He founded Camp Sternberg. He dealt with teens-at-risk years before it became a term. He was a cloak-and-dagger negotiator who freed political prisoners. From  the jungles of Mozambique to the corridors of the White House, Rabbi Ronnie Greenwald lived in dozens of spheres and presided over hundreds of causes.

Who could believe he’d leave this world so suddenly?

Photos Meir Haltovsky, family archives

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obody was prepared last Wednesday for the news that Rabbi Ronnie Greenwald had suddenly left This World, apparently in his sleep in the sort of misas neshikah we’re told is reserved for the tzaddikim. At 82 years old and still involved with the no-holds-barred community work that made him so beloved and respected over the years, he left not only his family but all of Klal Yisrael orphaned and deeply bereaved. “He was a human dynamo,” grieves lawyer and activist Alan Dershowitz, who knew him from his early years in Boro Park. “It is impossible to imagine him at rest.”

With his thick Brooklyn accent and trademark suspenders, he was a big man who exuded a warm, fatherly presence; between his size and relaxed, nonjudgmental manner, people instantly felt secure and at ease around him. But he was also a man of razor-sharp wit and nerves of steel — fearless in the face of danger and driven to do what had to be done, knowing that every committee he chaired, every campaign he initiated, every risky negotiation was in the service of G-d and the Jewish People.

Talk to the over 40,000 alumni of Camps Mogen Av and Sternberg and they’ll tell you about the man who made their summers possible. Talk to “his girls” who attended the Monsey Academy for Girls, which Rabbi Greenwald founded to help at-risk teen girls navigate their way back into life, or the dozens of individuals he personally saved from imprisonment and peril, and they’ll tell you about the man whose heart was big enough to care for every single Jew. He was as comfortable in the camp dining room as he was in the Oval Office or the headquarters of the KGB. In short, he was larger than life.

Melting Pot of Acceptance

Ronnie (Refoel) Greenwald grew up in Boro Park, where he attended Yeshivas Toras Emes, and later Torah Vodaath and the Telshe Yeshivah. After marrying his life’s partner Miriam, he became a rebbi in Toras Emes. “This was in the 1950s when the Hungarian immigrants were coming in,” says Pia Weinstein, a longtime Greenwald friend who served as the program director at Camp Sternberg from the earliest years. “Many of them weren’t so turned on to learning. They were the toughest kids in the yeshivah, so of course the administration gave them to Ronnie.”

But Rabbi Greenwald moved quickly from teaching into administration, where his talent for organization and command of detail soon became evident. Before long he became director of development at Torah Umesorah, helping open day schools across the country. His knack for getting things done came to the attention of the Jewish Federation, who tapped him to run their first camp for the Orthodox community, Mogen Av for boys. Two years later, he would found Camp Sternberg.

Of his manifold lifetime accomplishments and pursuits, Camp Sternberg was perhaps dearest to Greenwald’s heart.

“The Williamsburg YMHA had a nonreligious board that sponsored camps for nonreligious kids,” Mrs. Weinstein relates. “Ronnie told them, ‘If you sponsor the non-Orthodox, you also have to sponsor the Orthodox.’ ”

Sternberg was originally set up with three three-week sessions in order to provide a cheaper program for the children of rebbeim and others who found camp costs daunting; the Federation provided many scholarships.

Since 1964, Camp Sternberg has been a mainstay of frum camps, providing opportunities for many who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to go to camp. Just a few years ago, Rabbi Boruch Ber Bender of Achiezer recalls placing a last-minute call to Rabbi Greenwald to see if Camp Sternberg could possibly accept some girls from a broken, devastated home, whose mother wouldn’t be able to handle her children sitting in the house all summer.

“We had two days with dozens of phone calls, all initiated by Ronnie,” Rabbi Bender told Mishpacha. “Before we knew it, applications were processed, fees were waived, and these girls were told to pack for camp.”

But the story doesn’t end there. “Taking these girls into camp at almost zero cost was a huge chesed in and of itself. However, that wasn’t enough for Reb Ronnie. The mother of these girls told me that moments after they arrived in camp, they were asked to come to the camp office. The lady in the office had a care package waiting for them as if they were the biggest VIP campers. Attached to the package was a note from Reb Ronnie wishing them a great summer.”

