Photos: Andrei Riskin

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n a rather nondescript stretch of El Camino Real, Palo Alto’s main drag, stands a little shul called Emek Beracha. It’s housed in a former Blockbuster Video store, and aside from a Chabad House, it’s pretty much the only Orthodox game in town.

But that’s not so surprising in a town dominated by Stanford University and the high-tech industry, where the headquarters of Google, Facebook, Apple, Hewlett Packard, Tesla, Waze, and Pinterest can all be found.

The “Palo Alto Orthodox Minyan” was founded in 1976 and struggled for years to find a home, finally graduating from borrowed spaces (including the lobby of a bank that was closed on Shabbos) and humble kiddushes of soda and Entenmann’s cakes to a small but full-fledged shul. For years, the minyan didn’t even have a rabbi. Now known as Congregation Emek Beracha, the “Valley of Blessing,” it seeks to infuse brachah into a valley best known for its silicon chips.

Leading the charge is the animated, dedicated Rabbi Yitzchok Feldman. Aided by a dynamic kollel he helped establish six years after his arrival in 1995, he’s working hard to share the timeless wisdom of Torah with people whose day jobs involve technologies that change with staggering rapidity. One of his newest congregants, for example, is a lawyer working for Waymo, which develops self-driving cars. Another congregant recently departed for Eretz Yisrael after being offered an extremely prestigious position at Facebook’s Israel branch. In fact, Rabbi Feldman has a connection with Facebook: his Vaad gives a hechsher to the kosher food truck that pulls up at the social media giant’s headquarters every day. “We’re hoping Google will get jealous and follow suit,” he says. “At any given time, there’s usually about ten people from my shul who work for Google; you see quite a few kippahs there.”

Rabbi Feldman is well positioned to handle this sort of congregation as well as new recruits to Judaism. A graduate of Yale University, he was among the early wave of talented baalei teshuvah in the 1970s and ’80s who paid it forward, using their talents to inspire others to follow their path. In a town dominated by a prestigious university and the high-tech industry, he admits, “You can’t be stupid” when you teach the not-yet-convinced.

Rabbi Feldman arrived in Palo Alto just before the dot.com revolution, and as the tech sphere mushroomed, he did his best to reach out to the many Jews drawn to the area and the industry. Emek Beracha’s website boasts that it was one of the first shuls in the country to have a domain and a website, helping high-tech Jews to find them.

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abbi Feldman himself took the plunge into Judaism in the 1980s. Actually, plunge is the wrong word. He put his big toe into the pool of Torah and wasn’t sure he liked it. It took a long period of getting used to the water before he finally jumped in.

He was always something of a fighter, a contrarian who relished a good intellectual fight. He grew up in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, in a family with a mother who brought separate dishes to her marriage and a father who had little inclination for Jewish ritual. As a teen, he found the version of Judaism he’d been shown to be vacuous, and remembers agreeing to go to Yom Kippur services “only if I could read any book I wanted inside my siddur.” (He read Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto.)

Yet he was possessed of a lively intellectual curiosity, and was determined to read not only Marx, but a good deal of the canon of Western literature: “I wanted to learn how to read the world’s great books,” he explains. To that end, he enrolled in a two-year “guided studies” program at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

“I had some impressive classmates,” he relates. “One of them, [author and radio host] Eric Metaxas led a prayer breakfast during Obama’s administration. Ian McFarland, who’s one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known, is now the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge.”

After two years, looking for larger horizons, he transferred to Yale. Feldman had several months in between switching colleges, so he spent one month in Wyoming at the National Outdoor Leadership School. After that, he planned to spend some time on a kibbutz; Israel “just seemed like an interesting place.”

He arrived in Israel the week of Rosh Hashanah. Having adopted the philosophy, “When in Rome, do as the Romans,” he decided to take a bus to Jerusalem. At the Central Bus Station he was “chapped” by Jeff Seidel, who brought him to the Kosel. He arrived to find someone named Baruch Levine standing on a chair, handing people cards with names and addresses of families willing to host for the holiday. When the cards ran out and there were still young men standing around with nowhere to go, Levine turned to his assistants — one of whom was Howie Rotman Hy”d, one of the kedoshim massacred years later in the 2014 Har Nof shul attack — and asked them to bring the remaining recruits to Meah Shearim to try their luck. Yitzchok (then Larry) found himself in a Yiddish-speaking home where he didn’t understand a word.

The next morning, he woke up, donned a pair of shorts and a cardboard kippah, and went back to the Kosel, where Baruch Levine was once again on a chair handing out assignments. He had an opening for just one guy, so Feldman took it, finding himself with an American family named Rosenblum.

