Child survivor Emil Fish vowed to preserve the memory of his hometown. In the film, he takes his own family back to Bardejov

Forgotten Frontier

Rabbi Lynn stumbled onto the hidden story of Bardejov almost by accident. Before creating Olami Manhattan, he served for 12 years as the executive director of Meor, an outreach initiative at the University of Pennsylvania (he still teaches there), through which he pioneered trips to Israel and Poland that have become nationally recognized entities — and that led him to find out about the story of Bardejov.

It was in 2017 that Tzvi Sperber of JRoots, which partners with Rabbi Lynn in heritage tours of Europe, approached a Holocaust survivor and philanthropist named Emil Fish to help with funding the projects. Fish declined, stating that he only supported trips that would aid in the preservation of his home town of Bardejov, from where he and his family were deported when he was nine years old.

The following year, Rabbi Lynn and his group took Fish up on his proposal.

Bardejov, about an hour from Sanz, wasn’t on Rabbi Lynn’s usual Poland route. But there was some extra time between Krakow and Budapest, and Bardejov was on the way. Rabbi Lynn sent word to Mr. Fish that they would make a stop there.

They got off the bus and were greeted by a man named Pavel and an accordion player serenading them with tunes from Fiddler on the Roof. Mr. Fish was the owner of Bardejov’s museum, the old slaughterhouse, and the shul, and he had retained Pavel to help preserve the local Jewish sites — although tourists were rare.

Pavel related to them the incredible story of the Jews of Bardejov, and somewhere in Rabbi Lynn’s mind, he sensed potential for a film. (You can take the Jew out of the scriptwriting world, but you can’t take the scriptwriting out of the former scriptwriter-turned-kiruv-professional.) The typhoid epidemic ruse especially resonated with him two years later, when Covid broke out. He used his time in lockdown to write a screenplay about this forgotten chapter of history and hesitantly sent it to an old screenwriter friend for a critique.

“I was afraid to read it, in case I’d have to tell you I hated it,” his friend told him, “but this is really good!”

Emil Fish was enthusiastic about making it into a film. He suggested bringing producer Charles Roven (the producer of the Oscar award-winning film Oppenheimer) on board as well.

“You know him?” Rabbi Lynn asked Mr. Fish incredulously.

“Know him? He’s my cousin! He’s also from Bardejov.”

(Mr. Roven didn’t produce the film in the end, although interestingly, Charles Roven had been one of the first people Rabbi Lynn had worked for in his pre-Torah life when he first came to L.A. to write screenplays.)

The film was launched with the help of Israeli director and actor Danny Abeckaser, producer Yoam Gross, and actor Robert Davi. It begins with footage of Emil Fish himself taking his family back to Bardejov and vowing that he will do everything in his power to preserve the memory of the Jews of Bardejov. It then takes viewers back to 1942, as things begin to turn bad for the Jews: They are told to register for work, wear armbands, and relinquish their businesses to their non-Jewish neighbors. First, a group of boys is rounded up for a work detail, and then the order comes to send 300 girls to Auschwitz. The Nazi-controlled Slovaks employ subterfuge, claiming that they will be working in a shoe factory.

With the release of Bardejov, Emil Fish’s wish to immortalize his hometown enjoyed international recognition, and it all came together because a screenwriter rabbi took one of his kiruv groups on a trip through Slovakia.

Rabbi Lynn traded an offer to write for a major television show for a chance to study in Jerusalem. “I loved the learning. I came hungry, and I was surrounded by people who drank Torah”

Blending In

It would be easy to miss the entrance to Olami Manhattan, tucked behind a nondescript door among small businesses and restaurants on West 13th Street in Manhattan. Inside, the view is equally surprising: It looks more like a restaurant than a kiruv center, with a bar stationed at the entrance, tables and chairs extending back into the room, and appropriately hip décor — think exposed brick walls and ceiling pipes, framed posters, and a blue neon sign on the back wall. A couple of young frum-looking women float around setting up for an evening event.

The tall barista at the cappuccino machine with the black sneakers, trim graying beard, and yarmulke turns out to be Rabbi Lynn himself. Apparently, brewing a gourmet capsule of coffee and screenwriting are but two of Rabbi Lynn’s many talents. He’s the kind of guy who began life with the potential to excel in many fields: sports, music, writing. Instead, he chose a path of Torah and now helps other Jews find that path as well.

We head down a narrow set of stairs to Rabbi Lynn’s office to speak, a conversation that will span most of the afternoon because he has so many interesting stories that he enjoys sharing. The basement space, unlike the atmospheric upstairs, is modern, white, and brightly lit, with a conference room lined with seforim and staff members working on laptops.

