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leven years ago, Rabbi Efraim Stauber — a kollel yungerman fresh out of Rav Yitzchak Soloveitchik’s beis medrash — walked into the gym on his first day on the job at Kesher, a yeshivah in Jerusalem for young men from religious families who “went off the derech” somewhere along the way. Rabbi Stauber, hired to be the “let’s reintroduce you to Gemara” rebbi to a motley crew of once-frum American boys who’d gotten entangled in the temptations of secular society, scanned his talmidim. They were in various states of dress, which generally featured hostile-looking T-shirts. Some were lifting weights, sweating away to heavy-metal music. One boy, though, was wearing a button-down white shirt, and Rabbi Stauber stuck out his hand in relief, assuming he too was a staff member.

Rabbi Stauber remembers that awkward first conversation. “I asked him, ‘So, what’s your position here?’ To which he responded something like ‘Yo, I’m a bochur dawg.’ I was a little confused but he quickly clarified by pointing at himself and saying slowly ‘I’m a bochur…[pause]’ then he pointed at me and said dramatically ‘dawg…’ Wow. I knew I’d be expected to learn how to ‘chill’ but I was still amazed at the role reversal where he became the yeshivah bochur and I who had just spent 20 years in yeshivah was demoted to canine status.”

When the well-meaning, sincere avreich initially planned his transition from kollel to chinuch, he hoped to teach a Gemara shiur in a mainstream American yeshivah. “But Hashem basically tricked me into teaching at Kesher,” chuckles Rabbi Stauber, who came to realize — from life in those trenches — not to put a label on himself, or on any part of the complex spectrum of personalities he’s engaged with over the years. He’s seen many boys at their worst, but just as many tenaciously struggling to be their best, making a turnaround, reconnecting to Torah values, pulling themselves together, and bravely embracing or reembracing Jewish life.

But these “success stories,” he notes, all too often lack the “happily ever after” ending.

Patching the Holes

From the time he came to Kesher, Rabbi Stauber was plagued by the question of what to do with a bochur who made the turnaround, who felt ready to be mainstreamed after living — sometimes for years — on the fringe. When this bochur put on tefillin for a month straight, he emerged a hero. An outsider might consider him ready to rejoin the yeshivah world. But find him a seat in the Mir and he’d be seriously disadvantaged — who would understand his challenges? Furthermore, Rabbi Stauber knew, the issues and the baggage don’t just go away when these young men marry — which many do soon after their return.

“Just because he’s gotten away from his vices and he’s shomer Shabbos again doesn’t mean the source of his pain is healed,” Rabbi Stauber explains. “He still might have issues with his family, or with aspects of chareidi society that set off his initial disillusionment so there’s often a lot of therapeutic work that still needs to be done. Couple that burden with the normal trials of marriage and parenthood — challenging for the healthiest individuals. For these young men, some of whom had been entangled in unhealthy or dysfunctional relationships, slipping seamlessly back into Torah life isn’t always realistic. They may need extra guidance and a like-minded peer group to help them integrate their newfound inspiration into the practical nuts and bolts of building a Jewish home and insuring the stability of the next generation.”

Rabbi Stauber, who concurrent to his years in Kesher had trained as a therapist specializing in couples dialogue and a system called “Subconscious Conversation,” had a grand, if improbable vision: What if he could create a community of support for these American couples living in Eretz Yisrael — not exactly baalei teshuvah but not typically “frum-from-birth” either — who look “regular” on the outside and have, to a large degree, integrated into the mainstream, but are survivors of a checkered past with gaping holes in their Torah knowledge? He knew that without a continued support framework, too many success stories regress as young couples succumb to the increased life pressures of the secular work force and bearing responsibility of parnassah and family. What if he could design a new way for them to integrate, and craft a tailor-made way of learning Torah that would give them a sense of mastery and accomplishment and help patch up the losses of dropping out of yeshivah in their prime learning years? What if this kehillah could provide them with emotional support and camaraderie and include access to mentors, rabbis, and professionals? It would be a huge undertaking, and an even greater responsibility.