Similarly, if ever tragedy struck in the community, Camp Sternberg was always ready to receive the dazed children. “Make three more beds, we have the X kids coming,” staff would be told.

Rabbi Greenwald saw camp as an opportunity to help girls grow in new ways. “Ronnie was an innovator,” Mrs. Weinstein says. “He was the first to incorporate a division for children with disabilities in the camp [the Kesher program], and integrate them with the ‘regular’ campers. He took high-functioning girls ages 8–20 and integrated them with the other campers, with the intention of teaching that these girls aren’t different from you or me. Other camps followed suit later, but Ronnie was the first.”

Mrs. Weinstein’s son-in-law, Rabbi Moshe Krupka of Touro College, recalls, “This man, who spoke on a regular basis to gedolim and heads of state, could speak to a 13-year-old girl with Down syndrome coming to camp for the first time and make her feel like a superstar.” When those girls became too old to be campers, he hired them as staff in the kitchen and day care.

Sternberg was the first camp to have its own zoo, also Ronnie’s brainchild. “The idea wasn’t for the kids to look at animals,” Mrs. Weinstein explains. “Ronnie thought that children who had a hard time fitting in at camp could relate to animals — this is before anyone knew about ‘pet therapy.’ He’d also use the zoo as an incentive. He’d tell a camper, ‘If you come to davening, I’ll let you play with the lamb.’ ”

For Rabbi Greenwald, who never held much truck with putting Jews in boxes, Sternberg was designed to be a nonjudgmental melting pot of girls, a place for them to learn tolerance. “We had girls from close to 50 different schools, a mix that didn’t exist outside camp,” Mrs. Weinstein says. “The girls who thought they were so frum discovered they had what to learn from girls from more modern backgrounds, and vice versa.”

“He took all types — it wasn’t narrow like schools are today. Instead it was the most normal of frum camps,” says Rabbi Shneur Aisenstark. But Greenwald himself never fit neatly into any category. Clean-shaven, he typically wore a black yarmulke with blue or striped shirts, and those trademark suspenders. And while Ronnie was totally devoted to his charges, he was simultaneously making his mark in other major communal endeavors.

Friends in High Places

As he increasingly became known as a mover and shaker in the Orthodox community, Ronnie Greenwald was recruited to manage Nelson Rockefeller’s 1970 New York gubernatorial campaign for the Jewish community. His success in garnering Jewish votes led to work as a Jewish advisor for Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign. Before long he was working from an office at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue, working his ever-expanding Rolodex of contacts on behalf of the Jewish community. Among his accomplishments was convincing Senator Jacob Javits to tweak government eligibility requirements to make Head Start and poverty programs available to the chassidic world. Another phone call, to the secretary of agriculture, insured that surplus kosher chicken went to Jewish schools along with surplus peanut butter; yet other contacts opened up Youth Corps summer employment programs for yeshivah students.

His much-admired career as an international negotiator — much of which will forever remain classified information — began when Israeli MK Shmuel Flatto-Sharon, who knew Greenwald had worked for Nixon and had government contacts, asked him to help with negotiations for Natan Sharansky. It would take nine years and 38 trips to East Germany before Sharansky walked across the Glienicke Bridge from East to West Berlin and freedom. In the process Greenwald established a reputation for being a formidable negotiator.

Greenwald’s friendship with Rockland County’s Congressman Ben Gilman, whom he’d met on the Nixon campaign and who chaired the House Committee on Foreign Relations, led to his increased involvement in international affairs. Greenwald would be involved in the release of Zev and Shaul Raiz from the Soviet Union and many other high-profile negotiations, fearlessly venturing into hostile territory behind the Iron Curtain, South America, and Libya for hostage, prisoner, and espionage releases and exchanges.

How did a man who’d grown up in the yeshivah system navigate the delicate world of international intrigue, a field mostly occupied by secularly educated specialists? Where did he pick up his skills as a brilliant negotiator?

“It was all innate,” declares Rabbi Krupka. “He had no formal education. His strength was that he knew how to understand people, to listen to them, and make them feel valued.”