Rabbi Lynn actually lives with his family in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, having landed in Philadelphia with a mission to connect with and teach students at local colleges such as Temple, Drexel, and the University of Pennsylvania. But as time went by, many of his students, particularly graduates from the Wharton School of Business, moved to New York, about two hours away, and he found himself traveling frequently to the city to maintain those relationships. Before long, it simply made sense to establish a base in New York. Now he boards an Amtrak and spends three days a week in Manhattan, sleeping over as necessary.

Today his focus is on post-college young professionals, which he says is the sweet spot for interesting young people about Judaism.

“Undergraduate students today, perhaps because of social media and campus politics, don’t yet have the attention span and focus for a higher message,” he says. “They’re oriented toward getting a degree and finding a job. A few years later, when they’re more independent and mature and have launched their careers, they’re more primed to hear it. That’s when they really start to ask themselves what kind of life they want to lead.”

Rabbi Lynn relates easily to his Olami recruits because he shares their experience of growing up nonobservant. The son of a surgeon, Rabbi Lynn was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but his parents moved shortly afterwards to Palm Beach, Florida, where he grew up in the 1970s. At the time, Palm Beach was still an overtly racist place, with signs that shamelessly declared, “No dogs, no blacks, no Jews.” One of only a handful of Jewish kids in his class at school, Rabbi Lynn’s ethnicity barred him from attending many a birthday party at WASP-only country clubs, and he found absolutely nothing around him to project a positive view of Judaism.

“My bar mitzvah was traumatic,” he says. “My whole class was there sitting in the front row, gaping at me as if they were witnessing some primitive ritual for the first time. It was terrible for my street cred.”

Teens yearn to blend in, and he turned himself into a quintessential all-American kid, attending a private high school whose name, St. Andrew, reflects the sparse Jewish enrollment. Music was a big part of his life back then. He trained as a classical pianist but became proficient at other instruments as well, and was captivated by popular music.

In fact, music was in his DNA: His great-grandfather was a jazz musician, originally from Bialystok, who changed his name from Moshe Aharon Levine to Al Lynn (when he played in Cuba, he was Alberto Lino, and his music was recorded and can still be heard). His son, Rabbi Lynn’s grandfather, was proud of his father’s musical prowess, and married a concert pianist.

In addition to music, the young Shmuel (then Adam) Lynn was an athletic kid who loved to swim, surf, and especially play tennis, which he played seriously enough to compete in tournaments. In short, he was a bright young man with boundless potential, happily partaking from the vast smorgasbord offered by upper-class American life.

No Way Back

When it came time to choose a college, his parents pushed for the University of Pennsylvania, but he was a Southern boy all the way, and wanted the most Southern of universities: Duke.

“I thought Penn was too Jewish,” he says. But Hashem had the last laugh, he says: “Today I do kiruv at Penn.”

He even joined a Southern fraternity at Duke, where — in the kind of joke people could get away with in the 1980s — his frat “brothers” strung lights in the shape of a swastika over his bed (he laughed it off with everyone else). He loved fitting in, but his parents became nervous that maybe their son had become so mainstream he risked marrying out of the faith. They weren’t exactly observant themselves, but they were still proudly Jewish. The clincher came when they met Rabbi Meir Abramowitz, the founder of the Jewish Learning Initiative in Florida.

“Are you going to wipe out 3,500 years of Leviim?” he challenged them.

Rabbi Abramowitz told the Lynn parents that their only chance of salvaging their son’s Jewish identity would be to send him on a trip to Israel. But Adam/Shmuel was having none of it. They ultimately coerced him into just attending the orientation meeting.

“Rabbi Abramowitz was smart,” Rabbi Lynn recounts. “I found myself in a stunning house on the water, with a pool and a barbecue, and all around me were other young, tan, attractive, cool Jews.”

This was an unexpectedly pleasant revelation, and he agreed to go on the trip.

He came home from the trip inspired. Not religiously inspired, but Jewishly inspired.

“I thought the answer to the Jewish question was to be Israeli,” he says. “American Judaism held no interest for me.”

On his last day, he visited Yad Vashem, and then, since he was slated to play a tennis tournament in Germany, he flew to Paris and took a train to Hamburg. He visited a longtime German friend and tennis partner who he knew from the tennis circuit in Florida, yet was spooked by pictures on the walls of his friend’s mother’s relatives in Nazi regalia. When Friday evening arrived, something possessed him to want to make Kiddush. He took out the tie-dyed tallis and matching yarmulke he’d bought on Ben Yehuda Street, and since he didn’t know the words to Kiddush, muttered what he could remember of Aleinu.

