While the promises in Vienna didn’t initially pan out for a young Yaacov Frenkel, he held on to his emunah, and today Rabbiner Frenkel is well-positioned to help the city’s Jews across the board. “We take care of everyone”

A Tortuous Course

Helping people to pick themselves up by their bootstraps is a cause near and dear to Rabbiner Frenkel. He understands poverty and deprivation as well as anyone.

He grew up in a 27-meter (300 square-foot) apartment in the Mekor Baruch section of Jerusalem. As a child and as a bochur, he learned in Belz mosdos. He got married and learned in a kollel, but family circumstances soon forced him to seek a parnassah.

One day, a friend told him about an ad he saw advertising a vacancy for a cheder rebbi in Vienna.

“I never saw the ad myself but I needed a job,” Rabbiner Frenkel said.

But before making a life-changing decision, he consulted with his rebbe — the renowned “Reb Usher” — Rav Asher Freund ztz”l — a saintly Jerusalem rabbi known both for his ruach hakodesh and for founding Yad Ezra, a pioneering chesed organization for needy families. Reb Usher was one of the rabbanim whose advice proved pivotal in pulling Rabbiner Frenkel through all of his biggest trials and tribulations, professional, financial, and personal.

“Reb Usher just said, ‘go and you will succeed,’ ” he recalls.

But he never said it would be easy. Rabbiner Frenkel soon discovered that not everything turned out as advertised. This was 2002. Up to that point, Vienna’s school for chareidi boys was quite small. Many boys didn’t continue in the system after kindergarten, and in Rabbiner Frenkel’s first few years, enrollment was minimal. By 2006, it seemed to be a lost cause, and the school informed Rabbiner Frenkel that it would have to part ways with him.

“We don’t know what we can offer you, but we wish you the best,” is more or less how it was presented to him.

By this time, Rabbiner Frenkel had children of his own. He had delved into the  real estate business to try and augment his salary as a cheder rebbi, but deals were few and far between. “I said to myself, ‘What am I going to do now?’ And what would I do if I went back to Israel?”

Frenkel had purchased an apartment in Beitar before he left for Vienna, and his seller agreed to take payments over a few years so that the young Frenkel family wouldn’t have to take out a mortgage. But now the job was gone, and so was his ability to meet his payments, which included several thousand dollars in renovations that now needed to be done.

At the recommendation of a friend, he went to pray at the kever of the Chasam Sofer, about an hour’s drive from Vienna. He made a promise that if his prayers were answered, he would become a walking advertisement for the segulah of davening at the Chasam Sofer’s kever.

Miracles do happen. Shortly thereafter, Rabbiner Frenkel closed a real estate deal that provided him with enough money to pay the seller the remainder of his debt and to make some badly needed renovations on the apartment.

The story has a couple of postscripts.

“One of my cousins, whose wife was having trouble bearing children, heard my story and said, if it worked for you, it would work for me too, so he asked me to make another trip to the Chasam Sofer’s kever and daven for them,” Rabbiner Frenkel said.

Lightning struck twice in the same place. The couple not only had a son — but he was born on the Chasam Sofer’s yahrtzeit. When the Belzer Rebbe heard this story, he advised the couple to name the boy Moshe, after the Chasam Sofer.

While Rabbiner Frenkel overcame that financial hurdle, his career was still in a downturn. This was now 2007-2008, when the housing bubble burst worldwide, along with the stock and bond markets, flushing trillions of dollars of wealth down the drain.

Real estate no longer looked attractive, and Rabbiner Frenkel was struggling again. “I hardly had what to eat, and I was very down on myself,” he recalls.

By this time, Reb Usher had passed away, so Rabbiner Frenkel consulted with the Rachmistrivka Rebbe, who advised him to say one of the books of Tehillim every day for 40 days, and that would serve as a segulah for his parnassah.

This happened around Pesach time, and Rabbiner Frenkel found it easier said than done. He missed a day, twice, and Rabbiner Frenkel had to start from scratch, like the nazir who inadvertently stumbles into something that contaminates him and must start his count from scratch.

