Head Hunt

When most people saw recent reports that Argentina is unsealing its archives on the country’s history of sheltering leading Nazis, the news was a reminder of a disturbing post-Holocaust chapter that ultimately felt remote.

To Rabbi May, it brought back a career’s worth of memories of the long pursuit of aging Nazis. Although he wasn’t a Nazi hunter himself — no derring-do is part of the Meyer May bio — he played a leading role in enabling the search to go on.

“Argentina’s archives will confirm what we already know,” says Rabbi May. “That there was a ratline — an escape network that helped senior Nazis evade justice — and that the Red Cross was involved.”

The culpability of the Red Cross — which has never apologized for its role in aiding Nazis — is one of the many unfinished pieces of Holocaust business for Rabbi May.

It’s not just about history — it’s about their present inaction on anti-Semitism today, which is why, he says, “I wouldn’t give them a nickel.”

“They didn’t make a single visit to the hostages in Gaza. The Red Cross raises money for international disasters. They visit prisoners of conscience in jails. They’re good at transferring bodies, but where were they for 700 days?”

In the search for Nazis who evaded justice, perhaps the biggest name to get away is Josef Mengele.

The murderous SS physician evaded identification by the Americans after the war, sailed to South America under a false Red Cross passport, and slipped the Mossad net when the Israelis decided to focus on Eichmann’s capture.

By the time the Simon Wiesenthal Center was established in 1977, Mengele was two years short of dying near Sao Paolo, where he’d been living under a false name since 1971.

For years, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal had been on the Auschwitz doctor’s trail to bring him to justice, after the role that Wiesenthal had played in leading to Adolf Eichmann’s location.

“Simon showed me how he identified SS men. One method was an internal SS phonebook that they had in World War II. When it came to Eichmann, there was another method: He discovered that Eichmann’s brother was a lookalike — he saw him at the funeral of the parents. That family resemblance played a part in the identification of Eichmann.”

While it seems that Wiesenthal tipped off the Mossad that Eichmann was the Buenos Aires man known as Ricardo Klement, his pursuit of Mengele was unsuccessful.

The Nazi hunter only caught up with his evil target once Mengele was dead.

“When they found him in a grave, the question was identification. Wiesenthal didn’t trust the Brazilians to do a proper autopsy. This was before DNA identification, so we hired three leading American forensic pathologists, flew them down, and they participated. Based on skeleton size, markings, and so on, we concluded that it was definitely him.”

Terrible Ivan

Along the way there were other setbacks, along with successes. The SWC campaign to prevent the beatification of Pope Pius, under whose aegis the Vatican did little to prevent the Holocaust, proved a failure. But the center succeeded in lobbying the West German government to drop the statute of limitations that would have shielded aging Nazis.

“That’s why the person we thought was Ivan the Terrible could be prosecuted,” says Rabbi May of John Demjanjuk, the Ohio auto worker accused of murdering hundreds at Sobibor.

“When Demjanjuk was sent back to the United States after his conviction had been overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court, Simon Wiesenthal Center founder Rabbi Marvin Hier was on the morning shows and said, ‘He may not have been Ivan the Terrible, but he was certainly a terrible Ivan.’”

Along the way, Rabbi May developed a close relationship with Wiesenthal himself. “We helped make him an icon,” he says. “Early in his career he couldn’t raise money. He once came to L.A. and got five-hundred dollars for his entire effort. We came on board, and I followed his speakers’ bureau schedule — wherever he spoke, I’d go and set up a parlor meeting the next night. I always took him from the hotel to our events.”

Typical of the care for people that typifies Rabbi May, he saw beyond the driven Nazi hunter to the man underneath.

“Once I saw that he wasn’t well. My brother-in-law is a top ophthalmologist, so I took Simon to him. Later Simon asked me to visit him in Vienna. He wanted to show me all his medals, all his accolades — he wanted someone he felt cared about him to see it.

“He was a tough man, but when he softened up, he was a wonderful person.”

What began as Simon Wiesenthal’s personal crusade to hunt Nazis, says Rabbi May, morphed into something broader: a push to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust victims and the events themselves.