“He never lost his cool,” remembers Rabbi Nosson Scherman. “And he was very funny. You couldn’t get angry with him —he knew how to defuse anger. I remember once a family was involved in a very bitter custody dispute, with many big people involved and taking sides. There was no trust on either side. They called Ronnie in, and he alone was able to resolve it. ”

Greenwald once visited Lori Berenson — a Jewish American convicted of trying to overthrow the Peruvian government — at her prison cell on a frigid Peruvian mountaintop. He came bearing gifts of a dozen New York bagels and a copy of Rabbi Akiva Tatz’s Worldmask. His wife Miriam had inscribed: “You will now see Judaism from a greater perspective than the bagels.” Ronnie’s own take on it was that the judge responsible for convicting Berenson had been “wearing a mask.”

Then there were the negotiations with Mozambique to release Miron Marcus, an Israeli businessman whose plane had crashed in Mozambique and had since been held for almost three years on charges of espionage. South Africa’s long-serving Rabbi Avraham Tanzer told Mishpacha how Greenwald and Congressman Ben Gilman were flown in for the final negotiations on the first night of Pesach; Rav Moshe Feinstein ztz”l had authorized him to travel on Yom Tov because Marcus’s release was a question of pikuach nefesh. Rabbi Tanzer had insisted Greenwald come directly to his home instead of making a Seder in his hotel. The Tanzer family waited and waited, trying to slow the pace of the Seder, when finally, Rabbi Tanzer recalls, “Around 3 a.m., my kids opened the door for Eliyahu Hanavi and at that very moment, in walked Ronnie and Congressman Gilman.”

A well-placed individual in neighboring Bophuthatswana mentioned the Marcus story to the country’s president, who was so impressed he appointed Greenwald to be the country’s American ambassador. The Jewish rabbi from Brooklyn held this very unlikely title for two years, until the country lost its independence.

Somehow Rabbi Greenwald never lost his sangfroid during tense negotiations, even in hostile countries where he himself might be accused of spying and thrown in prison. He’d remain vigilant, and took precautions, but nevertheless traveled with the faith that Hashem was with him as he sought to do the mitzvah of pidyon shevuyim. He was never presented as an official government representative, merely a humanitarian negotiator and clergyman.

How did he remain diplomatic in this business rife with shadiness and underhanded machinations? “At the heart of the shadiness are people that need something, and when you need something, you trade,” Ronnie Greenwald told Mishpacha in an exclusive interview back in 2009. “If I get what I need, I don’t care how shady they are. If I want something for my people, I’ll trade with the enemy. I come in as a humanitarian rabbi, someone who wants to help, without any political agendas.”

He never seemed perturbed about the inherent dangers of his missions. “I travel with G-d,” he told Mishpacha. “I’ve been in countries where the airport was surrounded by soldiers, I was in Guatemala and Sierra Leone during a revolution.” And wherever he traveled, he kept his yarmulke on. As he explained, “I tell people, ‘Listen, my name is Greenwald, I come from Brooklyn, I have a big nose, you think I’m Asian?’ ”

Not every international incident was a matter of espionage and Cold War negotiating. Over 20 years ago, Rabbi Greenwald happened to be in Vilna with Rabbi Aaron Kotler when Rabbi Kotler received a call that the Lithuanian government was going to raze the Zaretchka cemetery, the resting place of Rabbi Boruch Ber of Kamenitz, and erect a shopping mall on the site. Greenwald immediately put in a call to Prime Minister Algirdas Brazauskas, an acquaintance from previous political dealings. As Mishpacha’s Yisroel Besser tells the story, “Ronnie told the prime minister that protecting Jewish graves will bring him great blessing, that Rav Boruch Ber was a holy sage, and that Rav Boruch Ber’s students (including Rav Aharon Kotler ztz”l, Aaron Kotler’s venerated grandfather) were leaders of world Jewry. ‘You have the chance to respect the wisdom of the Jewish People,’ Ronnie maintained. The visibly moved prime minister called two of his ministers on the spot and told them, ‘I will never allow construction there.’ ”

Voice for Broken Kids

Howard Tzvi Friedman, an askan and past president of AIPAC, worked with Greenwald in the 1990s. At the time, Friedman was the lay head of NCSY and Greenwald was the chairman. “He was a pioneer in kiruv and helping struggling kids before either field became an industry,” Friedman says. “Every Jewish neshamah was important to him. He’d drop everything to help kids.”

