“There were very wealthy laymen and seasoned businessmen there and they rose to the occasion,” he says. “The only challenges they raised have been how to do it, not whether to do it.”

Rabbi David Ozeri, leader of Brooklyn’s Syrian Orthodox community — is still haunted by a childhood encounter in the principal’s office, when a melamed had to beg his boss for five dollars for a Yom Tov expense. Nearly a half-century later, he’s galvanized his own community and the larger Orthodox world to join him in giving rebbeim back the stature and backing they deserve.

It was the fall of 1967, and a young Syrian boy named David Ozeri was a seventh-grader in Boro Park’s Yeshiva Toras Emes, having transferred in from the Magen David yeshivah. He was in the school office working the mimeograph machine, the ancient forerunner of the copy machine, when in walked a rebbi on his recess break. The yeshivah’s administrator was on his way out, but the rebbi stopped him. “Excuse me,” he said meekly, “I know I’m not getting paid for Yom Tov. But can I at least have five dollars to buy the arba minim?”

David — now Rabbi David Ozeri, who, as a rav and mechanech, has been a pillar of Brooklyn’s Syrian Orthodox community for decades — never forgot the 30-second encounter that unfolded before his eyes. “And,” he says, “it continues to haunt me every time I see a rebbi suffering financially.” Now, nearly a half-century later, he is determined to do something about it, and is galvanizing his own community and the larger Orthodox world beyond to join him in the effort.

As he relates the story for what must be the umpteenth round, he shakes his head as if telling it for the very first time. “Five dollars. These are the tzaddikim that we’re talking about. For years, I’ve watched rebbeim suffer in silence, not really complaining about their situation. But any time an extra expense comes up, a baby is born, a bar mitzvah, a chasunah, that’s when you see the extent of it, the pain and the anguish. It’s reaching a breaking point.”

“We’ve got to begin focusing in on the plight of our melamdim, the tzaddikim who work totally l’sheim Shamayim. Your wife has a job, you don’t have domestic help, you’re not driving a late-model car, and your combined salaries are sixty or seventy thousand — but you just can’t cut it anymore when you have seven, eight, nine, ten children.”

Cash in Hand

This past November, when Agudath Israel of America invited Rabbi Ozeri to address the keynote Motzaei Shabbos session at its annual convention, he saw his opening. “I told them the issue of rebbeim’s salaries is what I want to speak about. They weren’t really sure that’s what they wanted, but Reb Chaim Dovid Zwiebel gave the go-ahead.”

Rabbi Ozeri delivered a powerful, impassioned plea for the frum community to relieve the financial stress of yeshivah teachers, quoting the words of the Peleh Yoetz that a Jewish community is obligated “to give those who teach their children Torah dei machsoram b’mezumanim — all that they lack, in cash, straight into their hands, on a weekly basis. The community must spare no expense because this mitzvah is greater than the building of the Beis Hamikdash.”

And much as the Shuvu educational network for Russian children in Israel got its start decades ago in spontaneous reaction to a session at an Agudah convention, Reb David’s emotional call to action, too, was taken up on the spot by a group of activists who formed an ad hoc committee determined to achieve a breakthrough in this area. One of its most diligent members is a young man who rang the doorbell of the Ozeri home two days after the convention. Rabbi Ozeri invited him in and he said, “I was so moved and I’m so bothered that I went into my son’s yeshivah and wrote out a $500 check to be given to my son’s rebbi, and I don’t have the money for that. I have children in yeshivah for whom I pay a lot of tuition, but something has to be done.”

The speech at the Agudah convention was followed by an invitation to address the same theme at the Torah Umesorah Presidents’ Conference in Florida, which attracts much of the yeshivah world’s top lay leadership.

“There were very wealthy laymen and seasoned businessmen there and they rose to the occasion,” he says. “The only challenges they raised have been how to do it, not whether to do it.”

Paid from a Pushke?

These words have clearly struck a chord within a broad cross-section of the Orthodox world. Schools around the country have taken the initiative to find the money to give raises to their rebbeim, in some cases as much as ten thousand dollars. Other schools have begun contributing toward the cost of simchah events in a rebbi’s family. Rabbi Ozeri observes that “there are people walking into their local schools and writing large checks to be used directly to give rebbeim a bonus or a raise. So, baruch Hashem, things are really happening.”

In the months since Reb David’s opening salvo, both Torah Umesorah, the umbrella organization for American yeshivos and day schools, and Agudath Israel, a long-time advocate of yeshivah interests in the halls of government, joined the effort, with many of their respective lay leaders pledging financial support. And this past week, at Torah Umesorah’s annual dinner, months of concerted research and planning culminated in the unveiling of an unprecedented initiative to address the full panoply of financial issues facing mechanchim: Significant salary raises, phased in over several years; establishment of pension plans; provision of health and life insurance; and the creation of a fund to assist rebbeim in celebrating family milestones.

Initially, the committee had focused mainly on that last item — the creation of a “simchah fund” to defray the costs of the happy occasions, such as the birth of a child, a bar mitzvah, and a wedding, in the often large families of rebbeim. The group calculated that the average rebbi spends $155,000 on such costs over a 35-year teaching career, or $4,428 annually. By raising thirty to forty million dollars, the committee hoped to yield annual income of $6.6 million, which would cover half the simchah-related expenditures of the approximately 3,000 rebbeim in the Tristate area, with their schools to raise the rest.

The committee was excited about the idea, until one member, a very prominent long-time askan in the yeshivah world, voiced his adamant opposition. As Rabbi Ozeri tells it, “he turned to us and said, ‘A rebbi deserves to be paid from his boss, not from a simchah fund and not from a pushke. All you people, you have employees, right? You pay them, or you tell them to wait to get their money from a fund, from a pushke?’”