Meanwhile, back in the US, Adam/Shmuel became enraptured by the top-flight literature and creative writing faculty at Duke, and he decided to become an English major.

“My identity had started to change,” he says. “I was transforming from the athletic-preppy type to an artsy, ‘woke’ type of guy, which was pretty fringe in North Carolina.”

His parents, as Jewish parents are wont to do, worried this was no career for a Jewish boy. They convinced an uncle who worked at the now-defunct financial giant Bear Stearns to give him a summer internship in New York.

The job was awful, the boredom assuaged only by the fun of playing jazz in clubs late into the night. He was supposed to make cold calls during the day, which was so mind-numbing he began amusing himself by adopting different accents for each call. His boss found it much less amusing — the calls had been recorded and he was called on the carpet and fired. At loose ends in New York, he fortuitously ran into a friend who suggested he take some classes at the film school at NYU with him. He was so taken with those classes that when he returned to Duke, he convinced the school to offer film classes, and went back to NYU in the summer for further classes. After graduation, his plan was to move out to Los Angeles, where the film action was.

After graduation, he and a friend thought they’d first celebrate by doing some world touring. On a plane to Tel Aviv, reading one of those now-obsolete guidebooks on how to discover Israel, he read, “Israelis are the kind of people you can argue with vociferously and then become your best friend.”

His middle-aged female seatmate turned out to be one such Israeli, who arrived sweating and irritated after almost missing the flight. But then they started talking, and it turned out she and her family were in the film business. When she realized he’d made no plans for lodging, she invited him to her home. He and her family became fast friends, and the woman’s son, Boaz Yaakov, still works with Rabbi Lynn.

“I got a lot of offers to stay in Israel and work in film,” he says, “but the lure of L.A. was too great, and I went back to the US.”

In L.A., he effortlessly fell in with a successful crowd, sharing a house with four actors who are today household names for their starring roles in famous television shows and films. Despite the unsettling feeling that, as a screenwriter, he had no particular message he wanted to get out to the world, he found some good gigs and was well on the road to success. The only problem was a nagging sense of being existentially adrift.

“I saw that the answers were not in career success,” he says. “Nobody around me had a family or was even in a good relationship. I saw friends die of drug overdoses.”

To top it off, the world around him was roiling. Los Angeles at that time went through earthquakes, murders, and riots.

He even began to feel disillusioned by the work. He had finally gotten a project that seemed meaningful, a Holocaust story of a 13-year-old boy running from the Nazis after Kristallnacht. But then he received a devastating call from the producer, who was vacationing on the ski slopes.

“Yeah, we’re going to cancel it,” he was told casually. “If anything, the plot has to go in a completely different direction — maybe throw in some romance ….”

Romance? This is about a 13-year-old boy running from the Nazis. Let’s not be ridiculous, he thought. But he didn’t have time to dwell on it, because it was almost Rosh Hashanah, and he’d decided to fly home for the holiday. When he went home, he learned to his chagrin that the holiday was two days instead of one, and so he changed his return ticket. Yet the flight he ended up on lost an engine and nearly crashed, making a hard, painful landing on the tarmac.

Back in L.A. after Rosh Hashanah, he couldn’t sleep for several days, shaken up by his career frustrations and the idea that he had traveled on a plane that came very close to crashing. That Saturday, Shabbos Shuvah, he’d arranged to meet some friends for breakfast at a popular spot, but as he was walking there, he suddenly saw the door of the Jewish Learning Exchange.

“I walked in carrying my car keys,” he says. “I saw this religious-looking rabbi and thought, ‘Are we in 16th-century Poland?’ ”

A couple of guys approached him who turned out to be writers for a popular family comedy show. They invited him home for Shabbos lunch, and — with some trepidation — he accepted the invitation.

Lunch was another revelation, both alluring and perplexing. His hosts had funny, smart wives (“wearing somebody else’s hair,” he marveled). They were all successful, intelligent, normal-looking — and religious.

These new friends brought him to meet Rabbi Avrohom Czapnik, director of the JLE. Sitting in shul on Kol Nidre night, observing Rav Czapnik next to his Holocaust-survivor father, something inside him gave way. He broke down in tears.

“It opened the eye of the needle for me,” he says.

His transformation didn’t happen overnight, though. He still had lots of questions, and spent months straddling two worlds. One Friday night, while at a restaurant with some buddies prior to attending the premier of a friend’s film, he saw Rabbi Baruch Gradon, head of the Mercaz HaTorah Community Kollel, walk by outside, wearing a long frock. The rabbi was walking with a few other fellows on their way to a shalom zachar.