“He began as a Nazi hunter and ended as an educator. Justice, not vengeance, he would say — a phrase that became the title of a book that he wrote.

“He would tell survivors, ‘When we meet the victims in the next world, you’ll say you became a doctor, a lawyer. I will say: I never forgot you.’”

Memory Hole

The Wiesenthal Center and the man whose name it bore weren’t always in alignment. They disagreed deeply over the Kurt Waldheim case.

Waldheim was a UN Secretary General in the mid-1980s when he was exposed as a Nazi-era intelligence officer involved in atrocities in the Balkans, including the transfer of Jews to the SS.

Waldheim’s exposure brought intense media scrutiny during his 1986 Austrian presidential bid, which he narrowly won, and global ostracization during his subsequent term. The SWC campaigned against Waldheim’s admission into the United States, but Wiesenthal disagreed.

“He said you can’t call someone a war criminal without due process. We said due process or not, he should never be president of a country or head of the UN. Simon wasn’t defending him. Later, when Waldheim walked into a room where Simon was speaking, Simon stepped off the stage. He simply believed that integrity of historical truth requires pristine proof.”

That drive for historical accuracy was at the heart of the SWC’s mandate, says Rabbi May.

“We saw ourselves as repositories of memory. Everything had to be bulletproof — no gray areas.”

For decades, Holocaust memory was the single greatest force that kept anti-Semitism on the fringes of American public life. It was enough to blacklist Waldheim, and to compel a reckoning with Holocaust era complicity in a host of Western countries.

The Wiesenthal Center itself became a prominent part of the Holocaust education architecture. For nearly five decades the center served as a one-stop shop to counteract Holocaust deniers, prevent distortion of history, and support Israel. From 1993, more than three million students passed through the Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles to learn about racism with a focus on the Holocaust.

But along the way, Rabbi May would encounter a creeping universalization of the Holocaust.

“There’s always watering down. People create moral equivalencies where they don’t belong. Cambodia is horrible, but it’s not Auschwitz.

“Once I told a group of African-American educators: Sitting in the back of the bus is appalling, but it is not Auschwitz. Auschwitz stands alone.”

Resurgent Hatred

The passing years didn’t do the cause of Holocaust education any favors, and neither did the declining number of survivors. But it was October 7 that showed the model to be broken.

“We were among the loudest voices speaking out about anti-Semitism after October 7,” says Rabbi May. “It was a massacre, a world story. But that the murder of defenseless Jewish women and babies should have had the worst reaction — that it triggers more anti-Semitism — defies logic.

“The only way to explain it is the halachah that “Eisav sonei es Yaakov.”

The Holocaust still profoundly affects those who see the museum, says Rabbi May, but it’s clear that Holocaust inversion — in which Jews are accused of the very same crimes that they suffered — has taken over.

Part of the problem, says Rabbi May, is the fragmentation of the media landscape. It’s not just the rise of Holocaust denial — it’s also the fall of TV and the rise of internet influencers.

“In the old days, there were ten TV trucks parked outside our building, and Rabbi Hier’s three sentences determined the Jewish world’s message. Today the battle is influencers. We need influencers influencing for us.”

That now-hostile landscape — and the fading relevance of Holocaust education as a buffer against anti-Semitism — begs a big question about Rabbi May’s career. Was it the right approach? Were the mega-bucks poured into education worth it?

It’s far from the first time in recent years that he’s been asked this pointed question. In his polished yet candid way, Rabbi May answers with a parable from the world of sports.

“A rabbi sits down to watch a hockey game, and his team scores. One fan says, ‘Rabbi, you’re fantastic.’ The other team scores, and so the fan says, ‘Rabbi, what good are you?’

“The rabbi turns to the man and says, ‘Ed, we’re keeping it close. Imagine if I wouldn’t have been here — it would have been worse.’”

The parallel is that in the long arc of history, decades of post-war quiet were partly a product of education.

“History has previous examples of a goldene medineh that turned, such as Poland. History turns.

“We’ve hostedmillions of kids at the Museum of Tolerance since 1993. Does that mean that none will join anti-Israel college rallies later? I don’t know. But we did the right thing — without it, things could have been worse.”

