But he offers an important caveat: “Before everything,” he says, “these are creations of HaKadosh Baruch Hu. Chazal remind us that a person who acts in an unseemly manner is told, ‘The mosquito was created before you.’ It’s not a joke. It’s a lesson in life.”

No Beatles in Belarus

Despite his name and long frock, Friedman was raised with little Jewish upbringing. He was born in the city of Barysaw (Borisov) in Belarus in 1973, during the Soviet era. Most of the Jews there had long forgotten their religiosity, including his family.

So how did he get the name Leibele? Simple — he’s named for a great-grandmother. “Her name was Leah, so they just took the first letter and continued with Leonid, my Russian name. My grandmother was a very pious woman. The story goes that after the last shochet left town, she stopped eating meat. In time, when I began to take an interest in Torah and mitzvos, my parents began to doubt themselves. ‘Maybe we made a mistake giving you that name? You’re starting to act too much like her….’ ”

When he was young, the family moved to Minsk, where he spent most of his childhood and adolescent years. Even then, he didn’t quite fit in; there was something markedly different about him. Special, smart, and… Jewish. “The accent always pursues me,” he chuckles. “There in Minsk, they said my accent gave me away as a Jew. Here in Israel, they tell me I’m a Russian.”

He has almost no positive memories of his school years. “Maybe, after I retire, I’ll sit down and write about some of those bitter memories.” He can hardly speak about the persecution he experienced. His peers chased him, beat him, and none of the adults intervened. “I knew there was nowhere for me to run, not even to the teachers’ room, because the teachers wouldn’t protect me. Sometimes they even encouraged the beatings.”

Some teachers personally harassed him as well. “There was one teacher who I especially remember, a Jew who tried to deny his origins. I guess I was a visible reminder of who he really was and where he came from, and so he’d vent all his frustrations at me. He would even lower my test scores. I remember him once rejecting a correct answer that I wrote. I knew I was right and tried fighting for my answer, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”

In frozen Belarus, beetles were not common, but Leibele nonetheless found some specimens and became fascinated with the tiny insects. “I think I started with it when I was in kindergarten,” he says. “What I know for certain is that by first grade, I already had my own collection.”

He studied up on beetles in libraries — the same way he learned about Judaism decades later. “Religion always interested me. My grandparents, who were already older retirees, were less fearful of the Soviet rules, and they were more engaged with their Jewish identity. They spoke Yiddish and weren’t embarrassed to be Jewish like my parents were. I would spend time with them, listening and learning from them. Those were my first lessons in Yiddishkeit. That is the extent of what was possible in the Communist realm in those days.”

The end to Reb Leibele’s personal troubles came when he was a teenager. The Iron Curtain fell and he and his parents made aliyah to Eretz Yisrael. He landed straight into the 12th grade at the Kugel High School in Holon. “We didn’t know anything about Holon,” he says. “We just ended up there.” Even though he barely knew Hebrew, Friedman still passed his matriculation exams. Those days were difficult, but he remembers one recompense: “Here, I felt at home.”

It took him a while before he found any religious mentors or took an interest in Torah Judaism. “With time I connected with a chassidic rav, a Chabad chassid, and I began to find a new rhythm and purpose to my life.” He learned about the roots of Yiddishkeit and studied halachah. At the same time, he was accepted for a bachelor’s degree program in biology at Bar Ilan University, married, and settled down in the settlement of Kedumim.

It is more or less the point that he returned to his childhood hobby — insects. He traveled to Tel Aviv University, where he was introduced to Dr. Amnon Friedberg, an entomologist and global expert on flies, who urged him to indulge his interest in weevils.

Insect Salad

Today, Reb Leibele is guardian over one of the largest bug collections in the region. He takes me down to the lower level of the building, where he produces a different magnetic card. We enter a large, sterile room that resembles an archive: Endless cupboards, each of which contains dozens of drawers. And in every drawer there are boxes, each of which has dozens of species of preserved insects.

Surprisingly, there’s brisk business in this field. “This, for example,” he points to a large, colorful creature, “we got as a gift from a collector from Europe. He had some of these to trade. In exchange, we gave him a local species from here.”

He collaborates with fellow entomologists from across the region, even from countries that don’t have official relations with Israel. “I have friends in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. I keep up with them. We don’t take photos together, but we do send each other beetles and literature. There’s mutual assistance.”