Rabbi Lynn never did make it to the premier. He joined the group and attended his first shalom zachar, seeing for the first time in his life grown men sitting and singing together. The words of one zemer, “perok yas anach — redeem Your people” moved him deeply. (He eventually became close to Rav Gradon and still considers him to be his rebbi and a surrogate zeide to his children.)

“At that point, I knew there was no way back,” he says. By the end of the year, he was off to Jerusalem.

Shortly before he was scheduled to leave for Israel, Rabbi Lynn received a sudden offer to write for a major television show. It was a huge break, a golden opportunity. He went to Rabbi Gradon to figure it out.

“Rabbi Gradon held my hand and simply cried,” he recounts.

With Rabbi Gradon’s encouragement and support, he was able to walk away from it.

“Years later,” Rabbi Lynn recounts, “I was at a hotel with my wife, sitting in the lounge waiting for her to join me downstairs. She was then pregnant with our twins, our sixth and seventh kids. As I waited, I saw that show come on the TV in the lounge. All I could think was baruch Hashem, baruch Hashem.

Heroes of Their Stories

Rabbi Lynn went to Machon Shlomo in Jerusalem to learn. With the encouragement of the rosh yeshivah, Rav Beryl Gershenfeld, he stayed that year, and then another, during which he was introduced to Ruthi Cowland, whose British family had become more observant through Rav Noach Weinberg and Aish HaTorah (Ruthi’s brother, Rabbi Jamie Cowland, still works with Aish HaTorah). Ruthi was finishing a degree in Oriental studies at Cambridge, and despite her mother’s reservations about her daughter marrying an American, the shidduch went through, and the couple moved to England so that Ruthi could finish her degree.

The Lynns moved to London at the same time as did noted author and speaker Rabbi Dr. Akiva Tatz, and they became neighbors and good friends. Rabbi Lynn was prevailed upon to join a kollel.

“I loved the learning,” he says. “I came hungry, and I was surrounded by people who drank Torah.”

“Shmuel Lynn became a real talmid chacham — his kiruv capacity comes from a place of deep knowledge,” Rabbi Tatz comments. “He does not simply teach a little something to people who know nothing.”

These days, despite his many outreach commitments, Rabbi Lynn’s morning chavrusa still remains a sacrosanct part of his day.

When Ruthi finished her degree, the Lynns went back to Israel, where he learned in Rav Asher Arieli’s shiur in the Mir for five years as well as attending the shiurim of Rav Moshe Shapira ztz”l. He earned semichah with Rav Yosef Yitzchak Lerner, whose kollel prepares English-speaking students for rabbinic ordination. Through the kollel, he also received semichah from Rav Moshe Halberstam ztz”l (describing the exam with Rav Halberstam as “the scariest moment of my life”).

When it was time to move on, they set their sights on working in outreach in the US, debating between the major East Coast college towns — Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C.

When they presented their dilemma to Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky, the Rebbetzin told Rabbi Lynn, “Listen to my husband. Hashem puts words into his mouth.”

Rav Kamenetsky whispered something into his ear. Rabbi Lynn doesn’t share it, but the upshot was that he and Ruthi moved to Bala Cynwyd, outside Philadelphia, and have been there ever since, raising a large family and partnering in the mission of bringing unaffiliated Jews closer to Torah through Meor and now Olami. Ruthi, meanwhile, became a licensed marriage and family therapist.

Along the way, Rabbi Lynn was  fortunate to have been joined in his religious observance by his two brothers.

“One of my brothers was embarrassed to tell me he was becoming religious, while at the same time I was embarrassed to tell him the same thing,” he remembers. Today his brother Dovid is a sought-after therapist for the English-speaking community in Jerusalem, and Yosef is the mashgiach ruchani at Machon Yaakov, a yeshivah in Har Nof for baalei teshuvah.

“Reb Shmuel is the father of kiruv on campuses across the US,” says Rabbi Beryl Gershenfeld. “He came to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution, and showed that students could be inspired, grow, and change when Torah was presented with authenticity, depth, and relevance.

“One of his greatest skills is his ability to connect and inspire all types of people and help them achieve greatness in their own unique ways,” he adds, pointing to Rabbi Lynn’s Penn students. “They express Torah in many beautiful hues. One of them, Jack Cohen, is now a rabbi and the educational director of the Hebrew Academy in Miami. A second, Ian Glastein, is a prominent financial investor and philanthropist [responsible for the publication of Rabbi Aaron Lopiansky’s Ben Torah for Life]. Zack Rosen was an All-Ivy League basketball player who became a star in the Israeli professional leagues and is now a rabbi teaching Gemara in Jerusalem.”