As soon as his host learned where he was attending college, he said, “Yale? Oh, so you were sent here on purpose!”

“No, I wasn’t,” Feldman responded.

“Yes, you were,” countered his host, Mishpacha columnist Yonoson Rosenblum. “Baruch sends all the Yalies to me!”

It was all quite heimish; not only did the two men share a university, they shared Chicago as a hometown. Someone at the table even knew Feldman’s sister in Washington.

Yonoson had lent him a regular kippah to replace his cardboard one, so the next day, Yitzchok/Larry went to Ohr Somayach to give it back. There he ran into Yehuda Berenstein, a Harvard dropout from Los Angeles he’d met through Rosenblum at shul. Berenstein began trying to convince Feldman to come to yeshivah. “Look,” he told Feldman, “two or three generations ago, everyone was frum. But somewhere along the way, someone in your family decided not to be. But at least that person knew what he was rejecting.

“You inherited the consequences, but you don’t even know what it is they rejected! Don’t you owe it to yourself to spend two or three months here so you can make an informed decision?”

Feldman spent the night thinking about the offer. The massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon had happened over Yom Tov, but he found the Israelis surprisingly philosophical about it. He decided to stay put.

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arry/Yitzchok Feldman stayed at Ohr Somayach for the next two and a half months, attending classes. Rabbis Cardozo and Gottlieb made a big impression on him, seeding his brain with hundreds of Torah ideas. Having been indoctrinated with the Documentary Hypothesis in college, which proposes that the Torah is the product of multiple authors, he spent much of his time there wrestling with those claims.

He was exposed to other influences as well. During his second week in Ohr Somayach, he woke up in the succah and found a volume of collected articles from Tradition, and a copy of Rav Soloveitchik’s The Lonely Man of Faith. “I was struck by it,” he remarks. “Then I ignored it for the next ten years. I bought a few of Rav Soloveitchik’s other seforim during that stay, but I didn’t read them till I was back in the US.”

One thing he didn’t do was daven — not for the entire stay. Someone took him to meet Rabbi Yaakov Rosenberg, one of the founders of Ohr Somayach and later of Machon Shlomo. Rabbi Rosenberg was not amused by this confession. “How long are you here? Six weeks? Doing what?”

“Just learning. It’s interesting,” was Feldman’s rather lame reply.

“That’s not good!” fumed Rabbi Rosenberg, who was known not to mince words. “A person has to do, not just think!” (“This was 1982,” Rabbi Feldman says. “He left soon afterward to start Machon Shlomo.”)

Feldman returned to Yonoson Rosenblum, a little shocked. “Do you know him?” he asked.

Rosenblum laughed. “I met him in ’79,” he said. “He was so rough my wife said, ‘Maybe we should go back to the Conservative movement.’ ” But Rosenblum hadn’t been dissuaded, and Feldman wasn’t discouraged long term either. In fact, he sensed Rabbi Rosenberg was the genuine article.

Feldman went back to Yale in December. He wasn’t quite a convert to Torah life yet, but he’d found Shabbos beautiful, and tried to keep it as much as possible. He continued Hebrew and Judaic studies in college, and after graduation in 1985, opted to return to the strong-minded Rabbi Rosenberg at Machon Shlomo in Har Nof.

At Machon Shlomo, an intellectually challenging yeshivah, Feldman found himself surrounded by many great minds, notably Rabbi Berel Gershenfeld (Rav Rosenberg’s son-in-law) and Rabbi Meir Triebitz, a former child prodigy who’d entered Princeton at 14, finished a PhD at 19, and followed it up with a postdoc in physics at Stanford.

During this time Yitzchok was introduced to his wife, Ellen, an alumna of Cornell University as well as, as he puts it, “of Neve Yerushalayim at its best.” Ellen, originally from Little Neck, New York, had returned home after college to be near her recently widowed mother, where she was pulled into the Jewish Heritage Center by Rabbi Moshe Turk. Neve was the next step.

After spending time in Machon Shlomo, Feldman went on to yeshivas Mercaz Hatorah in Talpiot. He and Ellen served there as dorm parents, acquiring a reputation for being warm, compassionate listeners. He would remain there in kollel for the next seven years, but then began keeping his eyes out for a position in chutz l’Aretz. Ohr Somayach in London was a possibility, with campus work at Oxford; so was campus kiruv at Harvard or MIT.

But Hashgachah pratis intervened. A young man who’d spent time in Machon Shlomo and gone on to business school at Stanford contacted Rabbi Triebitz. He told him the sole Orthodox minyan in Palo Alto needed a rabbi — they’d been 19 years without one. “It was lay-led and very modern,” Rabbi Feldman says. “Palo Alto was a college town.” This was 1995, and the dot.com boom was just beginning to ramp up (Netscape went public the same month they arrived).