Lakewood Royalty

That faith-filled view of Jewish history is what has defined Rabbi May’s period in the upper reaches of the Jewish philanthropy pyramid. He’s ultimately a product of a yeshivah who spent decades in a world of influence, yet retains the sense of mission and identity that he entered with.

His story began very far from the moneyed environs of Los Angeles, in the world of old-time Lakewood, New Jersey. Born in 1952 in New York, he was nine when his family moved to Lakewood in 1961, where he lived until his marriage 11 years later. Meyer’s father was a rocket scientist who struggled for employment due to his Shabbos observance, and his mother was secretary of Sons of Israel, the shul that still stands on Lakewood’s Madison Avenue in silent testimony to a Jewish life in the town that predated the famous yeshivah.

“The rabbi of the shul was Rabbi Pesach (Paul Z.) Levovitz — a big talmid chacham and nephew of Rav Moshe Feinstein. Since my father had to leave on a five a.m. bus to New York each day, he would fall asleep when the rabbi started speaking on Friday night, but he would also learn with him.

“I grew up wanting to be Rabbi Levovitz, and it was widely assumed that I would be a pulpit rabbi.”

The shul rabbi wasn’t the only role model. In those days of a small yeshivah and small local Orthodox community, there was a natural connection between the two populations — a connection facilitated by none other than Mrs. May.

“My father didn’t go to yeshivah as a child because it was the depression years and his parents didn’t have any money, so my father never learned how to learn. So, my mother says, hey, we’re living in Lakewood and there all these tremendous talmidei chachamim around, and you don’t attach yourself to any of them.

“So she started the forerunner of what’s now Partners in Torah, by putting the balabatim from Congregation Sons of Israel in touch with various people to learn.”

Young Meyer May went to Lakewood Hebrew Day School with some of the future big names of the American yeshivah world.

“I’m technically royalty of Lakewood,” he says. “At my wedding — ten years after Rav Aharon Kotler was niftar — his rebbetzin insisted on coming.”

Life Lessons

One figure who made an impact on him in those early days was Lakewood rosh yeshivah Rav Yisroel Neuman, known as a tremendous masmid.

“Whenever I’m asked who is the most impressive person that I’ve met, I always surprise people. They expect me to name a king or a president. But Rav Yisroel Neuman of Lakewood is my hero.

“Growing up in Lakewood, every free hour I went to the yeshivah. I never came without seeing him there, walking and learning. I couldn’t understand how he always happened to be there, until at age fourteen, I realized that he always happened to be learning when I came, because he was always learning. That made a lifelong impression.”

Rabbi May would go on to develop a family connection that bridged the worlds of Lakewood and Yeshiva University, where he ultimately headed. “My father-in-law, Rav Yitzchok Filler — who gave the chazarah shiur for Rav Moshe Soloveitchik at YU — was known as the illui of Kletzk. He was Rav Aharon’s talmid muvhak.”

Those roots in Lakewood have given Rabbi May the ability to be comfortable in multiple parallel worlds. .

It’s meant that he has children living in Lakewood today, and that he’s a premier address for yeshivos wanting advice on fundraising campaigns.

That background also meant that Rabbi May periodically consulted gedolim on big decisions.

“Every ten years I went to a gadol who didn’t know me to ask if I was on the right track. Why someone who didn’t know me? Because people who know you tell you what you want to hear.”

And the early examples of greatness that he witnessed in Lakewood mean that he never gave up his own learning commitments despite the time away from the beis medrash.

“I learn three blatt of Gemara a day. I’m in three cycles of Shas at the same time — two Bavli and one Yerushalmi.

“The only way I keep track is writing down what daf I’m on in each cycle.”

Beholding Brilliance

If Lakewood is the subtext to Rabbi Meyer May’s story, the headline was written in the Yeshiva University world. In 1978, he headed to Rav Soloveitchik’s shiur where he quickly discovered that he was out of his depth.

The fact that he’d been considered bright in high school was scant comfort when he realized that the famous lamdan’s shiur was really tough going.

“I was petrified he’d call on me. He was very direct and not forgiving. He’d go through his book and land on me: ‘Meyer May, what’s the question?’ No matter what you said, it wasn’t going to be enough. He would say, ‘For that you’re in my shiur? Can anybody just get into the shiur?’”