Through Greenwald’s work at Mogen Av and Sternberg, he became one of the first to draw attention to kids who were floundering in Orthodox circles. Rabbi Krupka remembers him as the person who would be drawn “like a magnet” to a child he saw sitting on the side. “All those ‘throwaway’ kids — he respected them, valued them, could connect to them,” he says. “He was a gadol in building people, in infusing self-worth and self-confidence in those who had been robbed of it or denied it.”

But Greenwald was treated as an alarmist until the at-risk problem grew too big to ignore. He advocated and advised at conferences for Nefesh, AJOP, and Torah Umesorah. A few yeshivos were opened for boys who were struggling (Greenwald himself had been advocating for vocational schools for boys as far back as 1970). But at-risk girls had no options two decades ago.

In response, Rabbi Greenwald opened the Monsey Academy for Girls in the 1990s, which he humorously described as “a religious school for girls who didn’t want to be religious and who didn’t want to go to school.”

“Ronnie was a voice for all the kids who were suffering in silence, who were abused or on the fringes,” relates Dr. David Pelcovitz, psychologist and child protector advocate. “His approach was to open group homes and treatment centers for girls on the streets. He’d set up programs and pour his heart and soul into them.”

Running the Monsey school was often frustrating. In a 2003 speech at the opening of Home Sweeet Home for OTD youth, Rabbi Greenwald told his audience, “After three weeks, the parents call and ask me, ‘How’s she doing?’

“Three weeks? Give me two years! You had 15 years to destroy this child! People expect miracles, but it takes time, it takes patience, it takes caring.”

Rabbi Zlotowitz remembers how one of Ronnie’s students once came in with her hair dyed a garish green. She challenged him: “Aren’t you upset that I’m walking around like this?”

He only shrugged.  “If you want to walk around looking like a clown, so look like a clown,” he replied.

“The next day her hair was her normal color again,” Zlotowitz says. “But Ronnie was able to be nonjudgmental in a way that many in the world today can’t bring themselves to be.”

The Monsey Academy closed after ten years, largely because parents were reluctant to “brand” their daughters by sending them to a school for troubled youth. “He told me he felt very depressed when the school closed,” Rabbi Aisenstark says. “He was that school.”

Greenwald always saw the whole picture; at this year’s Agudath Israel convention, he recalled his dealings with a boy who was floundering. The boy’s father would call him every morning and ask, “Did he daven? Did he go to shul?”

“I told the father, ‘Why don’t you ask if he had breakfast?’ ” Greenwald said.

He was frequently exasperated by parents who were so hung up on their religious standards that they failed to see their children’s other needs. His daughter Chevy Lapin recalls sitting in a car with her father as he related his profound shock at hearing a father state that he’d rather see his son dead than not doing mitzvos. “It’s not about you!” he longed to tell the father. “Your child’s choices are not about you!” Then he questioned, “Has fitting into what the oilem expects taken the place of avodas Hashem?”

Greenwald deeply felt the pain of troubled teens. In fact, the week he passed away, while officially on vacation, he was busy putting his heart and soul into helping bring back boys who traded Yiddishkeit for drugs and alcohol. That last week he was involved with Torah and the Twelve Steps, Inc., a drug and alcohol rehab center located in North Miami Beach. At 10:15 p.m. the night of his passing, he was in contact with Miriam Turk, head of the Nefesh organization for Orthodox mental health professionals, to help connect these boys who needed help.

Rabbi Greenwald not only had the courage to stand behind his convictions, he believed that our present-day Yiddishkeit is robust enough to allow for self-questioning and a frank confrontation of problems. “We have a flourishing Yiddishkeit!” he said on numerous occasions. “There are more bochurim learning today in BMG, or in Mir in Eretz Yisrael, than in all of the litvish yeshivos in Europe before the war!”

No Glory Between his speaking engagements, advocating for kids, mediating family disputes, and untangling political problems, Rabbi Nosson Scherman notes, Greenwald could have become very wealthy as a consultant. But he never took money for his services. In fact, over the years there were quite a few people who didn’t repay money he’d lent them or otherwise let him down.

