation in a way that can act as a positive model for Sephardim who seem to have lost their connection to their own past.
It was in this way that I was able to exorcise the YOFHS ghosts and come to better understand the complexities of the Jewish past, in a way that is alien to my fellow YOFHS graduates, and to those who have embraced its Sephardi-hating ways.
When we look at the SY community, perhaps the most important exponent of the YOFHS ethos was the late Rabbi Ezra Labaton, whose career was a full-on assault against the Sephardic heritage in its devotion to Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and the Washington Heights mafia:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IcdFEia2TvNUoa3OhzSisj1XdjZru3wamrrysvJ9Cxw/edit
In Labaton we see the seeds planted of contempt for the classical Sephardic heritage in the spurious belief that it is inferior to that of the Ashkenazim, and which needs to be measured according to European standards against Arab Civilization.
These seeds eventually came to fruition, as the SY community completely turned its back on the Sephardic heritage, displacing the ethos of the past with the ways of Ashkenaz.
It is thus ironic to note that the pernicious Flatbush system has marked what must now be considered a failed Modern Orthodoxy; gradually giving way to the Haredi revolution marked in the current Pew Research Report on Jewish Americans.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aumJU1VzaWupahVJvRlpp6iICo48MiETuFDFw0qtUfQ/edit
In the Brooklyn SY community this can clearly be seen in the attachment of the aforementioned Kassin family to Mirrer Yeshivah and the Rabbinical Alliance of America:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Zp7U_fGi7_Q/m/TE2ZUjdXAgAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/N9azX1SKhFk/m/AHxlKySUAgAJ
And in the ongoing Artscroll-ization of the community under the aegis of figures like Rabbi David Sutton:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C7oM2lxCJliAFbpL4CHqqnJK7HZAao9heo6XoBrI9n8/edit
And his ally Rabbi Meyer Yedid:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/EQOXshZLBtw/m/bQ4boM-ECwAJ
And let us not forget the massive impact of Rabbi Eli Mansour and his Lakewood-Kotler values:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dqpMoLvNtU4j6rYTVyCJr6JcDuRDNwhSGzcDxbUvjyk/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fsGjRCuGUSYVCsl8XdXxaSHEKbt_f0uTS_ytmepWCwc/edit
The YOFHS system and its symbiotic relationship to the development of Zionism and Jewish religiosity, now completely turned into a debased messianism and ethno-cultural racism, has become a sign of a Judaism whose time has passed, and whose pedagogy has been replaced by a militant Haredi world led by the very Hasidism that Eliach turned his back on.
For this reason, I have been truly surprised to see the many tributes to Rabbi Eliach since he passed.
When we finally consider the ultimate significance of YOFHS, it is important to see how it has sought to negatively impact a Sephardic tradition which it sees as utterly negligible, and which it seeks to erase in the most emphatic manner possible.
The nefarious process has served to turn young Sephardim against their own cultural inheritance, making them amenable to Ashkenazi Jewish hegemony and antagonistic to the values of their illustrious progenitors.
Such Self-Hatred is profoundly unnatural, creating a Sephardic community that is not only ignorant in the most basic intellectual and cultural sense(s), but which has generated a form of moral corruption that now characterizes the members of that community and marks them as deficient in the most rudimentary human values.
And at the same time, they have lost the opportunity to ensure the continuity of their traditional culture and its religious value system, allowing it to be erased by hostile forces antithetical to those traditional values.
Such a Sephardic community is profoundly alienated from itself, and has lost its way in the world, as it watches others control a Judaism that has forgotten the best of what it was and is, as we have learned from the Pew Research Report, destroying its chance for a vibrant future.
David Shasha
From SHU 1024, November 10, 2021
Rabbi David Eliach Transformed American Jewish Education
By: Binyamin Krauss
Late last night (Thursday, September 30), I received word of the passing of Rabbi Dr. David Eliach z”l, a pioneer in Jewish education. As an educator and principal, Rabbi Eliach left his mark on me personally and I’d like to share some thoughts about his influence on generations of teachers and school leaders, and the day school enterprise in general.
