Rav Goldstein now in his 80s and confined to a wheelchair still gives a daily iyun shiur in the yeshivah for students who have been with him for decades as well as to young men who recently joined the ranks. And despite a slew of health problems that make talking difficult his eyes still burn with that youthful bren his mind is sharp as a tack and although his son Reb Yitzchak manages the yeshivah today and his other sons serve as maggidei shiur he’s still clearly the leader of the yeshivah community he created nearly half a century ago.

Believe in Love

Think Diaspora Yeshiva and your mind probably conjures up those traditional Saturday night Melaveh Malkah concerts by King David’s Tomb or long-haired backpackers searching for spirituality. But the yeshivah is also a serious learning place which has produced a slew of talmidei chachamim, many of them grandfathers today. How has Rav Goldstein kept the momentum going all these years without burning out?

“Come, let me explain it to you,” he says as he lifts his hands to my head as if blessing me and kisses me on the forehead as I bend down to his wheelchair. “It’s one word: love.”

The answer was a little surprising, but then again, Rav Goldstein loves to provoke surprised reactions. “Look, every Jew wants to be part of Am Yisrael, even if most Jews today aren’t even aware that that’s what they want. But if they manage to get to us, then our job is to open the door for them. As soon as the door is opened wide in welcome, they’ll come in. That’s really what I did all these years. I opened the doors of my heart.”

Those doors opened from the time Mordechai Goldstein was a young boy growing up in the Bronx.

His own father, Moshe Goldstein, was a bit of an anomaly himself — American born, yet leading a Torah-observant lifestyle at the beginning of the the 20th century albeit without any formal Jewish education. He was a Jewish community leader, involved with kashrus and other communal issues, and as a graduate of MIT, had a high-ranking position with New York City’s Department of Health. So determined was he to give his own son a Jewish education that he sent Mordechai from the Bronx to a Manhattan yeshivah beginning in first grade — a round trip of several hours in those days.

When he was just a teenager, young Mordechai was dedicated to helping Jews in Eretz Yisrael fend off the British. From the family’s Bronx basement, he assembled and packed arms for shipment to Palestine, together with groups of boys from various yeshivos. When the state was created, though, Rav Mordechai faced a huge disappointment: He’d imagined a Jewish state built on Torah and spirituality, but when he realized that wasn’t the reality, he switched his focus to chinuch — to do the work from the inside outward.

As a child who received the Jewish education his father never had, Mordechai — who was considered the “rabbi” of the family from the time he was bar mitzvah — didn’t want that for the next generation. Jewish education was his focus, and one of his first targets was his own father and a group of his father’s well-heeled yet nonreligious friends. And those encounters revealed the real secret of his future success — how Torah learning can touch even the most closed hearts.

“I wanted my father to taste the world of Torah with me,” Rav Goldstein, a talmid and musmach of Chofetz Chaim in Queens, remembers. “He never went to a yeshivah — he was a graduate of MIT at a time when Jews weren’t even allowed in. He was a true yerei Shamayim, but he didn’t have a real connection to Torah. So I decided to gather a few of his friends together with him and learn Gemara with them.” Mordechai Goldstein taught these Jewishly enthusiastic but religiously distant men the first page of Bava Metzia. After just two weeks, one of them wanted to buy a pair of tefillin.

“That’s when I learned the secret,” Rav Goldstein says. “Torah learning — skipping all those arguments about ‘truth’ and other philosophical issues — can transform the Jewish People.”

In 1970, a few years after Rav Goldstein had been successfully using this approach to inspire young men who found themselves at Diaspora Yeshiva, he ran into Rabbi Avraham Ravitz z”l (later to become an MK leading the Degel HaTorah party), a sought-after educator who understood the language of the Tel Aviv street. Rabbi Ravitz, an acquaintance of Rav Goldstein whose wives had become friends as fellow students at Stern College back in the ’50s, was considering opening an Israeli department for baalei teshuvah in Ohr Somayach’s yeshivah and wanted some advice and guidance.

