At Yeshiva Ohr Simcha in Englewood, New Jersey, a year after Rabbi Yossi Strassfeld’s passing, the love showered on every broken soul still endures

In a quiet corner at Yeshiva Ohr Simcha in Englewood, New Jersey, Rosh Mesivta Rabbi Eliyahu Dworetsky sits, as the sounds of boys’ lunchtime chatter filter faintly through the walls. An endless stream of memories of a beloved mentor, Rabbi Yosef Strassfeld, flood through his mind, almost one year since he — and we all — lost Reb Yossi, the yeshivah’s longtime menahel. As tears well just beneath the surface, Rabbi Dworetsky muses wistfully, “I mean, who gets emotional about his boss?”

If you don’t know the answer, it just means you didn’t have the opportunity to know Reb Yossi Strassfeld. So, ta shma, come and hear. Listen to a story about overwhelming love, and utter absence of ego, and a single-minded drive to help kids in need — and about what can be accomplished when they’re all combined in one very special individual.

A memory: “It was one of the last meetings we had together when he was already very sick,” says Rabbi Dworetsky. “There was a boy who wasn’t working out at the yeshivah, he was in big trouble, and Rabbi Strassfeld called down the parents. After a long meeting with them, it was time to call in the bochur. He comes into the room, tense as can be, and Rabbi Strassfeld says, ‘Okay, Shmuli, have a seat. We had a meeting, and we came to a unanimous decision — We all love you! We all want you to be successful and we all think you can be successful.’ That was the intro, and from there the discussion continued. The bochur did a one-eighty. There was a certain magic — ‘the Rabbi believes in me,’ and you just had to live up to it.”

“The Rabbi.” That’s what they called him. When Rabbi Dworetsky first arrived in Englewood and heard the kids calling him that it seemed strange, but after he’d been there only a month, it made perfect sense. “There was no other way to describe him, because he was just a unique personality. He wasn’t a rosh yeshivah or a rav. It didn’t fit. He was just ‘the Rabbi.’”

It’s what he was called by the boys who came back — they always did — to update him on their lives, to open their hearts to the one man they knew would really listen. And it’s how he was known by an Englewood bochur who went on to top yeshivos, but when asked by a prospective father-in-law where he had learned, said proudly, “Englewood.” This was a young man who had learned by Rav Meir Stern and Rav Avrohom Yehoshua Soloveitchik, but that’s not what he chose to mention, because he felt that everything he had was because of Englewood.

Never a “They”

Reb Yossi’s script for creating a haven of surpassing warmth and caring in Englewood was first written four decades earlier, during a turbulent childhood in Brooklyn. His parents divorced when he was nine, at a time, says his sister, Mrs. Soshie Hirth, when “nobody’s parents got divorced. That moved my brother to develop deep empathy and a desire to help struggling kids who went through things like this.”

Yossi went on to learn in the Philadelphia Yeshiva, where the mashgiach, Rav Avrohom Golombeck, took the youngster under his wing as a literal ben bayis. The two were inseparable until Rav Golombeck’s untimely passing, and Rabbi Strassfeld readily attributed everything he’d later become to the Philadelphia mashgiach’s loving embrace. Later, the Philadelphia roshei yeshivah sent him with a select group of bochurim to help be mechazek the fledgling Yeshiva Toras Chaim of Denver.

He later learned in Beth Medrash Govoha, where he also continued in kollel after his marriage in 1972 to Chaya Pekier, whose father, Rav Alter Pekier, had been a close talmid of Rav Aharon Kotler. After Reb Yossi received semichah from Rav Shneur Kotler, the couple then spent three years in Memphis, Tennessee, where Reb Yossi taught in the local day school, and then returned to settle in Monsey, New York. In 1978, Reb Yossi began a successful 20-year tenure as director of Project COPE, the Agudath Israel-sponsored job-training institute.

None of this, of course, is the standard career trajectory of an up-and-coming rosh yeshivah. But then, Yossi Strassfeld’s thing wasn’t titles and shtellers — it was spotting communal needs and jumping to fulfill them. Needs like serving as his shul’s gabbai, and its baal korei, and the initiator of its night kollel. Needs like Monsey’s chevra kaddisha, and Keren Hashviis, and starting a nighttime father-son learning program.

“My brother,” explains Soshie Hirth, “wasn’t someone who’d sit back and say, ‘there’s a problem in this community. They should do something about it.’ There was never a ‘they.’ And that’s a legacy from our father. I still remember when there was a fire in the neighborhood and we came home one day and there was a big family living in my house. I said, ‘Daddy, what’s going on?’ and he said, ‘There was a terrible fire, and this family needs a place to stay for now. Make sure to be nice to them.’”

