Although Pindrus only formally occupied the position of senior government liaison at Chaim V’Chessed for less than two weeks, months of sustained contact and coordination deepened the relationship between the politician and the organization at a decisive moment: CVC has just marked its tenth anniversary, and its challenges and ambitions continue to evolve.

A decade ago, Chaim V’Chessed operated out of a small apartment. Its dedicated skeleton staff attempted something that seemed improbable at the time: to create an up-to-date and efficient advocacy center in order to help ease the struggles of English-speaking immigrants in a country where bureaucracy is both a national pastime and a national complaint. Ten years later, Chaim V’Chessed now occupies a sleek, state-of-the-art building in Jerusalem’s Har Hotzvim, the city’s technology and industrial hub. The 25-member staff now handles upward of 4,000 cases a month, ranging from medical navigation and social-services advocacy to the labyrinthine dramas related to immigration paperwork.

“People asked me, ‘Why do you need Pindrus? You’re already doing all sorts of wonderful things,’” Rabbi Freedman says. “And it’s true — we’ve made tremendous inroads, we’ve become the go-to address, and we have many government connections. But when you have someone official with you, someone who is a former member of Knesset, who has relationships, who is well-liked across government offices, who knows the system from the inside, that takes things to another level.” He pauses, then adds, almost apologetically, “and although he’s returning to the Knesset, the short time he spent with us was extremely productive. With all due respect to what we ourselves have accomplished, when someone from the political echelon knocks on a door or picks up the phone and makes a call, it puts things in a different league.”

For Pindrus, the almost-position was a natural evolution.

“I come from an American family, so I understand a bit from the inside,” he says. “When you come from a different culture, it’s very easy to get lost. Not everyone has family here. Not everyone has someone to help them. Not everyone has a cousin who works in some office and knows how to push things through. I saw how Chaim V’Chessed filled a vacuum, helping thousands of people. In a way, that’s what I’ve been doing on my own for the last thirty years. So when I found myself out of the Knesset for a few months and received an offer to join Chaim V’Chessed, I jumped at it immediately. And even now, as I’m returning to the Knesset, I have no doubt that I’ll continue to help them.”

When Pindrus’s parents — Rabbi Moshe Pindrus, originally from Cleveland, and Zelda, originally from Boston — met and married in Eretz Yisrael and settled in Jerusalem’s Arzei Habirah neighborhood, the Anglo community was small enough to feel almost intimate.

“Everyone who spoke English knew one another,” Pindrus says.

When the Ohr Somayach yeshivah opened nearby, Rabbi Moshe Pindrus was one of its first maggidei shiur (and more than half a century later, he’s still with the yeshivah). And that meant that Yitzchak, born in 1971 and the oldest of 11, grew up around American baalei teshuvah at a time when the baal teshuvah movement was in its prime, as his parents had no problem bringing spirituality-seeking backpackers into their home.

Shabbos meals meant many lively discussions with searching young Jews, and at least one person, if not more, found those discussions fascinating: young Yitzchak himself, who says he sharpened his English from conversations with their Shabbos guests, even picking up their accent.

As a young child, Yitzchak started out in the Yiddish-language Kamenitz cheder, and then moved to the Zilberman cheder system, which follows the tradition of the Vilna Gaon, including his unique approach to rebuilding Eretz Yisrael in our generation. (He still considers himself a Zilberman talmid and has sent his own children through the specialized system.) At 19, he married Sarah Rottenberg, the daughter of Rav Menachem Rottenberg, mashgiach of the Kol Torah yeshivah. At the time, the norm was that a serious yeshivah bochur received a dirah in Jerusalem when he got married. But the Zilberman approach frowned upon taking large sums from parents and in-laws for an apartment, so the young Pindrus couple decided to settle in the nascent town of Beitar Illit, at the time a circuitous 40-minute drive from Jerusalem.

They were among the first 30 families to move to Beitar, although 1,200 apartments were in the initial construction stages, and those apartments were eminently affordable — about $60,000. But much infrastructure was still missing — there were only three buses a day, and only a few phone lines. Once, the entire city lost its water for three days, as residents hauled buckets of water to their homes from an army truck.

In many ways, Beitar was a new social experiment. It was the government’s first foray into building a chareidi city, and Pindrus fell into the role of unofficial liaison between the people and the government-appointed mayor, Dr. Moshe Leibowitz.

“I was a kollel yungerman, with no intention whatsoever of entering politics or public service,” he says, but after seeing the problems his neighbors and kollel friends were facing in their new, underdeveloped community, he found himself involved in vital communal causes, such as pushing forward a reliable public transportation system, building an eiruv, and helping to establish more kollelim.

For six years, Pindrus’s communal activities were limited to the bein hasedorim lunch break and evenings, but in 1996, when Leibowitz’s mandate to run the city concluded and the first municipal elections were being held, Pindrus ran for city council as a member of the Degel HaTorah party and was voted in as deputy mayor. He also became an ear to the many Anglos who began to populate the city.