“I told him the story about my father and his friends,” Rav Goldstein recalls the conversation that was to become a game-changer on the Israeli kiruv scene. “I said there are two things that can change the Jewish People and make them submit to Hashem’s Will and Wisdom: the taste of Shabbos, and the taste of Torah. Instead of taking new students and arguing with them about the existence of G-d, just take them and learn some Torah with them.

“That was over 40 years ago, but even today, fellows come here with very little connection to Judaism. But if we accept them as they are and open a Gemara with them even as their ponytails brush the page, it opens their hearts. I don’t ask them to daven, only that they stand in front of the Ribbono shel Olam and listen. They don’t need to say anything, only to listen.”

Call of the Mountain

People associate the early days of Diaspora Yeshiva with the reclamation of Jerusalem after the Six Day War, but Rav Goldstein actually founded the institution in 1965, long before “kiruv” was a buzzword. The Goldsteins had just moved to Israel with their five children and Rav Goldstein was learning in the Herzog Institute for rabbis and dayanim in the Bayit V’Gan neighborhood, when he was approached by his friend and future kiruv gadol Rabbi Noah Weinberg with a request: Reb Noah told him about a boy from Richmond, Virginia, with little Jewish background, looking for a private teacher who’d be able to mainstream him into a regular yeshivah.

Rav Goldstein taught him to read and daven, moved on to Chumash, and together soon conquered Mishnah and even a bit of Gemara — enough to prepare him for an entrance exam at the one yeshivah in Jerusalem which at the time had a track welcoming boys from abroad. The bochur actually passed the entrance exam, but the rosh yeshivah was worried about his secular background and the influence he might have on the other, less-exposed boys. When Rav Goldstein broke the news to him, the bochur was beside himself and cried for hours. “Is the Torah world locked before me because I wasn’t born frum?!”

“Listen,” Rav Goldstein told him. “I have a great idea. The Rambam talks about three crowns that were given to the Jewish People: the crown of malchus, which belongs exclusively to the House of David, the crown of kehunah, which belongs exclusively to the descendents of Aharon, and the crown of Torah, which belongs to everyone — ‘kol mi sheyirtzeh yavo v’yitol’ — so we’re going to open a new yeshivah called Toras Yisrael and the crown will be its symbol.”

And that’s exactly what Rav Goldstein did. He made a stamp — back then if you had a stamp you had an organization — with a crown logo and the name “Toras Yisrael.” And that’s still the yeshivah’s official name.

Rav Goldstein collected another dozen-or-so boys who were traveling around the country, initially using the ezras nashim of the Chevron Yeshiva in Geula, with the blessing and encouragement of Rosh Yeshivah Rav Yechezkel Sarna, with whom Rav Goldstein was close. Soon though, the yeshivah grew out of those quarters and relocated to the Diskin children’s home in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood, where it remained until 1967.

“I knew we needed to start some kind of major kiruv framework,” Rav Goldstein says, “although among Israelis at the time, there was little connection to chazarah b’teshuvah. When I spoke to people here about it they looked at me like I was crazy. Israelis were still either in euphoria after founding the State or in trauma after the Shoah. No one was thinking of becoming frum.”

There wasn’t much support from the chareidi community either, which had understandably turned itself inward, wary of any newfangled movement that would jeopardize its already precarious situation.

“Regardless, I stuck to my guns,” says Rav Goldstein. “Americans were in a different place. This was the ’60s and people were searching for real meaning, for real spirituality in their lives. Someone had to accept them as they were and teach them Torah.”

Rav Goldstein trusted his intuition, but what he needed most was someone to help him on a practical level with a place — how long could he keep borrowing space from other institutions? Government agencies at the time weren’t too pleased by the idea of allocating land for a kiruv campus, but his savior was Rabbi Dr. Samuel Zanvil Kahane, director general of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, who was also warden of the mostly abandoned land of Har Tzion where he’d established the Martef HaShoah (Chamber of the Holocaust) in 1948 as a symbolic burial site in memory of destroyed communities (it later became a museum).