But the void was pressing, and Rabbi Stauber was driven to fill it. Five years ago — with the unconditional backing and assistance of his wife Esther, the support and encouragement of Kesher rosh yeshivah Rabbi Michael Schoen, and much well-placed tefillah, Rabbi Stauber left Kesher and struck out on his own, creating the nucleus of his kehillah, which he would call “The Torah Center.” He started out with four couples, three of whose husbands were Kesher graduates, plus a lot of emunah, and hope that he was on the right track. What he gave them was a morning beis medrash with a specially designed kollel curriculum that would help make up the “lost” years, shalom bayis workshops, optional individual and couple’s counseling, rabbinic guidance, and a communal support network for the wives.

“It was a huge undertaking,” says Esther Stauber, a mother of children ranging from 8 months to 15 years, who taught in seminaries while working as a paralegal and occasional freelance writer, before putting her energy behind her husband’s kehillah venture. “But we were excited by the prospect and I knew that my husband was up to the challenge; we agreed we’d start and reevaluate after five years.”

Now five years are up. And over two dozen American couples, many of whom share a common history and who have acquired a “family” to navigate the challenges of living on their own in Eretz Yisrael are happy the Staubers haven’t thrown in the towel.

Survival Mode

What enabled a mainstream — albeit highly talented and multifaceted — yungerman to throw his life into this work, beginning with helping boys who hadn’t opened a sefer in months or years reconnect to Torah and guiding them through the process of building their own Jewish homes? Rabbi Stauber says his own struggles growing up sensitized him to the challenges of others, and that “my first foray into emotions was my own tough childhood.” He was born in Toronto in 1974, and moved to Scranton when he was five, after his parents divorced. When Efraim was 13 his mother remarried — to Rav Yehudah Jacobs, a mashgiach and respected baal eitzah in BMG of Lakewood.

“That was a wonderful transformation in my life fortune, so to speak,” Rabbi Stauber remembers, “but the challenges — figuring out a new family of six Staubers and eight Jacobs, plus the move from Scranton Hebrew Day School to Lakewood Cheder — weren’t exactly smooth sailing for me. I had a lot of reasons to think about myself and others, and how I was going to survive.”

His supportive family, and especially his wise, compassionate, new stepfather, helped the talented bochur through the rough times. Efraim attended mesivta in Edison, then went on to Passaic and Eretz Yisrael, where he initially learned in the Mir under Rav Asher Arieli and then moved to the yeshivah of Rav Yitzchak Soloveitchik, who’s remained his rosh yeshivah and pillar of inspiration to this day. Efraim eventually went back to Lakewood and then married Esther Frankel, whose father Rabbi Yitzchok Frankel is rav of Agudath Israel of the Five Towns in Cedarhurst.

The couple established their home in Eretz Yisrael, where Rabbi Stauber continued to learn under Rav Soloveitchik. Rabbi Stauber’s passion for teaching, his quick wit, charismatic style, and intuitive ability to connect eventually garnered him a few seminary teaching opportunities and as life moved forward he was looking into a more permanent yeshivah position — but teaching in a place like Kesher wasn’t exactly in the plans of the serious avreich learning under a scion of Brisk.

Unlimited Potential

“A friend who worked at Kesher tempted me with the position, telling me how great it would be to help get these boys ‘back on the derech’ and then, since they were once frum and obviously already knew how to learn I’d just reintegrate them into a high-level shiur,” Rabbi Stauber says, laughing at the memory and his own naïve enthusiasm. The one high-level shiur never materialized for him (that position was already taken); the dearth of knowledge he faced each morning was shocking (“One boy who had sat through eight years of yeshivah and a year of mesivta wasn’t quite sure who Noach was…”); and some days it was just about trying to get the boys out of bed. So what kept Rabbi Stauber at it?

“Well, there was definitely learning on the job,” he admits. “But the bottom line is that I love people and I love Torah and I have a deep desire to bring the two together. Every Jew, regardless of how he might appear, is a neshamah with unlimited potential.”

There was another secret to his success with this group, who was so far away from his own personal reality. He calls it a lesson in humanity, which he learned from his astute stepfather Rav Jacobs. “If you want to truly connect to people you must genuinely enjoy spending time with them,” says Rabbi Stauber, recalling the first summer he spent running a summer camp for Kesher students in order to hold them in Israel a little longer and help them retain their year’s growth. That summer he became an extreme hiker, biker, and professional level scuba diver. “For the first time in my life I felt that these activities were what I needed to be doing, so I allowed myself to fully share in and enjoy these experiences with my talmidim. It was wonderful.”