It was while watching kids learn with their fathers in his night program that the seed of a brilliant idea germinated in Reb Yossi’s ever-fertile mind and huge heart. Realizing that so many kids needed extra help that parents couldn’t possibly afford, and desperate to give these kids a good feeling about learning that would head off their plunge into trouble, he made the local yeshivos an offer they couldn’t refuse: “I know you have kids who need help, parents who can’t pay for it, and rebbeim who need the parnassah, so let’s go into this together. I’ll raise a third, you’ll pay the second third and the parents will pay the rest.”

Thus began the Monsey Chazarah Center, which has touched the lives of close to 1,500 kids, many of whom might well have not made it in yeshivos —or Yiddishkeit — without it. Shortly after founding the Center in 1996, Reb Yossi published an article in the Jewish Observer entitled Thoughts of a Wounded Child. It argued that every community must identify children in the early grades who are at-risk due to difficulties in school or at home and provide mentoring and remedial programs to boost self-esteem and give them a taste of success in learning.

The piece opens with the inner thoughts of a “wounded child” of divorce, whose feelings of fear, insecurity, and isolation, coupled with the failure of the adults in his life to understand him, cause him to spiral downward and eventually out of Jewish life. It is a jarring depiction of what might have become of Yossi Strassfeld, the imagery that haunted him and spurred him to open his beloved Englewood yeshivah.

Rabbi Shaya Strassfeld, who now fills his father’s role as rosh yeshivah of Ohr Simcha, recalls how even during his years as a “regular” Monsey balabos, Reb Yossi always had his eye out for any kid in the neighborhood who was falling through the cracks, because “he felt that he understood what these boys were going through and could relate and connect with them.”

Reb Yossi’s son-in-law, Rabbi Elchonon Butrimovitz, who is now the yeshivah’s menahel, concurs: “I remember getting the phone calls, ‘And oh, by the way, when you come for Shabbos, don’t be surprised, we took in two kids.’ There were a number of such kids who lived with them throughout the years.”

After seeing what the Chazarah Center had done for so many boys in whom he saw his own long-ago reflection, Reb Yossi leaped at the opportunity offered him in 1998 when the rav of his shul, Rav Don Blumberg, asked him to join him in his yeshivah high school upon its move to Englewood. Mr. Joe Alpert z”l and his wife, Gila Alpert, tibadel l’chaim, were the driving force in bringing the yeshivah to the Englewood community, and remained its greatest supporters. Later, after an Englewood talmid named Simcha Davis was killed in a tragic accident, his family, prominent supporters of the yeshivah and of Torah in Chicago, named the yeshivah Ohr Simcha in his memory.

Englewood’s rabbanim rallied around the yeshivah, and as Rabbi Menachem Genack, rav of Congregation Shomrei Emunah notes, Rabbi Strassfeld worked to create a lasting kesher between Ohr Simcha and its host community, giving shiurim and maintaining chavrusas with various residents and getting his bochurim involved in initiatives like tutoring, shatnez-checking, and succah-building for local families.

“For Chaya Strassfeld,” says Soshie Hirth of her sister-in-law, “moving to Englewood was her personal lech lecha.” She was happily settled in Monsey with loads of friends and every convenience, and she left it all behind. Once in Englewood, they moved a second time to an industrial section of town near the yeshivah’s current location.

For his part, Yossi’s decision to take a radical mid-life gamble on a chinuch start-up was no less perplexing. He had a secure job and he was happily and heavily involved in the Monsey community, yet he gave it all up in an instant. But as Rabbi Menachem Zupnik, rav of Passaic’s Bais Torah U’Tefillah and a former Englewood parent, observes, “Rabbi Strassfeld was interested in one thing: Helping boys be the best they could be, the happiest, the most well-adjusted they could be. He had no interest in being a choshuve rosh yeshivah. For some people, the better a bochur becomes, the better that reflects on him as a mechanech. There wasn’t even a half an ounce of that in Yossi Strassfeld. He opened a yeshivah because he wanted to help Klal Yisrael, not because he wanted to help himself.”

“I Made My Yeshivah for You”

Right from the outset, this was to be a yeshivah unlike any other. For one thing, Rabbi Strassfeld was determined that the yeshivah’s founding raison d’ךtre — to combine serious shiurim and sedorim with a nurturing environment where every single boy could find an individualized, empathetic rebbi-talmid relationship and experience the sweet taste of success — would remain its guiding vision.