Pindrus wanted to take a more proactive approach to developing the city and meeting the needs of its residents, regardless of whether the particular issue technically fell under the municipality’s purview. “I didn’t see it as our job to simply allocate the funds that came in,” he says. “If Beitar was to thrive, we had to take it upon ourselves to create jobs, expand housing, build schools, enhance security, and beef up public transportation — not leave it all to the government.”

When elections were held again in November 2001, Pindrus decided to run for mayor, even though he knew his chances of winning were slim. His party, Degel HaTorah, represented a minority of the population (much of the city was made of up various chassidic kehillos and Sephardi groups), but he was focused on advancing the interests of the city residents without partisan politics.

To the shock of his detractors and even his friends, he squeaked by with a tiny majority, supported in no small measure by the Anglos across the various kehillos who considered him “their man in Beitar.” At the young age of 30, Rabbi Yitzchak Pindrus found himself the mayor of a town of several thousand families — and facing a challenge that would define his career.

By the time Pindrus was elected mayor, construction of Beitar’s Givah B neighborhood was well underway, with the first residents slated to move in within the next few months. But the basic facilities necessary for occupancy — a medical clinic, a mikveh, even shuls and stores — did not exist in this new neighborhood on the adjoining hilltop. Furthermore, there was no road connecting the two neighborhoods, which meant that the new residents would have to take a long, circuitous route to obtain groceries and basic services.

The Housing Ministry was supposed to build a road between the two neighborhoods, but construction had not yet begun because of some technicalities that were preventing the necessary permits from being issued. But Yitzchak Pindrus had not run for mayor in order to blame problems on the national government. After receiving the name of a traffic engineer who could plan a road connecting the two neighborhoods, Pindrus didn’t waste any time. He took Beitar’s city planner with him, got into his car and drove to the fellow’s office in Ramat Gan.

The pair walked into the engineer’s office unannounced. “Hi, my name is Yitzchak,” Pindrus said by way of introduction. “I’m the new mayor of Beitar. How long does it take to plan a road between neighborhoods on two adjacent hilltops?”

“A month,” the traffic engineer replied.

“Okay,” Pindrus said. “I’m sure you can do it in half that time. I’ll be here in two weeks to pick up the plans.”

Two weeks later, plans in hand, Pindrus instructed the city planner to start building the road. “We can’t just break ground,” the city planner argued. “We need to get the necessary permits and make sure the regulations are met.”

“Listen,” Pindrus said. “I’m a Yerushalmi kid who learned in cheder. I didn’t learn about permits and regulations, but I know what a tractor looks like. I want to see one at the site.”

From then on, the city planner got a call from Mayor Pindrus every morning at 8 a.m. “I passed by the area today and I didn’t see a tractor yet. What’s going on?”

“Well,” the city planner director eventually replied, “the Housing Ministry finally agreed to finance the road, but in order to do that, they need me to get nine permits. That’s going to take until August.”

It was already January, just two months until people would start moving in.

“You’re not the city treasurer,” Pindrus told him. “I didn’t ask you to finance the road. I’ll deal with the funding. You get a tractor and start digging.”

The city planner was in a quandary. The unbudgeted NIS 3 million expense of building the new road could have plunged the city into bankruptcy. But the new mayor had told him to bring on the tractors and forget the finances, so he did.

In the meantime, Pindrus called a senior official in the Housing Ministry. “I understand that you have a bunch of permits that my city planner needs. Let me be very clear with you. We’re starting to build a new road here. We’re going to finish building the road as fast as we can, and then we’re going to put up signs at both ends explaining to the residents that the road is closed because we’re waiting for permits from the Housing Ministry.”

The road was finished a few months later, with all the necessary permits, and the funding, supplied by the Housing Ministry. The official name of the street is Hatov V’hameitiv, but to this day it’s still known as “Kvish Pindrus.”

While many well-meaning politicians consider their hands tied by bureaucracy, Yitzchak Pindrus understood that he could circumvent bureaucratic regulations in order to advance the needs of the city’s residents as long as he was willing to stand up straight and explain proudly why he did it.

But in 2008, when he moved back to Jerusalem after losing the 2007 Beitar mayoral election and became a member of the Jerusalem City Council, he realized that what worked in Beitar couldn’t be pulled off in Jerusalem.

“It wasn’t Beitar,” he admits. “I couldn’t just flout the regulations and do what needed to get done. I had to work within the system, and that was definitely more frustrating.”

He eventually became deputy mayor of Jerusalem, but instead of continuing to bang his head against the wall of red tape he faced in the municipality, he left municipal politics in 2019 and instead joined the UTJ Knesset list.

As number eight on the list, due to a reduction of UTJ seats within the ongoing cycle of elections and internal political shuffling, Pindrus has been yoyoed in and out of the Knesset several times in the past seven years, but now, at least, it looks like he’s back for good — or at least until the next round of elections, which are slated for the end of 2026, if not earlier.