Sometimes Rabbi Stauber is a musician, sometimes he’s a writer, sometimes he’s a therapist, and there was a time he even needed to be a scuba diver. The ability to flip hats, as he’d learned back in his Kesher days, is a blessing. “Hashem has allowed me to appreciate many aspects of His beautiful world. What better rhythm to follow than that of the needs of His children?”

And his wife Esther concurs. “You know, when he was first offered the job, I was surprised and I wondered how it would work out. He wasn’t a professional kiruv personality and this was front-line kiruv in real time, but it was totally in his skill set. Hashem obviously set it up for him.”

Kesher in Jerusalem and Neveh Tzion in Telshe Stone are the two frontline institutions whose goal is to rehabilitate at-risk young men. Kesher, which was originally connected with Ohr Somayach before going independent years ago, runs like a yeshivah, and also offers a side-by-side therapy program. According to Rabbi Schoen, who’s been the dedicated backbone of the institution for over a decade, of the more than 500 bochurim that have gone through the program whom he refers to as “diamonds in the rough,” a majority eventually find their way back to Shabbos observance, or at the very least, a heightened sense of accessing their potential.

“The main measurement of success is getting back one’s self image and confidence, which in essence means becoming a mentsh again,” Rabbi Schoen tells Mishpacha.

Kesher students might be dealing with drug or alcohol abuse, or have other issues such as deep-seated anger, defiance, resentment, low self-esteem, and lack of confidence, a combination of which has led them away from a life of Torah and mitzvos.

“My sense was that many bochurim who wound up in Kesher came because it meant a free year without responsibility, with fantastic trips, good food, and a chilled environment,” says Rabbi Stauber.

He notes that some parents are grateful for any kind of turnaround in mentshlichkeit even if their son hasn’t recommitted to Torah life. But other parents expect magic.

“One father was furious when he came to the yeshivah toward the end of the year. ‘What, he’s still wearing jeans?!’ he practically shouted to me. I found myself at a loss as how to help this man understand that much more important that his son’s choice of clothing was the fact that he now committed to being drug-free and shomer Shabbos.

“Really, any positive movement for guys in their first years at Kesher is tremendous,” Rabbi Stauber continues. “And that’s why, once they were back on track, I wanted to encourage them to really push themselves, and get them into a healthy environment and mindset. There can be guys who are functional for ten years but still have that underachiever mentality, an ‘I’m no good, it’s useless’ mentality. Today the young men I’m connected to are already frum for years, but we want to make sure they don’t fall back into that deadbeat mentality. We want them to become the achievers they really are, to take pride in their learning and take responsibility for their lives and their young families, to push forward and find their best selves. We want to enable them to move on, and that’s what the kehillah we’ve created is all about.

“Our fundamental belief system is that people are intrinsically healthy and capable, but problems come when we get stuck and misaligned. I see my role not to fix people, but to help them get untangled so that they can continue on their own. And this is the motif that runs through everything we do. In learning, these men master skills and gain knowledge, in therapy — if they choose to avail themselves of it — they find their inner strengths and resources to overcome challenges. In this community they take responsibility and become active — and that can include caring for one another with meals or babysitting, planning events, and helping each other with simchahs or through trying times.”

But there’s more than helping them along. He says he’s received a huge gift in exchange. “I may have been tricked into teaching in Kesher, but today I know what I needed to learn specifically from this group. There is something awe-inspiring about these people, who’ve learned the hard way that there can be no life without Torah. They know what self-destruction is, and their connection to Hashem is with the simple knowledge that anything else is death. I wish the rest of us could have this simple awareness.”