Rabbi Dr. Kahane offered a solution to the predicament of Rav Goldstein and his students. “He suggested that I take my talmidim and settle on Har Tzion,” Rav Goldstein remembers. “We didn’t even know what the place was. He explained that it was difficult to get there, with no small amount of danger involved, but that he was looking for people to strengthen Jewish control over the area. That was in 1967, just before the Six Day War, and Har Tzion was the border, suffering from sniper fire and the like. At the time, we couldn’t imagine how quickly everything would soon change, but we didn’t ask too many questions, we just came. The main form of transportation here was on the back of a donkey, so we rode donkeys. There was no electricity or sewage system, nothing.”

The Mishnah’s Niggun

Many Jews in Eretz Yisrael were fearful that the expected war would bring an end to the State of Israel as an independent entity. Even Rav Goldstein’s talmidim, who had made a long spiritual journey battling all kinds of forces, were afraid for their lives.

“My guys were also frightened by what was going on here,” he says. “There were enough people who thought this was the end of the country, that the Arabs were about to overrun us – but then our fate became very clear. What they forgot was that our strength is from the Torah, and that is stronger than any army.”

When the war was over, Rav Goldstein settled with his small core of two dozen talmidim on Har Tzion. There, at the top of the mountain, around the kever of Dovid Hamelech, his empire started to take shape. The initial group of students who delved into Torah in their own way led to a generation of baalei teshuvah, Torah students, avreichim, and talmidei chachamim. Over the years tens of thousands have passed through the yeshivah, but a core group stayed to live in the yeshivah’s compound, sharing a type of communal lifestyle unique to the Diaspora kehillah.

In those early years, there was a special aura around Har Tzion. “I took in boys regardless of how they looked — with a ponytail, without one, as long as they came into the beis medrash,” says Rav Goldstein. “All types rolled in here, good Jews that most people looked at as weirdos. Here they found their place. They’re still coming, by the way — some for a few days, some for a few weeks, and some for longer. We’ve always let them stay here as long as they like, in order to taste the sweetest thing of all — the taste of Torah in this atmosphere of tranquility.”

As the student body grew and matured, some of the fellows looked to get married. “When I realized that not too many frum girls would be willing to marry these guys — they were fresh baalei teshuvah, not yet accepted by the chareidi establishment — we decided to open a seminary for girls. We soon had some young couples as part of the yeshivah community. They rented apartments in the buildings the yeshivah built around the compound, and when their families grew, we started boys’ and girls’ schools.”

The empire that developed quickly spawned a generation of talmidim, a tribe that followed its undisputed leader. Rav Goldstein oversaw its growth into a mature community. In 1984, when the mountain was full with the kehillah and its mosdos, a group moved to the settlement Meitzad in eastern Gush Etzion — although the town, relatively isolated and far away from major transportation points, never really took off in its three decades of existence, but it does have close to 100 families today.

If people don’t necessarily associate the Diaspora Yeshiva with advanced Torah scholarship, they do associate it with contemporary music. The Diaspora Yeshiva Band, which conquered the modern chassidic music scene during the ’70s and ’80s with six albums, several major “chassidic rock” hits, and weekly Saturday night concerts at a courtyard adjoining Kever Dovid Hamelech, harnessed the musical talents of its students as an outreach tool to draw the post-hippie generation into the milieu of Torah study.

Actually, music became an integral part of the curriculum way before the band was formed in 1975. In the first years of the yeshivah, Rav Goldstein gave a class where he said that if a student wants to really remember a mishnah or piece of gemara, he should sing it. As many of the students had strong or professional musical backgrounds, everyone was taking out their instruments and singing their mishnahs.

There Goes the Neighborhood

In the end, Dr. Kahane was right. The very existence of the community on Har Tzion, surrounded by churches and Arab neighbors, helped maintain Jewish control over the area. Veteran bnei yeshivah say that when the Arabs first saw the young Jewish Americans, they didn’t identify them as Israelis, people connected to Zionism or the “occupying power.” That said, during the 1970s when Rav Goldstein requested funds through the Ministry of Religion’s budget for support of Torah institutions, he was met with inflexibility that astounded him.