Rabbi Shaya Strassfeld recalls that when the yeshivah first opened, people told him, “Give it a few years and you’ll see that your father’s yeshivah will change, he will raise the level.” But, he says, “they didn’t understand my father or why he opened Englewood. At one point, when there was a very large enrollment, there was a possibility of having parallel classes, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. He said, ‘The whole hatzlachah of my yeshivah is that no one’s a ‘beis’ bochur. I’m not going to have in my yeshivah a ‘second’ shiur.”

Rabbi Dworetsky remembers one boy who came to take a farher at the yeshivah, who had struggled throughout elementary school. “I met him first and then he went in to meet Rabbi Strassfeld. He looked at him and said, ‘I want you to know something: I made my yeshivah for you. I am so happy you came here.’ The boy later said that was the turning point of his life, before he had even stepped foot in the yeshivah.”

But doesn’t the yeshivah’s ironclad commitment to remain a small, warm place mean the yeshivah’s huge financial burden can’t be eased by the additional tuition income that larger classes would generate? Unequivocally so, says Rabbi Butrimovitz. But, he adds, he’s got to swallow it and figure out how to run a yeshivah with a $2 million budget on $700,000 in tuition. “What can I say? We’ve got to remain true to the yeshivah’s unique calling, which is to bring out the best in each bochur. The boys’ needs, not finances, were always the driver.

“He was able,” Rabbi Butrimovitz continues, “to take any boy from any matzav and background and pinpoint what he needed to help him grow. It didn’t necessarily have to do with learning; in fact, it usually didn’t. One parent came to the shivah crying — someone who doesn’t shed tears easily — and said his son entered high school not being able to read. Rabbi Strassfeld came to their home and told them he was putting his son in charge of the yeshivah’s kitchen. The parents were resistant, but Reb Yossi said simply, ‘I didn’t come to ask if I could put him in charge, but to tell you that if you want your son to be matzliach, I need to put him in charge of the kitchen.’ And that’s what he did. Years later, this boy told his father that he only became what he became — he’s now a successful rebbi — because he felt so good about being in charge of the kitchen and that gave him the confidence to be able to shteig.”

There was an anomaly at the heart of the phenomenon called Englewood: On the one hand, Rabbi Yosef Strassfeld was its beating heart, with everything revolving around him; yet, it’s hard to find a rosh yeshivah for whom the title, the trappings, the spotlight meant less than for Reb Yossi.

On the Yamim Noraim, Reb Shaya recalls his father running the entire davening from his seat at the front of the beis medrash. “He’d get excited by certain parts, he’d cry, he’d clap his hands. His emotion would spill over and ignite the whole olam. His thunderous ‘Amen, yehei shmei rabba mevorach’ left an indelible impression on all who heard it.”

And then there was the scene each Yom Kippur night following Kol Nidrei.  As the boys walked by Rabbi Strassfeld, he’d spend two minutes with each one, telling him how proud he was of him, discussing what he’d accomplished in the past year and what he thought he ought to work on next. “It was reminiscent,” says Reb Shaya, “of the Klausenberger Rebbe giving brachos to those girls in the DP camp. And after that, every bochur would be walking around thinking about what the Rabbi had told him.” Someone who observed this scene commented that anyone who didn’t experience it can’t appreciate what Rabbi Strassfeld’s yeshivah is all about.

And yet, for all his centrality to Ohr Simcha, considerations of ego and prestige, the language of “my yeshivah,” were simply foreign to him. It’s not, Reb Shaya explains, that “his humility was a tzidkus, that he learned Mesillas Yesharim about not being a baal gaavah. It just didn’t speak to him.”

One rebbi in the yeshivah still remembers the words Rabbi Strassfeld told him at his job interview. “‘If I have a boy who I feel has outgrown our yeshivah, I am so proud to send him on to the next stage in his growth in learning.’ It was such a breath of fresh air, to listen to someone so real, who didn’t try to convince a boy that it’s really best for him here. To Reb Yossi, it truly wasn’t about him.”

A story told at the shivah: One Purim, Rabbi Strassfeld was at the home of a major Monsey baal tzedakah, when someone walked in whose son had attended the yeshivah many years earlier. After doing something clearly unacceptable, the boy was asked to leave.