It’s not so easy to compile a collection of weevils. Like other collectors’ items, there are more and less valuable specimens. Leibele’s collection spans borders and countries. Often, he travels to a certain country where he hopes to find a certain rare species of weevil, but comes up empty. “There are successes and there are disappointments,” he says.

There is an irony in collecting, too. All too often, scientists collect rich pickings of specimens on their expeditions, only to find that the beetles eat the rarest specimens during the trip back to the lab. “It’s hard to understand,” he says. “You’d think they’re willfully taking revenge on us, doing it just to spite us. Not long ago, one of our entomologists returned from a collection trip. He brought some rare bugs, but by the time he got here, it turned out that the insects had beat him to it. They ate up all the specimens. There was also a case where there was a pair of insects, one male and one female. The male is much rarer. Which do you think the insects ate?”

Behind one of the cupboards I notice a quite familiar sign. “Danger!” it reads, in red lettering. “Issurim d’Oraisa.” It’s an advertisement warning chareidi consumers against eating certain leafy vegetables. Depicted are several repulsive images of magnified insects that look like scary frogs. “This is what the insects in your salad look like,” the ad intones.

Reb Leibele has a different view of the issue. First of all, he says, the person who identified the insects got all their names wrong. Second, he calls the fear of bugs in food “absolute hysteria.”

“I’m not a rav or a posek, but I am a professional,” he explains. “There are entire sectors today that completely avoid certain important fruits and vegetables because they’re so scared of bugs. True, there are fruits and vegetables that tend to become more infested, but if you really know about insects, you know that you don’t have to cut produce out of your diet. It’s the lack of knowledge that leads to hysteria.”

Given that Reb Leibele is a big fan of bugs, what happens when someone in his family finds one in the house and wants it permanently removed?

“Oh, it’s a whole fuss,” Reb Leibele says, laughing. “Sometimes they wake Abba up to tell him about an interesting creature. In most cases, they’re things that are not worth making an effort for. But there are times when it certainly is worth it. It’s a bit like the parable about the treasure underneath the bridge. Sometimes you go to Africa to look for something and in the end you discover it in your own backyard. It’s happened to me. I’ve found some of the rarest species in Israel on my window.”

Just before we part, I ask Reb Leibele the million-dollar question. How does he feel being the only chareidi Israeli in a tiny field dominated by secular scientists and enthusiasts?

“What a question,” he says. “We believe that everything has a purpose. Whether we like it or not, over the coming decades, the religious public is projected to become a majority in Israel. We have to be involved in all places, even in research. I don’t want to sound proud, but the fact that I’m here is a very Jewish statement. You can be successful in the academic world and be involved in research without being ashamed of your Yiddishkeit.”

BEETLES AND THE BIBLE

Here’s an almost chassidic vort about beetles: The Hebrew word for beetle, chipushit, is actually quite new. It is derived from the root word of chipus, searching, Reb Leibele explains. Why? Because beetles move about like they are searching for something. Consequently, “searching” is something we can learn from the beetle. And that’s the story of his life. Searching — chipus. Chofesh — freedom. Chipushiyot — beetles.

What about beetles and the Bible, I ask Reb Leibele. “The truth is,” Reb Leibele says, “that there is no mention of beetles in the Gemara. The closest thing to it is “putisa,” which is mentioned in the mishnah in Maseches Makkos (16b). Everyone explains that it’s a “water insect” but it’s likely that it is from this family.”

While we’re on the subject of living things and Torah, I ask the entomologist about the techeiles he wears on his tzitzis. No, he’s not a Breslover, he says. “It’s techeiles of a zoologist. I researched the subject on a professional level and decided to wear the dye derived from the “argaman keiheh kotzim,” the hexaplex trunculus, or murex. It’s the most likely to be like the ancient techeiles color.”

THE TALE OF THE DUNG BEETLE

Sometimes it takes a smelly problem to realize how important beetles are, says Reb Leibele. And that reminds him of a story. “When the first colonists arrived on the continent of Australia,” he says, “they brought with them a very high-quality species of goats. For a while, everything was fine. But then they noticed that Australia was becoming covered in goat manure, which was not decomposing as it did back in England.

“That’s when the colonialists learned a lesson about the wonders of Creation. Apparently, there are beetles everywhere that break down this waste, but in Australia the local beetles could not handle it. So the colonists imported thousands of dung beetles, which saved Australia from drowning in goat manure. It is an example that can teach us how these insects are important to our lives.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 789)