The month of Elul is a propitious one to get serious about teshuvah, so on or about the 10th of Elul, as Rabbiner Frenkel recalls, he decided to buckle down. “I told myself I wouldn’t take off my tefillin after Shacharis until I had said my Tehillim.”

He kept his word this time. His 40 days ended that year on Hoshana Rabbah.

Two days later, right after Simchas Torah, the blessing fell in his lap.

“The head of the Machsike Hadass came to me, out of the blue, and said, ‘You know, Yaacov, I’ve been thinking about you. I have an opening for managing director of the organization, and you’re the man I want.”

He accepted on the spot and started the next day.

“What it all taught me is that when you have emunas tzaddikim, and you follow what they tell you, that’s the secret to success,” he said. “It wasn’t my hishtadlus or my talent or my mazel or anything but that.”

The Nazis thought they’d obliterated every trace of Jewish life when they burned the building, but the voices of Torah study two flights up are a sweet revenge for the ravages that lie underground

R

abbiner Frenkel is not looking for credit. He seeks only accomplishments on behalf of the community. He notes with much satisfaction that Machsike Hadass does not operate in a vacuum, and none of the community’s success would be possible without the support of not only the wider chassidishe community of some 150 families, which includes Belz and Satmar, but also of the broader Jewish community.

That includes an estimated 600-700 Jews of Bukharian ancestry, many of whom emigrated to Vienna from the former Soviet states of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and another 150-200 families of Georgian ancestry. Many still live in the same neighborhoods, mainly in Leopoldstadt, the major Jewish neighborhood before World War II.

As we chat in his office on the third story of an office building on Gredlerstrasse 4, the noise, which includes automobiles, streetcars, and the ever-present construction, rises from the street below. I ask Rabbiner Frenkel if he can close the windows, and he tells me that the building is not air conditioned, so my choice is to bear the noise or suffer from the heat. I choose the former.

Rabbiner Frenkel himself seems undisturbed by the distractions. He can keep his focus on whatever he is doing now, and even if he begins to stray from the topic of my question to be more expansive, he will pull himself back on track. He’s mindful and diligent. He likes to lead by example, and not just talk, often motioning me away from his desk so he can show me what he’s describing. He is also a student of history.

Aside from the tables of voting records that he shows me, his archives include details of recent Austrian state elections, and even historical information dating back to the mid-19th century, including details of Emperor Franz Joseph I. One year after taking power in 1848, Franz Joseph was the one who encouraged the Jewish community to start organizing itself when he canceled a longstanding prohibition against Jewish organizations. Franz Joseph even granted Jews equal rights in 1867, and in 1869 visited Jerusalem, where he established a fund that would enable Jews to formally organize elsewhere, in addition to a Talmudic Academy in Budapest.

“His idea was that Jews, just like all other religions in Austria, should have one formal body that represents their religious interests before the government,” Rabbiner Frenkel said.

Today, the Jewish Community of Vienna, known as the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG), fulfills that function. The IKG is the official umbrella group that attends to Jewish needs and causes before the Austrian government, including religious and social affairs, education, and immigration.

Rabbiner Frenkel won a seat on the board in 2012, won reelection in 2017, and is running for reelection in this month’s Jewish community elections. Seven factions hold seats on the 24-member board, and Frenkel’s faction, which he named Kehille, holds three of those 24 seats. He also takes pride in the fact that his faction provided the votes that helped Oskar Deutsch to become the IKG president, a job that calls for direct contact with government officials. European politics is very organized, and the only way for Jewish organizations to obtain any government funding is to be recognized as the official representative of the community, which the IKG is. So Frenkel is well-positioned to assist Vienna’s Jews, but his goal is to provide that from a lower perch.

“I never wanted a position like that for myself,” Frenkel explains. “It’s more gratifying for me to be the kingmaker than a king.”

He may not be a pollster or a data scientist either, but Rabbiner Frenkel has statistics, which he shares with me, that prove that the majority of Vienna’s Jews who voted for his faction are not members of his natural chassidic community.

“There’s no way we could have gotten as many votes as we did, even if all of the 150 or so chassidic families had voted for me.

“Our support comes from across the Jewish spectrum, because I take care of everyone,” Frenkel adds. “My emphasis is Torah v’chesed and chesed v’Torah, and it travels both ways. On one hand, we take care of the chareidi world so they won’t be shortchanged, and we also watch out for the little guy, that he shouldn’t lack anything.”