The former parent, in a totally sober state, came over to Reb Yossi and slapped him across the face in front of all present, sending his hat flying. Reb Yossi simply picked up his hat and walked away. Later, someone told him, “I just want you to know that I stood up for your kavod after you left.” His response? “It wasn’t necessary.”

Unbreakable Belief

Emotion came easily to Reb Yossi, and he was entirely comfortable showing it. At every mesibah in the yeshivah he would jump up on his chair and dance. His brother-in-law, Reb Sender Hirth, says he can’t recall a time when Reb Yossi gave a shmuess and didn’t end up crying. “And I’d end up crying, too. Whenever he davened, he’d cry. He was a very real person. He cried when he needed to, whether out of happiness or sadness.”

And because he was so full of feeling, he understood, too, the emotions of others. A story he’d tell often to get talmidim to think about others’ feelings was that of two bochurim walking down the hallway, when one brushes against the other. The second boy flies into a rage, and when the first boy complains to the rosh yeshivah, the latter tells him, “You have to understand that when someone has a broken arm and you brush against it, it’s extremely painful. Sometimes, a boy may be screaming and acting up because he has a broken heart, but he’s not going to tell you that. You’ve got to understand on your own that he’s got a broken heart.”

Over time, Rabbi Strassfeld succeeded in bringing to life the dream he’d dreamt, of a place where young men are built, not demolished; where they come to believe in Hashem, but also that Hashem believes in them; where the rosh yeshivah called his boys “my Chaim, my Yanky,” and meant it.

Here, Chazal’s statement, banim eilu hatalmidim, was no mere metaphor. On Shabbos, he and the rebbetzin would sit together at every meal in the yeshivah, with the bochurim all around them. It was, says their son Reb Shaya, a “family matzav, the boys were at my parents’ Shabbos seudah.”

Clevelander Eliyahu Koval says that as an out-of-towner, “if I got sick, I couldn’t go home like a guy from Monsey could. Rabbi Strassfeld would come to your bed, he’d get you medicine, he’d take you to the doctor, all himself. He never got someone else to do it for him, no matter how busy he was.” And when a bochur from out-of-town had nowhere to go on an off-Shabbos, it was obvious that he would spend Shabbos with the Strassfelds.

“When it didn’t work out for a bochur in the yeshivah,” Rabbi Butrimovitz reminisces, “he would sit there crying, ‘I want you to know, we’re all facing the same yetzer hara, we’re all fighting it together. Zeeskeit, you are one of my boys — never forget that. You can come back any time you want, because you may be going to learn in a different yeshivah now, but this is always your home.”

What defined Reb Yossi perhaps more than anything else, Reb Shaya observes, was his unshakeable belief in his boys. “He’d tell them, ‘just hold my hand and I’ll get you to the finish line. I can’t drag you, but if you’ll hold my hand, we’ll get to the finish line together.’ And he did.

“He would often tell the story of a boy who just couldn’t learn, telling the Rabbi, ‘I just can’t do it. Many rebbeim told me I could, but I just can’t.’ He told the boy, ‘We’re going to make a half-hour seder late at night and you’re going to see that you can make a leining.’ After six months of learning together, the boy was able to do it. Reflecting on the experience, Rabbi Strassfeld would say, ‘I’m not some kind of master kriah specialist. I just believed in him and showed him that he could.’”

As a Lakewood teenager, Srulie Epstein was a self-described “lost boy” when he first discovered Rabbi Strassfeld. The 12th of 14 children, he’d lost his father, also his best friend, and spent his tenth grade year out of school. Then, Rav Matisyahu Solomon encouraged him to check out Englewood, and after meeting Reb Yossi for an hour, he was awestruck.

“He listened to every single word that every single talmid said. He heard what was bothering them, but he never forced them to grow; the growth just happened. He trimmed the bushes as needed, but he never forced the growth. And he never flinched from any issue. You could tell him, ‘Rebbi, the world is crumbling, it’s done, it’s over,’ but he didn’t flinch,” said Srulie. “I can’t tell you how many times I sat schmoozing with the Rebbetzin, when a former talmid who’d been asked to leave the yeshivah would come in because he needed to speak to Reb Yossi. Where in the yeshivah world do you have an ex-student coming back to the rosh yeshivah? He was like our second father.”

Good News and Bad News

Englewood was such a dream come true for Reb Yossi, and then, in the midst of it all — a nightmare. In March 2015, as he approached age 65, he was diagnosed with cancer. Not wanting his illness to ruin the Yom Tov joy, he didn’t share the news with a single soul until after Pesach, not even with his wife.