You’ll Love Learning

To that end, Rabbi Stauber has adopted a system of learning that he says is guaranteed to make Gemara learning for people on any level — certainly a ben yeshivah and even unskilled learners — feel a sense of accomplishment, putting responsibility for their kinyan Torah back in their own hands. “One day a newly married Kesher grad told me that while he always did okay in yeshivah, he never actually liked learning, and now that he was beginning to build his home, he was ready to give Torah learning one more chance. He challenged me to make it happen for him, and I took him up on it. ‘Follow our system and in 30 days I guarantee you’ll love learning more than you do now. If not, you win.’ ”

What happened? “Well, he’s still with us a year and half later,” grins Rabbi Stauber. “So I guess we all won.”

Technically, Rabbi Stauber’s system is based on an interlocking scheme of chazarah. At the end of the day one reviews what he learned four times, and at the end of the week one reviews the entire week’s learning four times. This pattern repeats itself so that a few months into the zeman, the person will have reviewed what he’s learned over a hundred times, and no matter what his pace — a line or a page a day — he’ll have concrete understanding and recall of the subject matter.

And that’s one reason Brooklyn-born Moshe P. loves Rabbi Stauber’s morning kollel. Another reason is Shabbos. In fact, some people know Rabbi Stauber as the “Shabbos Rabbi” because of his popular lecture series — available to the public on Torah Anytime — on transforming Shabbos, a day that can be subliminally elevating or deathly boring, to a personal and joyful highlight of the week.

“Shabbos unfortunately is a burden for most of the world — it was for me and I threw it out for years,” Moshe admits. “Rabbi Stauber wants to make it beautiful for us so we’ll be excited about bringing it into our homes every week.”

The third reason is the emphasis on shalom bayis, on healthy couple’s communication and relationship skills. “Most kollelim are just about learning, but here it’s about living,” says Moshe, a Kesher alumnus who’s traveled the long road from Brooklyn to Jerusalem.

Moshe, 25 with a wife and baby daughter, says he comes from “a normal, heimish family, went to a totally regular yeshivah, and even a year of mesivta — but I got thrown out in the middle of tenth grade and that was the end of my high school.”

He says he wasn’t spiteful or rebellious, he just wasn’t finding happiness in life and so looked toward other horizons. “Other people looked like they were having so much fun, that their lives were so glamorous and I was drawn to that.” Moshe lived at home throughout the time he wasn’t mitzvah-observant and says he even tried to be a good influence on his younger brothers, encouraging them “to shteig, and to listen to Ima and Abba.”

He spent a few months in a friend’s dorm at Neveh Tzion, and later even earned the distinction of being kicked out of Kesher for abusing their anti-drug protocol. “A few years later they asked me back to be a drug counselor, because by then I had the training and experience helping people get clean. I was a dorm counselor but I wasn’t even frum then, although I had a strong desire to help kids clean up their lives and get them back on track.”

Moshe says he owes his turnaround to Rabbi Motty Braun of Monsey, the founder of LOMED (“Learn One Mishnah Every Day”) who opens his home to Kesher alumni. “He’s hard-nosed and I needed to be pushed, no slack,” says Moshe. “Some kiruv rabbis are feel-good types, at-your-own-pace types, but that didn’t work for me. He pushed me to learn Torah. I came to realize that growing up, what I really wanted was to be a talmid chacham — that was my inner ratzon and he pushed me there. I dropped all my old friends and started learning every free minute.”

Moshe hasn’t stopped learning since. Coming back to Israel with his wife, he spent the last year in the Mir, where Rabbi Stauber located him and asked him to join the new kollel. Today he learns in The Torah Center (TTC) from 9:40 to 1:00, is in Mir in the afternoons, and then starts his US-hours work day for an international real estate firm.

He says Rabbi Stauber’s emphasis on tools for a healthy marriage and good communication is what keeps him focused on his daily spiritual pursuits. “In order to become the person you want to be, to overcome your past yetzer haras or your current ones, it all starts at home. Learning starts at home, davening starts at home, feeling good about yourself starts at home. When you’re married the source of everything is your home. And you don’t have to have been an off-the-derech bum or have had a sordid past to take advantage of it. Halevai every husband would be able to take advantage of what we have in the kehillah.”