Savvy students in Rav Soloveitchik’s class developed a stratagem to avoid these encounters: For the first three days of the semester, they arrived a half-hour late. If you weren’t there for the first three days, Rav Soloveitchik crossed you off the list — then they could attend without getting called on.

“The shiur was packed — 70 men. I was valedictorian everywhere I had ever been, the smartest everywhere, until I got to YU. Suddenly I was average or below. Everyone was smarter than me. But it was exhilarating. You were watching brilliance and emes develop in front of you.”

Out West

Fascination with Rav Soloveitchik’s Torah combined with the difficulty of approaching it were ultimately what led Rabbi May out west.

“I wanted to learn the Rav’s Torah but was afraid in that shiur. Rav Moshe Meiselman, the Rav’s nephew, was starting the YU kollel in Los Angeles, and learning with him gave me access to the Torah — not firsthand, but a very good secondhand. For me, it was the perfect opportunity.”

Moving to Los Angeles brought a young Meyer May into contact with the man who would open up horizons in different worlds — Wiesenthal Center founder Rabbi Marvin Hier.

“I came to L.A. because I wanted to learn in the kollel and needed more time. Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder of YULA (Yeshiva University High School of Los Angeles) and later the Wiesenthal Center, required all of us to do communal service at night. You learned full-time morning and afternoon, and at night you had to give something back to the community.”

For Rabbi May, that something rapidly developed into a kiruv career.

“Rabbi Hier asked me to start a program for adult education for unaffiliated Jews. I made a brochure — I didn’t know the first thing about making a brochure. At the beginning I had two women in my class. After six weeks I said I wouldn’t continue. They said, ‘Rabbi, one day we won’t be able to help our children with their homework — can you do six more weeks?’”

A short while later, Rabbi May had 50 people in his class, his wife Rebbetzin Shulamit had another 50 in hers, and Rav Meiselman had 50 in his. By four years later, the program had 600 people learning every week.

The learning programs led to shabbatons three times a year. People brought sleeping bags and slept all over the YULA building. Friday night there was a speaker, Shabbos day another.

Gone were the dreams of a pulpit position; instead, the Mays were on the front lines, teaching Torah.

Those were heady days, with many successes. One memorable breakthrough was a woman whose mother was a fervent Conservative Jew, who rebelled by joining the American Nazi party, then rebelled again and became Orthodox.

She came to the Mays for Shabbos for a year and a half. Along the way, Rabbi May found himself in the odd position of walking to shul in Beverly Hills with a woman wearing a tallis and yarmulke.

Every Shabbos, that would be followed by two and a half hours of questions of life and Judaism. These were exhausting encounters, but ultimately fruitful. Eventually, the woman went to Neve Yerushalayim, then Gateshead, and married an avreich in the Mir.

“The message,” says Rabbi May of that colorful search, “is that everybody is able to come back. Everyone’s looking for truth. You need patience — and you need a wife who goes along with it.”

Money Matters

Like many mekarevim before and since, parnassah was a factor in the decision to move on. In Rabbi May’s case, there was also a process of transition under Rabbi Hier’s leadership.

“Rabbi Hier asked me to help him with money for the institution. At first, I raised money for YULA, but it was only five hundred dollars at a time in donations. He produced a film on the Holocaust that won an Academy Award. I suggested we take the film on the road — make a premiere in each community. Half the money would go to YULA, half to the Wiesenthal Center.

“We made $200,000 at a premiere — that’s a lot of $500 donations. Then Rabbi Hier said, ‘You’re next to me.’”

It was an inspired choice, because Rabbi May was indeed blessed with the rare ability to connect to people and raise money — lots of it.

Over the years as executive director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, he brought in $1.6 billion — including $325 million from governmental agencies.

There’s nothing that opens doors like money and connections, and the two rabbis at the head of the SWC found themselves acting as roving diplomats for the Jewish people. Rabbi Hier sat at seat 7a, and Rabbi May was 7b as they crisscrossed the globe on behalf of Israel and the battle against anti-Semitism. The pair’s visit to Bahrain in 2017 served as a trial balloon for what later became the Abraham Accords.