“They told me that there were no regulations that allowed funding kiruv yeshivahs. There was no such word in the lexicon in those days. They told me it’s impossible that a secular Jew would actually go to a yeshivah, so my trying to sell them that I had a yeshivah that brought Jews back to Torah was a fantasy.”

After a prolonged struggle the Ministry finally agreed to provide funding, as long as the yeshivah could bring a signature of approval from then-Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren. But Rabbi Goren was skeptical — he’d never heard of the yeshivah, and anyway, what did he need with a bunch of counterculture Americans? In the end, the solution came from an unexpected source.

“There lived an elderly scholar in Jerusalem then by the name of Rav Ze’ev Frank, the brother of Rav Tzvi Pesach Frank ztz”l,” Rav Goldstein remembers. “We used to send bochurim from the yeshivah to help him out with a minyan in his shul, and in return, he came and said shiurim. Soon he became part of the regular staff and was one of the biggest fighters on the yeshivah’s behalf. After a time, he became ill and was hospitalized, where he fell into a coma and was declared clinically dead. But then one of the bochurim, who’s still with the yeshivah to this day, was sitting by his bedside when Rav Frank miraculously awoke! Rav Frank said that he’d gone up to Shamayim where he was told that he had nine more months to live, because he had not yet completed his role in the yeshivah. Upon his release, he asked to be taken straight to Rabbi Goren. He came into the Chief Rabbi’s office and knocked on the desk with his cane. He declared: ‘If you don’t take care of getting the yeshivah funding and arrange that yeshivahs for baalei teshuvah get recognition, when I go back up again, I’ll make sure that you don’t get into Gan Eden!’ ”

With all the goodwill that has supposedly been generated over the decades with the yeshivah’s neighbors, we still hear the bells tolling in the nearby churches and the cries of the muezzin calling Moslems to prayer in the neighboring mosques.

“I’m used to the bells already,” Rav Goldstein says with a shrug. “Once upon a time they would purposely ring them while we davened vasikin in order to annoy us. Now it’s just background noise. You know, there’s no easy existence. We Jews have to constantly cope with a complicated existence. The miracle was that the Arabs came to understand that we were a different breed, and weren’t part of the local war. We were Americans; we were strange to them. We even developed neighborly relations with them. I have no doubt that our being here has helped protect the Jewish Quarter and access to the Kosel.”

But like every place in Israel today, you can’t always trust your neighbors. One Friday night last year, 15 Arab rioters from nearby Silwan (Shiloach/Ir David) broke into the yeshivah and began attacking students with stones and blocks. The students initially fled for safety, fearing the Arabs had live ammunition, but quickly returned to defend themselves and the compound. They threw chairs, urns of boiling water, and even a huge bubbling pot of cholent at the rioting infiltrators, managing to chase them away.

Faithful Guardians

The area under the yeshivah’s purview is enormous — the King David’s Tomb complex is some 100,000 square feet. And although Dr. Kahane originally gave Rav Goldstein and the yeshivah authority over the whole area, in 1977 — a decade after the yeshivah set down roots, cleaned up the area, and encouraged it as a tourist attraction and prayer site — the Lands Authority demanded the yeshivah leave, claiming the permit issued by Dr. Kahane, who had since passed away, was no longer valid.

In the end, the yeshivah was granted a 49-year lease over the area, which was backdated to 1968. This means it will be up next year, in 2017.

But that’s not what’s really concerning the Diaspora administration, who assumes their half-century chazakah in the area will be maintained. It’s because the compound is complicated by another factor: On the second floor above King David’s Tomb is an area that Christians call the “Last Supper Room,” where their savior had supposedly eaten his last meal before being crucified by the Romans. For the last two decades, the Vatican has been vocally claiming rights to the area, and there is a big push by the Vatican to take over major swats of Har Tzion and King David’s Tomb as well.