Rabbi Eliach understood that Jewish education is a serious enterprise, and brought professionalism and respect to the field. He taught so many of us how to teach, and modeled for us how to lead. His standard of excellence and commitment to Jewish education reached so many and he had a significant impact on me.
As a young semicha student at RIETS, I registered at the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education & Administration as part of my semicha (ordination) requirements. The first class I took was the famous class taught by Rabbi Eliach. There, each week, a different student would present a model lesson and it was broken down, methodically, respectfully, but firmly, by Rabbi Eliach.
He taught us that every lesson needed a “motivatzia,” or a “hook” to engage the students. Every lesson. Every day. Because if a student is not engaged in the subject being taught, s/he will never internalize the content and will not develop the skills we as educators were entrusted to impart.
After completing semicha, I applied for my first teaching position at the Yeshivah of Flatbush, where Rabbi Eliach served as principal for decades. I was honored to be offered a position and to be encouraged by him to accept it. Rabbi Eliach would begin his day by walking the hallways and peeking into classes for 1-2 minutes.
Once, when visiting my class, he observed that, while I was teaching in Hebrew, I allowed a student to ask questions in English. He called a meeting of all faculty to immediately address this observation, which, thankfully, he found in many of the classes he visited that day. He reminded us that Ivrit b’Ivrit was both a pillar of the values of the school, as well as a contractual obligation on the part of the teachers, and implored us to stay the course. He was sure that the long-term benefits of Hebrew proficiency far outweighed the short term discomfort of teachers and students. Generations of Modern Orthodox adults credit this “obsession” with Ivrit for their success in Jewish learning.
After his retirement from the principalship in the late ’90s, Rabbi Eliach continued to mentor teachers with the same vigor and passion as always. I understand that this practice continued for many years, and, until very recently, he continued to make the trek to Brooklyn multiple times a week to do what he did best, and what he loved.
Rabbi Eliach’s work ethic was unparalleled. He began his career as a Judaic Studies teacher and ultimately became the principal of Yeshivah of Flatbush, an exemplary educator, mentor, beloved by all those who were fortunate to learn from him. He was infinitely patient, while maintaining a true standard of excellence and never tolerating mediocrity or complacency. He fought for the values that he believed in, but never made himself the center of attention.
Rabbi Eliach brought his love of Zion to the shores of New York, celebrated a love of Israel, the importance of Jewish identity, and promoted the value of the Ivrit b’Ivrit teaching model rooted in his true love for the Hebrew language. He taught the importance of teaching each child according to their way. His approach to education went beyond just teaching text to students; he taught us that our responsibility as educators is to also teach our students how to become better people and that in order to effectively reach our students, we must find a way to connect with them. Rabbi Eliach believed that Jewish education lived beyond the classroom, and introduced chesed projects as a requirement for graduation, the concept of shabbatonim, and the post-high school “gap” year in Israel. He was an innovator who stimulated not only Jewish education, but the Jewish world, yet the most modest man.
I know that my experience as a student in Azrieli, and as a teacher at the Yeshivah of Flatbush for four years, was deeply enriched and influenced by Rabbi Eliach. It is hard to quantify that experience and the impact Rabbi Eliach had on others together with his beloved wife Yaffa z”l. Imagine how many students have benefited from his wisdom and counsel over the span of 60 years. And how many thousands of students and teachers have been impacted by the presence of one person. I feel privileged to continue to pass on the mesorah, the tradition, as at SAR High School, where I now serve as principal, we now educate some of Rabbi Eliach’s great-grandchildren and strive to continue his legacy.
Yehi Zichro Baruch.
Rabbi Binyamin Krauss is Principal of SAR Academy, a Modern Orthodox co-educational day school in the Bronx, NY. SAR Academy is dedicated to the belief that every child possesses a divine spark, has unique worth as an individual and should be encouraged to achieve according to his or her ability. Our warm environment promotes confidence, creativity and enthusiasm for learning. In our approach to academics, we nurture students to develop intellectual curiosity, critical thinking skills and a lifelong love of both Torah and Secular studies.
From The Times of Israel, October 1, 2021