Influence and access are self-reinforcing – and with a massive global following and the ability to orchestrate large grassroots lobbying campaigns, the Simon Wiesenthal Center became too large for hostile politicians to ignore.

But in terms of fundraising, the secret to Rabbi May’s ability to open doors proved to be integrity: He  is a man of his word — a quality that inspires others to trust him with their hard-earned money. “Before the art of fundraising, you have to be a statesman,” Rabbi May says. “People give to people, and they have to respect you. You have to be a person that people see as representing something noble.”

Allied with that was the genuine respect that he had for others — especially those acting as a mensch — whatever stage of religious observance they were up to. Asked who he found inspiring in the wider world, Rabbi May mentions Lester Crown, billionaire head of defense giant General Dynamics.

“I took Simon Wiesenthal to visit him, and he insisted on walking Simon right through the company offices to the elevator. I thought that that was an act of class, that you’re a Lester Crown, but you met your match, and you have to show him the dignity that he deserves.”

A lesson in the meaning of words came via board chairman Larry Mizel, whose son had become religious. The philanthropist had a request: “I want you to look after my son,” he said.

“I’ll try my best,” replied Rabbi May — fully meaning it, as he went on to host the son extensively.

But Mizel wasn’t happy with the response. “You’re going to try?” he said. “When you ask me for a million dollars, you want me to say I’m going to try to give it? If you spend the next five years with me, I’ll never say the word try.”

“He was right,” concludes Rabbi May. “Try is an equivocation. It’s just the wrong word — there’s no integrity in it. So, I erased the word from my vocabulary.”

Thinking Big

That openness to both people and new angles meant that the five decades in Los Angeles saw Rabbi May reach the pinnacle of Jewish organizational life. It’s been a long roundtrip, but as he heads to the next chapter in his own story, Rabbi Meyer May has, perhaps unexpectedly, come full circle. What began with outreach on the West Coast is culminating in outreach at the Western Wall.

And fittingly, given the amount of time he’s spent mentoring others, it’s one of those protegées who has opened that door.

Aish CEO Rabbi Steven Burg was a beneficiary of Rabbi May’s guidance back in Los Angeles. Working as West Coast director for NCSY, Rabbi Burg was invited to join a Simon Wiesenthal Center mission to Washington, D.C. in the course of which he met Rabbi May.

“From that trip forward, he became my mentor,” says Rabbi Burg. “During my five years in Los Angeles, he became my teacher, my advisor, and my example of what a true leader looks like. I would go to him with every question I had about running an organization. No matter how busy he was, whenever I called, he always made time for me, because he is a Klal Yisrael person foremost.”

Two years ago, when it became clear that the founding generation at the SWC were preparing to retire, Rabbi Burg made his move, turning to his old mentor with an offer that he couldn’t refuse.

“Why don’t you wrap up your career by building a makom Torah in Yerushalayim?” he proposed.

What Rabbi Burg had in mind was no sinecure — to dispense wisdom while dwelling on former glories in retirement.

Aish is drawing up ambitious plans to reach every last unaffiliated Jew through digital Torah learning in a world of post-October 7 dislocation. A standout initiative is AishU, a program that will give students college credits for Jewish studies. That formalizes long-term trends in outreach in which students undertake Torah learning in exchange for various incentives – an approach that Aish’s previous iteration pioneered.

It also aims to address the sense of isolation felt by a generation of young Jews studying on often-hostile campuses.

In short, there’s now space for an aggressive push to break boundaries in the outreach world – and the approach to Rabbi May is part of that big thinking. So he’s on board fora series of ambitious new global projects, at a time when most people are settling in for some quiet nachas from the grandchildren.

After a lifetime of achievement on the big stage of L.A. and the world, for Rabbi Meyer May, it’s full speed ahead on the next project — the future of the Jewish people.

“I enjoyed what I did — but there’s more to life than meeting popes and princes and kings,” says Rabbi May. “And if there’s one thing I’ve learned along the way, it’s that if you’re given the skills to do impactful things, you have to rise to the challenge.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1090)