“But he never harbored ill feelings toward people who did him wrong,” Rabbi Zlotowitz says. “There was once someone who wronged him quite seriously, and then had the temerity to call him and ask if he could give his daughter a job at Sternberg. Ronnie called the girl in, interviewed her, and gave her a job. I said, ‘Ronnie, how could you do that?’ He answered, ‘Is it her fault she has a father like that?’ ”

Greenwald himself told Mishpacha about similar cases. “One guy, after I got him out of solitary, sent me a Rosh Hashanah card and then I never heard from him again. Another family, who trusted me with a huge sum of ransom money and originally offered to pay me whatever I wanted and was flabbergasted when I told them I take no money for what I do, later asked me for an itemized receipt when I told them the total expenses came to $2,100. You can’t be in this if you’re looking for gratitude.”

As much as Greenwald was devoted to the klal, he did his utmost to be there for his own family, and cautioned others not to neglect their children in order to pursue their own crusades. At this year’s Agudah convention he stated, “I’ve traveled two and a half million miles in my lifetime. In all that time I’ve never been away from home for Shabbos more than five times… I know kiruv leaders who can’t be mekarev their own kids. You have to first be a leader in your home.”

At the levayah, his son called him “a gadol in chesed, who lived and breathed everybody else,” a person who was able to find the good in every person even when other people didn’t see that good.

“I’m not worried about my brothers and sisters,” he said. “Tatty, you raised us to be strong. But what about all the others?”

Linked to a Legacy

Suspended in time

Growing up, I had two universes. There was school — blah. And there was camp — yahoo! Camp was where we really lived. And there was no choice of where to go to: My friends and I all went to Camp Sternberg and boy, were we proud of it. We had plain wooden bunk beds, hikes, and campfires, and no namby-pamby curtains or fans. At Sternberg, there were spiders and bears and ancient mattresses and… Rabbi Greenwald.

Rabbi Greenwald was always in the background of camp, zipping around in his golf cart, wearing his trademark suspenders and telling us in a gruff voice to pick up the papers and the ground because “we all want camp to be beautiful.” He was there on the first day of second half of camp, lifting up all the towels and bathing suits and whatnot that had been left hanging on the line from the first-half campers. One by one he’d wave the item in the air and call out the name that was printed on it. “Singer? Who knows Singer? You? You want to bring this home for Singer after camp?”

He was there at the break-the-fast meal, telling us all not to eat too quickly or we’d get stomachaches.

He was there when those magical camp Shabbosim were over, making Havdalah. He started with his loud “Hinei!” waited for hundreds of girls to be quiet, and then continued, ending with a resounding, “A gut voch!”

But best of all he was there on the mike doing his famous double-talking routine. He would start off slow with not a bit of a smile on his face. “There is something very important that all campers must know, so listen carefully,” he would say. He would then start to speak gobbledygook and everyone would look at each other confused. “I’m going to repeat this message because it’s so important,” he would add. “Everyone must, I repeat must, put the vordje gasters in the printed red balchimas” (or something like that). Then we would notice his smirk and remember this stunt from last year and break into the table-banging chant of “Hey, machaneinu machaneh Sternberg, Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie!”

Years later, when my daughter was ready for sleepaway camp, she went to Sternberg. (But of course!) On visiting day I expected it all to be the same. I wanted it all to be the same. And some of it was the same, but so much had changed. Another pool? How could they? Reassuringly, there was Rabbi Greenwald, zipping around in his golf cart, wearing what looked like the same suspenders.

When I read that he was niftar, I was so surprised by everything attributed to him. Political activist? International spy swapper? Hostage mediator? I thought he was just the fun guy in the suspenders behind Camp Sternberg.

And thus lies the uniqueness of this man among men, for he was all of those things, and an erlich Jew as well.

—Peshie Needleman

Like his own child

I was from a broken home, and at around the age of 14, I found myself basically homeless. One of my friends was staying with the Greenwalds, so I went along, supposedly just for a few days, but one day flowed into the next and soon it became my home, too.

The Greenwalds accepted me for who I was, a person struggling spiritually and psychologically. Rabbi Greenwald never seemed to notice how we girls were dressed — he focused only on our faces. The fa?ade meant nothing to him.  Mrs. Greenwald would be the one to say cheerfully, “Bubbeleh, your skirt’s too short!”