An Ill-Advised Letter

Rabbiner Frenkel’s tenure with IKG got off to a choppy start, and he almost didn’t survive his first year in office.

The trouble began when he endorsed Sebastian Kurz in advance of the September 2013 national elections.

The 27-year-old Kurz had become the wunderkind of Austrian politics. Tall and telegenic, Kurz had led the youth arm of the electoral campaign of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and had also served as state secretary to the Ministry of Interior. The ÖVP, which is currently the ruling party in Austria, is center-right, and was facing stiff competition from the far-right Freedom Party, which was home to more than a handful of neo-Nazis. So it made sense to endorse a center-right party rather than a far-right party, yet the personal endorsement of Kurz is what got Rabbiner Frenkel into hot water.

Austria has a quirky election system. Voters cast paper ballots by drawing an X in a circle by the party of their choice. In addition to choosing a party, voters have the option to write one name as a “preferential vote” for a specific candidate on the party list.

“It doesn’t make you into the prime minister, or the party leader, but the party can see who’s most popular and can say, he’s someone we need to reckon with or promote to an important position,” Rabbiner Frenkel said.

In his endorsement, Rabbiner Frenkel filled in a sample ballot writing in Kurz’s name as his preferential vote. Some 4.7 million votes were cast in that general election, and just 160,000 voters chose a preferential candidate. Kurz finished first with 35,728 preferential votes, defeating Hans-Christian Strache of the far-right Freedom Party by some 7,000 votes.

Frenkel may have picked a winner, but his big mistake was writing his endorsement on official IKG stationery, a political faux pas that implied the organized Jewish community backed Kurz.

It turned into a scandal. Rabbiner Frenkel still has the newspaper clippings, which he showed me. The president of the IKG admonished Frenkel and immediately sprung into damage control, clarifying that the Jewish community does not endorse any candidate or political party, other than to warn Jewish voters not to vote for neo-Nazi parties.

Why did Rabbiner Frenkel step out of line?

For starters, he says, it was supporters of Kurz who had approached him, because he was a new Jewish community board member, and they wanted his support.

Rabbiner Frenkel thought he could lobby Kurz and the ÖVP to ease the path for immigration to Austria and cut bureaucratic red tape so that more Jews could settle in Vienna. He also hoped to obtain official recognition that yeshivah gedolah students would be considered on par with university students so their parents could continue to receive student stipends on their behalf.

“From my point of view, I wanted to leverage this to our advantage to help our community, and Kurz seemed agreeable, but it boomeranged on me,” Rabbiner Frenkel said.

Many Jewish community board members demanded his resignation, including some coalition partners. Rather than make a hasty decision, Rabbiner Frenkel traveled to Israel to consult with the Kretshenif Rebbe of Kiryat Gat.

“The Rebbe told me just one thing,” Rabbiner Frenkel recalls. “Don’t be afraid. It will all work out well.”

When he returned to Vienna, he found that the mood had changed. So had the agenda. The item on the board meeting that was going to call for his scalp was amended to a brief discussion of whether an individual board member could issue a letter, or take a public position, using IKG stationery or its logo. They decided to bar it, without advance coordination, but after that, the matter was settled.

To this day, Rabbiner Frenkel can only speculate as to what changed on the ground during his brief trip to Israel. The board may have deemed it inadvisable to open a public rift inside the Jewish community. It could also be that many shared the same political views and were concerned firing Rabbiner Frenkel could harm their relations with the ÖVP and Kurz.

Once again, there was no other explanation for him but his reliance on emunas chachamim. “I once again observed the power of tzaddikim from the advice that my rebbe gave me not to be afraid and everything would turn out well.”

Safely ensconced in his seat, Rabbiner Frenkel thought he was now in an ideal position to cash in on Kurz’s promises and approached him shortly after the election, only to have those hopes dashed.

Kurz had become the foreign minister, and as the saying goes, the view from here isn’t the same as the view from there. Kurz placed a higher priority on upgrading relations with Israel, and the Netanyahu government, than on attending to the needs of the local Jewish community.

