Rabbi Zecharya Greenwald helps newcomers navigate life after teshuvah

Photos: Elchanan Kotler

When popular mechanech Rabbi Zecharya Greenwald decided to write a guidebook to help newcomers to Torah navigate the often daunting and confusing life they’d entered, he was following the lead of his rebbe, Rav Shlomo Wolbe ztz”l, who gave the clarion call: The long-term integration of baalei teshuvah into an insular frum world would be the next great challenge of the generation

IT was the first day of Chol Hamoed Pesach in 1978, and 19-year-old Zecharya Greenwald — today a veteran mechanech, sought-after educational consultant, and longtime head of Me’ohr seminary in Jerusalem — was heading back to Monsey with his larger-than-life father, whom he’d just picked up from the airport. Rabbi Ronnie Greenwald a”h, famed communal and political askan who passed away in 2016, had just spent the first two days of Pesach in South Africa where he was involved in a complex four-way international spy swap that would include the release from a Mozambique prison of Miron Marcus, an Israeli businessman whose plane had crashed in that country. Rabbi Greenwald was flown in for the final negotiations on the first night of Pesach, after Rav Moshe Feinstein ztz”l had authorized him to travel on Yom Tov because Marcus’s release was a question of pikuach nefesh.

“My father, who was always discreet about his behind-the-scenes intrigue and never went into too much detail, broke his silence and began rehashing some of the really incredible and unbelievable things that went into securing the deal,” Rabbi Greenwald remembers. “It sounded pretty far-fetched to my young mind, and I told him, ‘Tatty, that is impossible.’

“He looked at me and said, ‘Zecharya, don’t ever say something’s impossible. The difference between possible and impossible is 15 more minutes of effort.’”

It was that credo that always reverberated in the back of Zecharya Greenwald’s mind, pushing him to rise to the daunting challenges and fateful opportunities that would come his way over the ensuing decades.

And Rabbi Ronnie Greenwald was the role model, the cloak-and-dagger negotiator who, from the jungles of Africa to the corridors of the White House, straddled dozens of spheres and headed hundreds of causes. He started out as a rebbi in Boro Park’s Toras Emes in the 1950s, founded Camp Sternberg, moved into leadership administration with Torah Umesorah, initiated many social service programs (he created Youth Corps for kids all over America so that yeshivah kids from poor families could get subsidies), and had the ear of political movers and shakers around the world.

“Actually, most of the international intrigue took place once I was out of the house,” Rabbi Greenwald says. “But what we saw growing up was how much he cared about the community and the people around him who were struggling, always doing things that need to be done. He got involved in bigger things not because he was looking for them, but because the opportunities presented themselves. Yet his priorities were always anchored, and that’s perhaps the greatest legacy he left us. When I was in mesivta, he got an offer from Caspar Weinberger who was leaving what was then the office of Health, Education, and Welfare for the Defense Department. Weinberger wanted to hand over HEW to my father, which would have been a very cushy, comfortable, well-paying, and influential position, but my father turned it down. When I asked him why, he said, ‘Because the chinuch of my children is not in Washington.’

“That’s how I grew up,” Rabbi Greenwald says. “If something needs to be done, you go do it, without compromising your values.”

And it’s what gave him a profound appreciation for those in the larger Jewish community who’ve stretched themselves beyond imagination, who’ve pushed out the limits of their comfort zones to make huge and meaningful changes in their lives.