And meanwhile, even though he had to officially step away, Chaim V’Chessed is still close to his heart.

“Things changed over the last few decades,” Pindrus says. “Back in the day, practically anyone who spoke English knew each other and helped each other out, or they’d ask their Israeli neighbor to help them.”

But by the time Paysach Freedman arrived in Israel in 1996, “there was already a critical mass of Anglos — we were in the thousands — and the problems were on a completely different scale,” Rabbi Freedman says.

And the numbers have continued to multiply, so has CVC’s workload.

“Just a few days ago, the new US consul general asked to come for a visit,” Rabbi Freedman says. “So we know there are around seven hundred thousand American citizens in Israel. Now, some of them are fully Israeli and don’t speak a word of English, so let’s say you subtract two hundred thousand — you’re still left with several hundred thousand real, bona fide Yankee-Doodle Americans. We know from Bituach Leumi that there are about thirty thousand foreign residents here without citizenship, the vast majority of whom are English speakers. Add to that more than ten thousand yeshivah and seminary students — and I’m not even counting the thousands of people like myself or my children, who are full-fledged Israeli citizens.”

So here’ s the big question: With a population of that size, why is an organization like Chaim V’Chessed still even necessary? If English-speakers make up such a meaningful share of Israeli society, is there a failure within the political system that requires a nonprofit to do what the state ostensibly should?

“To be honest, saying that the government works well in helping people is unfortunately not necessarily true,” says Pindrus, who knows more than anyone how hard it is to make things happen on a governmental level. “Even when an Israeli needs something, he has to push with his elbows. And the bureaucracy is getting worse and worse as the country grows. Getting your rights, getting what you need — it’s not simple. If an Israeli needs an appointment with a specialist, instead of waiting half a year, he calls someone who knows how to make it happen,” Pindrus says. “But the American doesn’t know who to call.”

One of his goals during his short stint at Chaim V’Chessed was to open the system to greater cooperation with civic organizations.

Still, one might assume that a community approaching half a million people would wield political leverage, or at least make politicians attentive to its voting power.

“It doesn’t work that way,” Pindrus admits. “And I’ll tell you why. Israeli bureaucracy doesn’t start with politics — it’s structural. And this is one of the hardest things for Americans, and even Israelis, to grasp. At the end of the day, a minister has very little influence over his own office. The ministries are run by bureaucrats who enter the system in their twenties and stay until they’re seventy. They don’t have to actually accomplish anything; they just have to avoid getting into trouble. That’s the system. And as time goes on, there’s more bureaucracy, not less. This is the main problem both Israelis and Americans face — and even the prime minister faces it.” And as the chareidi community faces its own structural disadvantages within Israeli society, western immigrants within that world end up paying a double price.

For families raising children with disabilities, the bureaucratic challenge is especially acute. Rabbi Freedman knew firsthand what it meant to feel adrift when it came to figuring out what benefits he was entitled to, and actually founded Chaim V’Chessed after having to navigate the system with his own special-needs daughter.

He says the turning point for the organization was in 2021, in the middle of Covid.

“Everything was chaotic — getting into the country, getting out of the country. You needed permits for everything, but there was no way to get an appointment at the Interior Ministry. People were sleeping in the streets just to secure a slot. Eventually we managed to secure a meeting with the ministry official in charge, but he thought we were exaggerating, so he challenged us: ‘Bring me all the cases for one month.’ ”

And that’s what they did. Every day, Chaim V’Chessed sent an organized, case-by-case file, name by name, request by request. “That’s when they realized we were serious.”

Today, every English speaker (and even veteran immigrants who admittedly can navigate the Israeli bureaucracy on their own) knows that for any question — from up-to-date passport renewal regulations to questions about student visas to Bituach Leumi coverage, to assistance with hospital procedures and lab reports — they can call Chaim V’Chessed and get clear, easy to understand directions, or if necessary, advocacy as well.

From phone bills to medical emergencies, from citizenship issues to apartment purchases, from hospital registration to child benefits to legal requirements after birth, CVC cuts through the language barrier and the paperwork.

(And here’s a special bonus: On February 12, the American consulate staff will be at the Chaim V’Chessed offices, streamlining passport procedures for US citizens living in Israel.)

There was once a casual certainty among Israeli officials that all English-speaking immigrants were cushioned by prosperity.

“This stereotype manifested most sharply in social-service offices, where Anglo requests for assistance were often met with polite disbelief. Through organized representation, the Anglo community’s struggles have become acknowledged, and they’ve become recognized as a permanent and valuable constituency. Hospitals have added liaisons; ministries have introduced English-language phone lines,” Yitzchak Pindrus relates. “If I can continue to have a part in all this, it’s my greatest service.”

True, Israel has not become less complex, but it has become more human. The machine still hums, but now, somewhere within its rhythm, there is a voice speaking your language.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1097)