One of the other girls had gotten her driving license, and got into an accident with Rabbi Greenwald’s car. Then she got into a second accident with a rental car he had, and she was devastated — she came home completely hysterical. Rabbi Greenwald had to calm her down. But he was amazingly cool about it. He told her, “It’s fine! Everybody gets into accidents when they start driving!” And he encouraged her to start driving again right away.

I remember once I had a really bad day, and Mrs. Greenwald found me crying. When she asked me, “Bubbeleh, what’s wrong?” we started talking, and during the discussion I mentioned that it was my birthday.

“Oh, I didn’t know,” she replied. “Happy birthday!” Later that day, Rabbi Greenwald came home with a gift — a pair of slippers and a handbag (he’d apparently gone to a store and asked the salesgirl what he should buy for a teenage girl). In the summers, when I went to Sternberg with them, they’d buy me everything I needed before camp. Over time, with the love and stability they gave me, I began getting my life together.

They took care of me like parents — actually much better than my own parents. When I started dating, the Greenwalds insisted on vetting every date. When I got engaged, they made me a vort in their home, organized the whole wedding in six weeks, and took care of all the wedding arrangements A to Z, from the gown to my sheitels. They came in for brissim when I gave birth to boys, even when it meant traveling a couple of hours.

I would never have the life I have today — married, frum, a mother — if not for the Greenwalds and the way they believed in me. People don’t know the half of what Rabbi Greenwald accomplished. He cared for every Jew like his own child.

—Efrat

The phone call

In March 2009 I got a phone call that would dramatically change my life.

“This is Ronnie Greenwald. Do you know who I am?”

“Uh, no,” I admitted, certain that this was the wrong answer.

“You just published an article about the siblings of kids at risk,” continued my aggrieved caller with the thick Brooklyn accent. “How can it be that you didn’t interview me? I’ve been dealing with kids at risk 20 years before they even coined the term!”

So it was with his signature humor, spirit, and finesse that Rabbi Ronnie Greenwald burst into my world. Hearing about his life experiences and klal work, I wasn’t about to let him go so fast. I suggested we profile him.

“No way,” drawled the gravelly voice. “I don’t do no profiles. Every magazine wants to write me up, but I’m not interested, thank you. I don’t need the press,” he said, and he fully meant it.

I dared to broach the subject in a follow-up call a month later. The words flew from my mouth in a Heaven-sent gush.

“How will the next generation take up the lead if we don’t show them what it means to sacrifice and work tirelessly on behalf of the tzibbur? And besides,” I added, “your life has been full of siyata d’Shmaya and open miracles. Isn’t it a tremendous kiddush Hashem to publicize that?”

He thought for a long moment.

“All right, fine,” he rasped. “I’ll do it.”

Our interview ranged from his establishing a halfway house Brooklyn, to redeeming an Israeli captive on the border of Mozambique in the dead of Seder night. The conversation was peppered with the who’s who of the international community — prime ministers, presidents, philanthropists, and diplomats, he knew them all. We talked about his “baby” — Camp Sternberg — about his two-year stint as ambassador to the tiny country of Bophuthatswana. In his self-deprecating, eminently casual style, he transported me to Sierra Leone where he negotiated with thugs, inside KGB headquarters to mastermind a prisoner swap, and to Guatemala, where he rescued — gratis — a kidnapped gentile.

He shunned the spotlight, never expected recognition or accolades. He didn’t take himself too seriously and certainly never expected others to either. There was no human being whom this great man would not carry in his own boundless heart. He was sharp and perceptive, but never judgmental. He was witty and wise, but never condescending. The same Ronnie Greenwald who fearlessly negotiated with terrorists and kidnappers cried alongside a broken teen and opened his home to the homeless. His life, his property, his resources, his energy, they were all reshus harabim.

Over the years, I’d get a phone call —the rasping voice, the Brooklyn brashness.

“How you doing? Ronnie Greenwald here,” he’d drawl. We talked about many things. About his hopes for Klal Yisrael. About his disillusionment with the “system,” which he forever worked to change. About problems, about solutions, about his latest projects.

And now he is gone and I am bereft, along with countless others whose lives he illuminated, changed, perhaps even saved. A beacon of love and compassion has been taken from us, leaving behind a legacy of selfless devotion and the power of one individual to change the world. You never needed or wanted it, but thank you, Rabbi Greenwald. The inspiration lives on forever.

—Riva Pomerantz

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 595)