By the next year, millions of migrants began streaming into Europe, including Austria, as refugees from the “Arab Spring” or totalitarian African countries. The timing wasn’t right to ask for favors for new immigrants, even Jewish ones.

I asked Rabbiner Frenkel what he learned from his mistake. He drew back a bit in his chair.

He contemplated his response and after a lengthy silence, he leaned forward and spoke softly.

“You know who makes mistakes? Someone who does things. Someone who doesn’t do things will never make mistakes.”

Having said that, Rabbiner Frenkel credits Kurz — who later became chancellor for two different stints, totaling three years — for being good to the Jews, and more government funding did begin to flow to the Jewish community.

“In the long run, I think that without my letter and support, things wouldn’t have moved along so smoothly,” he says. “Plus Kurz and his party understood that helping the Jewish community would open doors for them in the world, especially with Israel and the United States, particularly if they were seen as fighting against anti-Semitism.”

H

aving learned to be more judicious with the political influence that a public position grants, Rabbiner Frenkel settled down after the controversy to launch what’s become his flagship project inside the Jüdisches Berufliches Bildungszentrum (JBBZ), or Jewish Professional Educational Center.

Originally opened in 1992 by a nonobservant Jew, and subsidized by the government, the JBBZ offers vocational training and continuing education to young Jews, both native Austrians and immigrants, so they can be integrated into the national job market.

Seeing that there was a niche for chareidim looking to enter the job market, Rabbiner Frenkel leveraged the goodwill he’d built and his political connections to lobby for government aid for an additional program that would offer separate classes for men and women, in an environment more suitable to chareidim.

Aside from Ukrainian Jews who need immediate help, Vienna has long been a major, centrally located European transit point. Many young chareidim find shidduchim in Vienna and end up staying.

“For me, this was born out of necessity,” Rabbiner Frenkel said. “We needed a place for chareidim where they can learn the language, and a profession, in a manner that does not contradict their religious needs and sensitivities. And it’s not just for chareidim. It’s for anyone who wants to learn a trade in a religious Jewish environment, without distractions.”

He admits he came up against resistance to the concept of separate classes. That didn’t bother him. “I’m used to fighting for everything I’ve ever achieved.”

Eventually, he was able to persuade the right people to provide financing for his program, on the condition that it operate in the same facility to avoid duplication of expenses.

Fortunately, the JBBZ offices have plenty of room. Rabbiner Frenkel set up ground rules for modest dress and conduct, but with maximum sensitivity toward the staff, he also set aside space for a separate kitchen for non-Jewish staffers.

When he started his program in 2014, initially, there was no need for separate classes: Only women signed up for the courses. During the next year or two, the project caught on and men applied. Now in its sixth year, his program offers a full curriculum funded by the Federal Ministry of Labor and Economy, to the tune of about €350,000 to €400,000 ($350,000 to $400,000).

As he shows me around the classrooms, Rabbiner Frenkel stops at one picture on the wall with a group of chareidi men from a variety of religious streams. “All of them learned to be mashgichim here, and all are working today either as mashgichim or in related professions.”

He also shows me pictures and examples of classwork in computer programming and graphics, office management programs, real estate, and how to run a retail outlet or a warehouse. All of the school’s computers have filtered Internet, and Rabbiner Frenkel consults with the rav of the Machsike Hadass kehillah, Rav Moshe Eliezer Weiss, along with other gedolei Yisrael.

He hopes his program can serve as an example in other chareidi communities in Europe, but he wants to make it clear that none of these courses come at the expense of limudei kodesh.

“I’m not trying to change anything or introduce secular studies into the yeshivos,” he said. “But there must be programs for young people who need to make a parnassah, and that’s what we’ve created here.”

The Stadttempel, Vienna’s main synagogue, somehow emerged relatively unscathed from Kristallnacht

Let Your Soul Lead

For the future, he hopes that the program for mashgichim that he started will take off and that Vienna can become a center for G-d-fearing men who want to learn the field and apply their knowledge in the workplace.

It’s a project that one day may help his growing family as well. Overall, life in Vienna has been very good for Rabbiner Frenkel. He has five children — two boys and three girls — and he recently became a grandfather. He has made his mark on the community and invests in its growth every waking hour.