Like a high school student weighing college options, he chose Stanford over Harvard and MIT, and moved out to Palo Alto with Ellen and three children (they would eventually add seven more). He started off dividing his time between trying to inject energy into the shul and going to campus once a week to try to attract students. “It was lonely at the beginning,” he admits.

Slowly, his efforts began to pay off. “Rabbi Feldman took what was basically a basement minyan that wasn’t very interested in leadership, and grew it into a normal, successful shul,” says Rabbi Avi Lebowitz, Palo Alto’s rosh kollel. “Some of the congregants were more to the right, others to the left, but he was able to straddle both sides, maintaining standards while being very welcoming and nonthreatening to the more liberal elements.”

Rabbi Lebowitz notes that Palo Alto is a challenging community in which to work. “Nobody comes to Palo Alto for the Yiddishkeit,” he says. The community is so small that there’s no peer pressure or social norms to keep people in line with normative frum behavior. On the contrary, there’s an ethos against judging anyone’s lifestyle, and a strong anti-religious attitude in the surrounding community. “We bring people in, but the tide is in the other direction,” Lebowitz says. “Once in, it’s not easy to keep them in.”

After a few years, Rabbi Feldman acknowledged he could use some reinforcements — socially, kiruv-wise, learning-wise. In 1997, in conjunction with Torah Umesorah and Rabbi Nate Segal, a meeting was held to discuss opening a small kollel. Rabbi Segal told Rabbi Feldman that a congregational rabbi can never sleep, because he’s thinking about all the people he should be learning with. But when a kollel comes to town, he can get some rest.

“I was looking for my own next step,” says Rabbi Joey Felsen, one of the original recruits from Ner LeElef and today the kollel’s executive director. “Yitzchok wasn’t sure the community was ready, but finally we organized pilot trips for each kollel couple. The Feldmans hosted each one of us separately and showed us around.” Finally in 2001 the kollel, also known as the Jewish Study Network, was established. While not officially associated with Emek Beracha, the kollel members daven there, and there’s tremendous coordination between the two.

“The kollel has been the strongest force for kiruv in Palo Alto,” Rabbi Feldman says. “It’s amazing what they accomplish. They ought to win awards just for the creative way they name their courses.”

Rabbi Felsen, for example, created a class entitled “Habitat for Jewmanity,” which was actually a hands-on class in how to build a kosher succah. The classes aren’t limited to Palo Alto; kollel members do outreach in San Francisco and the South Bay area. They’re currently housed in high style at the local Jewish Community Center, a $155 million complex that’s a great place to bump into people and strike up Jewish conversations.

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he challenges of Silicon Valley kiruv aren’t unique, but certain mindsets are more deeply entrenched than in more conservative areas. The tech world is very atheistic — at the very least, religion is a taboo subject. Tech companies give matching donations to many charities, but never to religious organizations, which is not so much the case on the East Coast. “Religious Christians [in the Bay Area] are embarrassed when people find out they go to Bible study,” Felsen says.

Furthermore, he adds, certain non-PC subjects are best avoided — at least initially — in Silicon Valley, which is more morally left-wing than Los Angeles. “You learn what you can speak to people about,” he says, “or how to phrase things in ways they can relate to. For example, you can focus on mitzvot bein adam l’chaveiro and spin them in terms of avoiding creating a ‘toxic environment.’ ”

But Rabbi Feldman doesn’t believe the high-tech crowd is so different, in terms of kiruv, than any other group of intelligent Jewish people. “Yes, you have to be able to gauge who you’re speaking with, and it helps to be informed about the world,” he says. On the other hand, he confesses his own extensive background in the humanities isn’t especially useful for dealing with a high-tech crowd. “The Great Books aren’t so important,” he says. “I once opened a speech talking about The Great Gatsby, and very few people knew what I was referring to.”

Rabbi Felsen begs to disagree. “Because of his Yale background, Yitzchok has academic credentials that the people here respect,” he says. “He speaks with a very sophisticated vocabulary and knows how to connect with academic people. You can’t speak yeshivish to Palo Alto intellectuals.”

Rabbi Avi Lebowitz concurs. “As a baal teshuvah himself, Yitzchok can relate to where these people are at,” he says. “People in Palo Alto are very cerebral — they connect on an intellectual level. They’re not turned on by warm-and-fuzzy stuff like a kumzitz.”

It’s also not easy to pull academics and techies away from their highly driven work schedules. One of our more well-attended programs is Thursday night mishmar, Rabbi Felsen says, because it begins at 9 p.m. “That’s when people are just leaving work. When they’re not working, they’re likely to be off biking or surfing or hiking in the mountains — everyone here is very into nature.”