When the new zeman began, the way he broke the news to the boys was vintage Reb Yossi: He used his trademark humor in an effort to soften the blow for them. After the first Minchah in yeshivah, he stood up and said, “I have good news and bad news. I went to the doctor and he said I have to undergo treatments. My hair is going to fall out, but I don’t want anyone to be scared of me. The good news is that the doctor said after I finish the treatment, my hair’s going to grow back, and that’s great news because I’ve been trying for 30 years to get my hair to grow!”

Over the next year and a half, Reb Yossi waged a fierce seesaw battle with the dreaded machalah, undergoing surgery followed by an extended hospitalization, and finally regaining his strength to the point that on his last Shavuos, he stayed up through the night, learning with his boys and shepping nachas from the roar of Torah learning in the yeshivah’s beis medrash.

Then, in Elul, the disease returned. Still, that Yom Kippur he fasted through the day. Every year, at the end of the Yom HaKadosh, his excitement would burst forth with clapping and dancing. This time, too, he danced, his whole being radiating with an ethereal joy. Perhaps, in retrospect, this time it was a farewell tantz, a last chance to show his love for Hashem and for His children in a beis medrash whose very walls were suffused with Reb Yossi’s overflowing passion.

Winter zeman began, and Reb Yossi remained at home. Englewood was a different place; the Rabbi wasn’t there. Rabbi Dworetsky shares a last snapshot from those trying days: “Six weeks before his petirah, when he was home because there was nothing more to do, we went — for the very last time — to consult with him about a boy; he came from a very broken home and we just didn’t know what to do with him. ‘Just love him,’ he told us, ‘just love him.’ The kid turned around.”

On Motzaei Shabbos Chanukah, the entire mesivta came to have a Melaveh Malkah with him at his daughter’s Monsey home. He was too weak to even speak, but he sat there for ten minutes just connecting emotionally with the boys.

That night, at 1 a.m., Hatzalah took him to the hospital. Just over a week later, he was gone.

In his tzavaah, with his typical concern for others, he had asked that the levayeh take place as early in the morning as possible so people could get to work. As it happened, it ended up being on Asarah B’ Teves, a Sunday, and a thousand people gathered on only two hours’ notice. Talmidim who’d learned in the yeshivah ten years earlier stood bawling, as if their own father had died. Rav Elya Brudny gave a hesped describing Reb Yossi as unique in our generation, speaking of him as a gaon in being able to seeing the totality of a bochur and knowing what he needed to work on first and what had to come later.

Initially, Rabbi Strassfeld had wanted to be buried in Eretz Yisrael but later changed his mind, opting instead for kevurah in Lakewood, explaining that this way “my talmidim will have somewhere to come daven.” That’s the sort of consideration that could only have been made by someone whose love for his talmidim was such that he felt it necessary to write in his tzavaah that “I did NOT love my talmidim like my own children. My children were always loved by me on a completely different level. “

During the shivah, with the yeshivah in deep mourning, Rabbi Dworetsky asked Chai Lifeline to send someone to speak with the boys. The organization contacted a rebbi in Lakewood who said, “I don’t usually speak outside Lakewood but I was at the kevurah and I’ve never seen anything like it… the achdus, the emotion. I’m coming.” He was hoping to get a few boys to say something — but the session went on for two hours. “The rebbi didn’t know what hit him,” says Rabbi Dworetsky, as the boys packed the room, telling story after story. Some made them cry, some made them laugh, but all were about how he cared for them and understood them.

It has been a year, a difficult one, since Reb Yossi took leave, but his spirit hovers still over his extraordinary yeshivah. At the Strassfeld home in Englewood, the Rebbetzin sits in her kitchen on Erev Shabbos the way the Rabbi did, the refrigerator door adorned with pictures of alumni and their growing families, as the phone rings every few minutes with a bochur calling to say good Shabbos or just to tell her what’s going on in his life.

And across the street, at the yeshivah, Rabbi Strassfeld’s sons and son-in-law continue the Englewood legacy. It’s there, in the unusual warmth that’s palpable when one enters the beis medrash, in the kesher that’s apparent from seeing even a momentary exchange between rebbi and talmid.

Reb Yossi’s family watched him write Englewood’s Chapter One, as for decades, he lavished love and wise guidance on every single boy who came his way, and now, with the understanding and empathy he bequeathed them, they’re hard at work on Chapter Two. Together, these chapters comprise one of the greatest stories of the Torah world today.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 691)