Tech professional Yossie Strickman wants parents to know what their teens are up against

Photos: Naftoli Goldgrab

My meeting with Yossie Strickman begins with a bear hug. No, Yossie is not a long-lost buddy; this is our first time meeting in person. He’s just that kind of guy — warm, open, generous. He releases his hold and welcomes me into his Passaic, New Jersey home early one short Erev Shabbos morning. I might be the interviewer but he gets the first question. “You want cholent?” I don’t actually, but how can you turn down an offer like that?

“Sholom, let’s get some cholent going. Take out the mug, the huge one,” he tells his 14-year-old son. The mug appears, steaming hot and truly huge. Involuntarily, a caption for the article, a really dumb cliché, flits through my mind, something like “the warmth of the cholent, a reflection of the warmth of the Strickman home.” I try to banish the thought because that’s horrible literature, but it keeps coming back — probably because it’s true: The Strickmans are such incredibly warm people. And warmth, I will soon learn, is the key to Yossie’s success. It’s how he wins where others have declared failure, it’s how he infuses hope where others have long despaired.

A tech whiz, Yossie worked as manager at TAG’s Lakewood division, installing filters on smartphones and personal computers, setting up safe technology protocols, and providing ongoing oversight to that end. Today, with his sixth sense for bochurim in crisis, he heads Project Trust, a program of support facilitated between kids, parents, and schools to prevent tech users from falling into the very real and present dangers of technology — be it cyber bullying, exposure to improper or decadent sites,  or a general unhealthy or obsessive relationship with the Internet.

Yossie is a techie, but he’s also a self-styled mechanech, determined to both educate and spread as much love as his enormous heart can muster. But that heart carries a lot more than love. It also carries the burden of so much pain and suffering — the tragedies that ensue from misuse of technology, the horror, the anger, the confusion. And it’s Yossie’s mission — with his razor sharp perception of today’s teens — to try to put the pieces back together.