Rock Bottom Together

TTC isn’t a commune or a bungalow colony. Member couples live all over Jerusalem; the Staubers live in the Jerusalem suburb of Givat Zeev and the kollel beis medrash is in a miklat in the Maalot Dafna neighborhood. Some members are full-time learners, but Rabbi Stauber encourages others to pursue a more realistic model for themselves, of learning half a day and bringing parnassah the other half. Out of about 25 couples, 14 are now in the TTC kollel, some in other kollelim. “A morning of learning is what we encourage as a minimum,” says Rabbi Stauber, “although there are some in our community who aren’t learning yet, and that’s also okay. What we’re trying to set up is a healthy, spiritual, meaningful way of life, and there’s no time limit on that.”

Can anyone join this warm, supportive community of Americans building their lives together in the Holy Land? “Well, it’s really a question of compatibility,” says Rabbi Stauber. “The bottom line is that they have to feel comfortable here, and be a good match to the avreichim already with us. Many of our men are Kesher alumni from way back, who’ve been frum a good few years already. Still others are FFBs who never went off the derech at all, but were never turned on to the classic system. Here they feel comfortable and are welcome. But the only criteria regarding the kollel is consistency – you have to be committed to being a ben Torah and show up every day.”

Esther Stauber, whose open home and approachability have made her an address for guidance and inspiration for the kehillah’s two dozen women, grew up in a rabbi’s busy, open home on Long Island, but she says the Modern Orthodox community of the 70s and 80s where many weren’t strictly observant, and even public school kids back then were still light years away from what goes on in front-line kiruv today, where the descent into the crazed, hedonistic world of indulgences has sunk to a whole new depth.

In the kehillah, the husbands are all close — some of these avreichim have experienced the low moments of extreme rejection together, and many of them were friends from the Kesher days before they returned to Torah. These are the guys who set goals and pulled themselves up. People who meet them today are only seeing a part of them, but these men know each other in a way no one else does — perhaps even their own wives. They’ve travelled together on a heartrending journey and have an unspoken pact of understanding between them. And their wives have married into this “family.”

Some of the kehillah women knew their husbands from “those days” and had the same challenges, and others met through a standard shidduch.

That’s how Miriam R. met her husband Binyamin. She was a baalas teshuvah who was studying at Neve Yerushalayim after completing a business degree at Colorado State University. Binyamin, today a full-time learner, grew up in a Torah family but “took a few years off” to find himself. He wound up in Kesher, Rabbi Stauber was his Gemara rebbi and today his chavrusa is his former Kesher dorm counselor. “Marrying into this nucleus was like marrying into a bunch of brothers,” Miriam says. “We wives — we’re like the sisters-in-law.”

Time to Heal

While Torah is the kehillah’s soul, Rabbi Stauber’s personal guidance sessions are the glue, for any member feeling overwhelmed, out of control, or otherwise stuck. (He also maintains a private practice.) Rabbi Stauber just followed the path of those close to him — many in his family were drawn to the world of counseling. His first and foremost mentor is still Rav Yehuda Jacobs, advisor to thousands of bochurim and yungeleit for the past half century, his mother eventually earned a degree in social work from Rutgers and after working in the field for 20 years eventually headed the mental health department of the ODA primary health care center in Williamsburg New York, his own father a”h was a therapist and his stepmother is an Imago therapy practitioner and workshop presenter under whom Rabbi Stauber continues to have supervision.

In helping individuals and couples, he uses both Imago therapy — a complex theory based on the idea that all of us have some type of wounds from our childhood and look to our spouses to fill that void (which they usually can’t) — and a system in which he’s formally certified called Subconscious Conversation, based on the idea that there are subconscious beliefs and blockages acting simultaneously with our conscious system that prevent us from maximizing our potential.

But Rabbi Stauber says that a core belief of his is not to let his own past struggles — which he acknowledges has made him a more intuitive empathizer — prevent him from moving forward. And that’s a foundation principle for his kehillah, whose members have travelled their own winding paths. It’s about being there for others, offering support when family is so far away, and using one’s gifts and experiences — even the ones that seem negative and are laced with pain and remorse — as a springboard for service to others and for self-growth.

“I don’t believe our past story has to determine how we live our future. Our past doesn’t have to define us, doesn’t have to lock us in or force us to wallow in self-pity. It’s our tailor-made blessing only to get us to move toward our own unique and glorious future.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 567)