Rabbi Joseph Freilich lived outreach before kiruv was a livelihood

Photos: David Chesner, Family archives

Back in the 1970s, before “kiruv” was a job with a salary, Rabbi Joseph Freilich a”h gave up his profession as a pharmacist in order to teach the hundreds of secular Jewish students who passed through his portals. Ever charming yet pushy when it came to getting people in the door, he knew that once they tasted Torah, they’d be hooked. Memories of the rabbi who never gave up

Rabbi Joseph Freilich a”h had two great loves: learning Torah and teaching it. Beginning in the 1970s, he was often the first point of contact to a Torah life for thousands of young men and women in London. Charming and unfazed by rejection, he would approach assimilated Jewish students and professionals and encourage them to try out a little Jewish learning, promising that they would know Hebrew after his 12-session crash course and have basic Gemara skills after his beginner’s class. What was the secret of this special rebbi who chose kiruv as a full-time job long before international organizations offered the security of paid employment in the field?

Chaim (Christopher) Phillips, who was an editor at The New York Times for 23 years, is one person who was transformed after taking up the offer of this one-man kiruv institution. Manhattan-born Chaim was 32 when he met Rabbi Freilich in 1983, having arrived in London after spending the last 14 years between Los Angeles, Taiwan, Hong Kong, India and a few other places. He’d arrived in England for his dream job as an editor at The Telegraph Sunday Magazine.

“But today I know that the real reason I came to London was to meet Rabbi Freilich and to start on a proper Jewish education — something I had always wanted but never had,” he says, remembering the man who changed his life ten years after Rabbi Freilich passed away on 29 Teves, 5772 (January 2012).

Chaim discovered that there was a comprehensive Jewish library at the University of London’s Hillel House, and one evening after work, he recalls, he was pawing his way through the shelves “when this very distinguished-looking man walked in and set out his papers at the end of the long table, followed by a flock of students of various ages. Rabbi Freilich’s eagle eye saw that here was fruit ripe for the picking, and the next thing I knew I was sitting next to him at that library table. During that hour or two, I knew instinctively that I had reached a pivotal moment in my life — that a big change was about to happen.”

Within nine months Chaim had left that “dream job” on Fleet Street to learn full-time, in Jerusalem’s Ohr Somayach.

“Rabbi Freilich,” he says, “was that rare combination of warmth and focus. He was determined, but it wasn’t the determination of a locomotive — you felt velocity, but never a fire hose. If he asked you to do something, you knew in your bones you were going to end up doing it.”

(Chaim had an instinct that Rabbi Freilich’s magnetic, compelling shiurim should be captured for posterity, so during those nine months, he taped the classes, which are still available at the  Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Library in New Haven, Connecticut.)

Alon Goren was an Israeli law school graduate and son of a prestigious judge, on his way to earn a doctorate at Harvard, when he made a stopover in London and had an encounter with the broad-minded rabbi who would change the trajectory of his life.

The first time Rabbi Joe Freilich and Alon bumped into each other, Rabbi Freilich sat with him until 2 a.m., discussing and debating anything the young Israeli thought of. His scholarship, his curiosity, his charm and sense of humor won the day for the secular intellectual. Alon put Harvard on hold and remained in London to learn Torah. Forty years later, Alon — today a religious lawyer — says that “not a day goes by that I don’t think of Rabbi Freilich.”