Rabbi Pini Dunner, the popular writer, lecturer, history buff, and rabbi of Young Israel of North Beverly Hills, has amassed the world’s largest collection of items related to controversy

Beverly Hills, California — center of fame, fortune and glamour, with glitzy streets like Rodeo Drive and Sunset Boulevard, and within shouting distance of Hollywood — isn’t a place you’d expect to find an intriguing, rare Judaica treasure. But anyone who knows Rabbi Pini (Pinchas Eliezer) Dunner, senior rabbi at the Young Israel of North Beverly Hills, also knows he’s full of unexpected surprises.

Ancient books and letters are surely exciting for collectors and antiquity buffs, but even those who yawn through history lectures might perk up at Rabbi Dunner’s unique collection, because it’s all about contention and controversy. Although an acknowledged expert on antiquarian Hebrew books and manuscripts who’s frequently consulted by libraries, academics, dealers, and private collectors, Rabbi Dunner is no stodgy professor-type. He’s a popular writer, mesmerizing lecturer, and his entertaining and whimsical presentations of historical events have garnered him a national following well beyond the confines of his pulpit.

In fact, his most recent piece of modern historical research has made him into a veritable celebrity. Just a few months ago, he pieced together the unknown story of a rebbe who — forced to flee to America because of disgruntled members of his Eretz Yisrael kehillah and devastated by the decimation of his family and his chassidus in Europe — cast off religion and changed his name, only to return to Eretz Yisrael and Yiddishkeit at the end of his life, after 40 years in self-imposed exile.

“We tend to look at history in the context of ‘then,’ ” Rabbi Dunner says. “What I like to do is present it in the context of now.”

Rabbi Dunner’s passion for history is perhaps linked to his own illustrious heritage. He was born in London in 1970 to Rabbi Aba (Avrohom Moshe) and Miriam Dunner, both of whom escaped the clutches of the Nazis. Rabbi Aba Dunner — a prominent communal activist well-known for his work in Europe on behalf of Jewish causes, including lobbying the EU and individual governments on such issues as shechitah and bris milah, and as director of the Conference of European Rabbis until his passing in 2011 — was just a year old when his parents escaped Nazi Germany in 1938. Miriam Cohen-Dunner, who was born in Nazi-occupied Rotterdam during World War II, was saved by a Christian couple who fostered her until the end of the war.

Rabbi Pini, who says he can trace his lineage back about a thousand years to such Torah luminaries as Rashi and the Maharal of Prague, is keeping the rabbinic chain going. His grandfather, Rabbi Josef Hirsch Dunner, was the last chief rabbi of East Prussia before World War II, and for over 50 years was the presiding rabbi of the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations in London. Rabbi Pini himself is a talmid of Gateshead, Ner Israel in Baltimore, and Lakewood’s Beth Medrash Govoha, where he obtained semichah. He is also a graduate of University College London, where he participated in the Jewish history honors program.

Rabbi Dunner came to Los Angeles with his wife, Sabine, and their six children in 2011, where he served as mashgiach ruchani at Yeshiva University High School of Los Angeles (YULA) for two years before being invited to become rabbi of Young Israel of North Beverly Hills. The founding rabbi of the shul, which opened in the early ’90s to serve the Orthodox community of North Beverly Hills, was Rabbi Sholom Tendler, then head of school at YULA and currently rosh yeshivah of L.A.’s Mesivta Birkas Yitzchok.

“The shul,” says Rabbi Dunner, “is Modern Orthodox, very pro-Israel, with a wide range of observance among the membership. We have just over 100 membership families, and yet it is known to be one of the most philanthropic communities on the West Coast.”

But the beginning of his rabbinical career actually started 20 years before, when he traveled to Moscow to set up a youth camp and work as an assistant to Moscow’s Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt at the Moscow Choral Synagogue — where he found himself a witness to one of the most significant moments in modern history: the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

“When I arrived in Moscow, I went to stay with Rabbi Goldschmidt, who worked very closely with my father promoting Torah needs in Europe,” Rabbi Pini remembers. Rabbi Goldschmidt had stayed with the Dunners in London that year, and encouraged young Pini to join him in Moscow. “As soon as I arrived, Rabbi Goldschmidt said to me, ‘Don’t take your coat off, we’re going to the Kremlin… I mean, we’re going to the Red Square.’ And as we got there they were lowering the flag of the Soviet Union and raising the Russian tricolored one.”

It was the moment when the USSR ceased to exist — Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned, Boris Yeltsin was left in charge, and the Soviet hammer and sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time.

“It was really the very beginning of the reemergence of organized Jewish life in Russia after 70 years,” says Rabbi Dunner. “Most of these people knew absolutely nothing, but everyone wanted to immigrate to Israel, whether they were Jewish or not — they thought this was their route to the West and a good life.”

Rabbi Dunner reflects back on those days, which he calls “a remarkable time.” He and Rabbi Goldschmidt would sit from morning to night meeting people to determine if, in fact, they were actually Jewish. He also worked with fledgling organizations to help set up a Torah-based infrastructure, which involved a mikveh, shechitah, kosher food availability, and giving a hechsher to the first kosher bakery in Moscow.

After serving as assistant rabbi in Moscow, Rabbi Dunner returned to London where he served in various rabbinical capacities, and in 1998 he was invited to launch and lead the innovative, if somewhat unconventional, Saatchi Synagogue for young Jewish professionals in London’s West End.

During that time, Rabbi Dunner took over a failing daily Jewish radio program, which he turned into a much listened to, two-hour daily broadcast, popular for its interviews with both British and Israeli politicians, celebrities, and other people of Jewish interest. In fact, one of those guests would be the catalyst for Pini Dunner’s vast and unusual collection of both fringe and central historical controversies.

“The stories differ but the focus is the same — controversial people, controversial topics, marginal episodes in Jewish history, and the effect they had on Jewish history,” Rabbi Dunner says of the thousands of “controversy” items he’s collected over the past two decades.

And now, the stories behind those items have evolved into a book Rabbi Dunner has just launched entitled Mavericks, Mystics and False Messiahs: Episodes from the Fringes of Jewish History, published by Toby Press.

His very first acquisition — and the original basis for the book — is the largest-sized volume of Shas ever printed, a Maseches Berachos published in 1919 by Rabbi Yosef Shapotshnick. But surely, Rabbi Dunner wasn’t simply looking to be the owner of the largest Shas. So what else was so special about this volume? The backstory, he says, started with his radio show in 1996.