“Between 1967 and 1979, our yeshivah was in charge of both the Tomb and the Last Supper Room,” explains yeshivah director Rabbi Yitzchak Goldstein. “We took care of the area, cleaned it, had guards posted.” Besides some upscale restaurants and tourists shops, the Diaspora Yeshiva is still the only Jewish presence on Har Tzion, maintaining and managing King David’s Tomb as well as the Martef HaShoah museum across the way.

In 1979, the yeshivah decided to give the Tomb — whose structure includes the Last Supper Room — back into the hands of the Ministry of Religious Affairs. “We felt that because it was a national-religious shrine, it should be properly run by a government authority. I still think that’s the right decision,” says Reb Yitzchak. “The only problem is that we couldn’t foresee that in the future the Ministry of Religion would dissolve and be shifted around under various offices, and we never dreamed that the Jewish state would not totally fight for Jewish interests on Har Tzion.

“In the last 20 years since the Vatican has expressed an interest in reestablishing relations with Israel,” Reb Yitzchak explains, “we’ve had direct information from those involved in the negotiations that one of the most important points has been that the Last Supper Room be run by the Vatican. It’s been back and forth and up and down, and officially the Israeli government hasn’t agreed to this, but there are many who want to renegotiate it.”

Several years ago when the issue was again tabled, Rav Mordechai Goldstein told Arutz 7 that “according to their bible, the Land is to return to the Christians, and 144,000 Jews are to return to Mt. Zion. Their plan is for them to take control of the site, and then to announce that they are holding a mass reenactment of the Last Supper, with all types of religious rituals, and to invite millions of Christians to come to Jerusalem and celebrate.” This of course means lots of tourism money for Israel, and there are forces in the Israeli government that would be very interested in making it happen.

If it comes to such negotiations, says Reb Yitzchak, it would mean the yeshivah’s agreement with the government was de facto not honored. “Our contract says that we gave back the Tomb because we felt the government would be able to more properly handle the site. But if it comes to negotiations, it means the pretext for giving it back isn’t being maintained and we should take back guardianship. We relinquished our rights for the benefit of the Jewish People, not as a bargaining chip for the Vatican. It’s unconscionable that a place inseparably part of our heritage would pass into gentile hands because of the government’s weakness.”

Today, negotiations with the Vatican have officially been put on hold because of that body’s recognition of a Palestinian state, but Christian ceremonies at Dovid Hamelech’s kever haven’t. On the pope’s visits to Eretz Yisrael in 2013 and 2014, the Vatican insisted on holding religious ceremonies there. During the last visit two years ago, the Diaspora Yeshiva and other nationalist and religious activists barricaded themselves in the upper-floor room to prevent Christian services from taking place there. In the end, not only did that demonstration fail, but the police removed Jewish worshippers from the main kever sanctuary in order for Catholic mass to be held inside Dovid Hamelech’s shrine.

“There is immense importance in maintaining our presence here, in these holy places,” says Reb Yitzchak. “I don’t even want to think what would happen if part of the structure of Kever Dovid would fall into Christian hands. If we wouldn’t be here, it probably would have happened already.”

Past and Future

Across the cobblestones from King David’s Tomb, the Martef HaShoah/Chamber of the Holocaust is also run by the yeshivah, in a way a reminder of horrifying destruction side-by-side a promise of redemption. The museum was created by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who went back to the camps, gathered the ashes of the martyrs, and brought them to the Holy Land in 1949. He wanted to bury them near the site of the Beis Hamikdash, and the closest place then was Har Tzion. That’s why the museum is filled with tombstones — it’s like a graveyard of entire kehillos that were wiped out.

The Goldsteins refer to the repository as a beis hakvaros, a cemetery, rather than a museum. But regardless of what it’s called, the items on display and the reconstruction of the crematoria give visitors a jolt that transcends time.

“On the one hand, it’s a testimony to the terrible tragedy that befell our people,” says Rav Goldstein, “but at the same time, there’s a promise of rebirth: our yeshivah, a haven for lost Jews on the path to rediscovery; and the resting place of Dovid Hamelech that attests to our heritage of thousands of years and the promise of redemption and Mashiach.”

—Rachel Ginsberg contributed to this report

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 620)