Rabbi Gershenfeld notes that while his former talmid’s background was in film, he realizes the real drama is in human relationships and growth. “He knows how to reach people through storytelling, and they relate to his journey.”

Rabbi Lynn himself explains, “I tell stories because they have the power to take a kernel of truth and package it in a way that people are open to it. Their intellectual guard is not up in the same way, so they can simply experience truth in a more palatable and inspiring way — to feel it, taste it. It opens people up to seeing themselves as the protagonists in their own narratives, and becoming the heroes of their own stories.”

In the film, as the local Slovak guards give the Jews orders for the roundup. In Hollywood style, they gave the script a happy ending, but in reality, just two months after the faked epidemic that granted a reprieve, the entire community was shipped off to Auschwitz. 

The Show Must Go On

For Rabbi Lynn, getting back into the film industry with a new agenda had its own surprises. Baredjov was shot in Israel and Slovakia and has been picked up by distributors such as Apple and other major platforms. Rabbi Lynn’s script did suffer some Hollywood-style modifications at the hands of his producers, but it’s still probably one of the cleanest films to come out of the industry.

“They gave it a happy ending,” he says. “But in reality, two months after the ‘epidemic,’ most of the Jews were shipped to Auschwitz, although a few did manage to leave. Raphael Lowey met a terrible fate at the hands of the Nazis for his role in the deception. There are different versions about what they did to him, but all of them are awful.”

He seems philosophical about the film’s happier ending; he’s familiar with the tropes of the screenwriting world and the pressure to show a triumphant ending to an inspiring act of bravery.

He says he found the dynamics between the Jews of Bardejov and their non-Jewish neighbors particularly interesting. It was the type of town where they had lived side by side for generations and relations had been more or less amicable. Suddenly the peasants and townspeople found themselves permitted — even encouraged — to take over their former employers’ businesses, reversing the roles. As time went by, it became clear they were being asked to do the Germans’ bidding to actually help exterminate the Jews.

Rabbi Lynn sees the potential of film when it comes to raising Jewish consciousness and bearing witness in an era of Holocaust-deniers.

“Twenty-five percent of American youth think the Holocaust was a myth,” he says. “I want Jewish young people to see that they come from something, that they have an illustrious past worth sacrificing for.”

The film is currently reaching a wide audience through on-demand video platforms, and will later be released to streaming services.

With the success of Bardejov, Rabbi Lynn has moved on to new scripts, dusting off the old talents that had been on hold during the years he was forging a new life path and bringing thousands of young people along with him. One of those scripts features a young refusenik woman named Marina Furman, who became an activist and survived numerous KGB imprisonments, torture, and assassination attempts. He actually met her years after those events, and he wants to share her story.

“As Soviet Jewry activists, my in-laws were in touch with her family in the 1980s, when they were refuseniks living in the USSR,” he says. “They risked their lives to leave the country and join the Jewish community, even though they knew nothing about Judaism beyond an idea that they weren’t allowed to eat pork on Yom Kippur.”

Another script is about a Holocaust survivor’s reflections and memories as he approaches the end of his life. This survivor is actually helping to guide the production of the film while others work on the script.

“It’s about dealing with the end of era, with making amends or reparations, with reconciling with the past,” Rabbi Lynn says, noting how important it is for closure and healing, for facing reality and letting go.

Rabbi Lynn is an example to the many young professionals he mentors that being Orthodox doesn’t mean you have to give up your creative talents. Too many of them think that Orthodox life means retreating into a modern shtetl. Instead, he is able to show them how to channel creativity to educate and inspire.

Rabbi Lynn says it was Rabbi Yaakov Rosenberg ztz”l — founder of Machon Shlomo, who passed away in 1999 — who passed on his secrets of successful outreach. The first, Rabbi Rosenberg taught him, is that it’s not a numbers game. When someone is ready to change his life, you need to take achrayus for him.

Secondly, Rav Rosenberg would say, “You never know whose neshamah is in front of you. Be humbled, and try to find the right Torah for what that neshamah needs.”

On the stage of life, Rabbi Shmuel Lynn could have chosen many roles and made a success of any of them: musician, tennis player, scriptwriter. Instead, Hashem led him on a path of Torah, engaging his intelligence and people skills to reach out to other Jews with the same inchoate hunger for meaning.

When entertainers say, “The show must go on!” they express their commitment and belief in the importance of their art. But Rabbi Lynn knows that when the “show” is Torah Judaism, the commitment has consequences well beyond winning a golden statuette or multimillion-dollar contract.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1008)