Rabbiner Frenkel is biting his nails a bit as the Jewish community returns to the polls this month to vote in elections for the new composition of the IKG board of directors, held every five years. He hopes to improve on his three-seat showing in the 2017 ballot, but is taking nothing for granted, working tirelessly and reaching out to all community members asking for their support, and their votes.

Despite his many successes, he is reticent about advising other askanim in other lands where the culture and politics are different, but from his vantage point having gained a “seat at the table,” he has some experience he can share.

“A person who cares about the future of his children and his kehillah, and wants them to earn an honorable living while adhering to the purity of their Torah values, must knock on every door possible,” Rabbiner Frenkel said. “You must learn the local turf to discover all sources of funding, national, state, and local, including philanthropic sources. If a person has the desire in his soul to do this, he will succeed, but he must make his goal into serving Hashem, and not just looking for the parnassah.”

Before we parted ways, Rabbiner Frenkel left me with a devar Torah that encapsulates his worldview.

The Gemara in Maseches Makkos (10b) brings several proofs of the axiom that a person is led in the way in which he walks.

The Maharsha points out that the Gemara uses the term molichim for being led, which is stated in the plural. He notes that every person’s thoughts, words, and actions create a malach, an angel that can lead the person either toward good, or chas v’shalom toward evil. It all depends on the will of the person. So if a person uses his force of will for the good, the angels he creates will combine their forces and lead him to bigger and better accomplishments.

“I’d rather give a devar Torah than give tips to others. I’m not big enough for that, but I try to carry out the mission that burns inside me. Anyone who cares, and says there’s a need to be filled, and it bothers him that it’s not being filled, is the one who will be rewarded by being the one to do it.”

Buried No Longer

Malzgasse 16, which today houses the Machsike Hadass cheder in Vienna, has a storied history.

Built by Isidor Giesskann and Theodor Schreier, the latter a Jewish architect, murdered in the Holocaust, it housed a Talmud Torah beginning in the 1870s, with the addition of a synagogue in 1906 and the world’s first Jewish museum in 1913.

The fires of Kristallnacht, the nights of November 9 and 10, 1938 incinerated it all. The Nazis ransacked the school and synagogue. The museum had already been closed and its collections confiscated.

The Nazi authorities ordered the Jewish community to utilize the building as an old-age home, but from June to October 1942, it served as a staging point for preparations for the mass deportations to the concentration camps.

Both during and after World War II, the building housed a Jewish hospital, but the Talmud Torah was reopened on the site in 1956.

As Arieh Bauer, the secretary-general of Machsike Hadass, shows me the original plans for the building from the 19th century, he tells me how his grandmother was an eyewitness to the savage destruction that Kristallnacht wrought.

“My grandmother was expelled from Vienna the next year,” Bauer said. “The Nazis called it emigration. Emigration is not the right word. They stole everything from her, and she had to flee to Shanghai, where she lived in a cellar after a harrowing journey.”

We noted earlier about the discoveries buried in the approximately 700 tons of debris removed from the basement floor of the building, and Bauer supervised every stage of the process.

The Federal Monuments Authority was also summoned to inventory and examine individual artifacts. While the community has assumed everything was destroyed in the fires and reduced to charred ashes, much miraculously remained intact.

That included dented and rusty dishes from the school kitchen, the undamaged inkpots, the face of a clock, a stained glass window that was only partially melted, and even the remains of two of the incendiary devices that likely destroyed the building.

All of these, plus architectural drawings, were displayed to the public for the first time in November 2019, in an exhibition titled “Buried No Longer: Jewish-Austrian History in Vienna’s Malzgasse 16,” held at the House of Austrian History.

Three years later, Bauer is busy with plans for renovating the historic Jewish site. He would like to use the emptied basement for school expansion and convert the entire structure into a four-story building, with a playground on the roof.

“The shul would be reopened for the Talmud Torah, conserving parts and refurbishing others,” Bauer said. “Near the main entrance, we would like to build a Holocaust memorial site where the artifacts are exhibited and open to the public, and we have been in contact with the government about this, although progress has been slow until now.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 934)