In the absence of a lot of Jewish infrastructure, Rabbi Feldman takes it upon himself to create it. He personally organized the community eiruv. The community had no shatnez testing, so he encouraged a few local people to get training in how to do it. “He feels personally responsible; he knows what needs to happen, and will fill in himself if necessary,” Rabbi Felsen says.

Rabbi Feldman himself once summarized his achievements in this way: “Every piece of key infrastructure gives lasting satisfaction — the eiruv, or bringing an official Orthodox mission to the community day school, or obtaining a building for a nomadic community, or starting a kollel. Each of these sets the stage for repeating success. Every Shabbos a mother can come to shul, every kid is able to see the shul as a normal Jewish entity and sees clarity in what the school stands for.”

On top of that, he’s constantly involved in chesed work, supporting people when their life or family falls apart, helping them put together a simchah, and sharing Torah.

The frum community has grown in other ways. Chabad and Meor, another kiruv group, both have a presence on the Stanford campus now, allowing Rabbi Feldman to devote himself exclusively to the shul and outreach (Chabad rabbi Yosef Levin preceded Rabbi Feldman to Palo Alto, having arrived in 1980). While the community day school educates the younger children, seven years ago Rabbi Felsen started a high school for girls, Meira Academy. “The number waxes and wanes, but we can’t seem to ever get more than 30 girls.” Rabbi Feldman says. “Some people prefer to send to the community school, which tries to treat the frum kids well, and others prefer to send out of town.”

Perhaps the biggest factor tamping down the growth of the frum community is the exorbitant price of housing. In an area where a tiny three-bedroom house easily fetches $2.5 million, few people can afford to stay. “Everyone is affected,” Rabbi Felsen says. “Nobody can afford to buy near the shul.” Some of the kollel families have moved to cheaper San Jose. The real estate bubble affects donations as well, because those who do buy houses end up house-poor.

“The Wild West still hasn’t been tamed,” Rabbi Feldman admits. Palo Alto isn’t likely to become the next Boro Park; both the university and the tech sphere are fluid, with people coming in for a spell and moving on to other opportunities. But the Jewish Study Network and Emek Beracha are uniquely positioned to make an impact on people who themselves impact the world at large. If Google and Apple can transform the world with their cutting-edge concepts, perhaps Emek Beracha and JSN can transform hearts and minds in their own way, infusing high-tech pioneers with the Torah’s age-old wisdom.

One-woman show

Ellen Feldman is careful to point out that Palo Alto was not a total midbar when she and her husband arrived in the 1990s. “There was the shul and day school, established by the local Modern Orthodox community,” she says. “Kosher food wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t impossible. But the Chabad shaliach and his family were the only other chareidi people in the community.”

She remembers the locals as being very welcoming. When her son turned out to be the only boy in kindergarten with a kippah, she sent him the following day with a baseball cap. To her surprise, his non-Orthodox teachers exclaimed, “Aharon, you should be proud to wear a kippah, and proud that your father is a rabbi!” The day school offered her a part-time position largely to help her obtain health insurance at the end of a pregnancy, and certain community members adopted them, helping with babysitting and other needs (including sewing girls’ clothing to make it tzniyus-compliant).

Without making any particular effort, Ellen found herself possessed of a certain celebrity status, since she and the Chabad rebbetzin were the only Jewish women in town always accompanied by a large gaggle of kids (at least until the kollel arrived). She was also a person hosting twelve people regularly for Shabbos — again, until the kollel arrived to siphon some of the burden. “Now we typically have four or five extras,” she says, “but the kids don’t feel it’s Shabbos unless there are guests.”

It wasn’t easy being a one-woman show in the early days, with no one to cook the family meals after a baby or invite her for Yom Tov (at the beginning, the Feldmans made a policy not to eat in anyone else’s home). But she was more concerned about her children, growing up without frum peers. “My oldest son had only one friend, from a modern family,” she says, and the “fifty-year-olds in shul were his buddies! Little League also helped; there was a league which wasn’t frum but was very wholesome, placing a lot of value on respect and team spirit. Our son couldn’t play the Shabbos games, but the boys would walk over to tell him who won.”

The children imbibed a sense of normative frum life from summer camps and out-of-town high schools, and when the kollel moved in, the younger children were blessed with like-minded peers. But sending the older ones away at age thirteen or fourteen was hard on everybody. “My son cried every night at the beginning, even though everyone was very friendly and nice,” Ellen admits. (That son is currently in kollel in Los Angeles, and completing a sefer.) “As baalei teshuvah ourselves, we didn’t have frum family in New York or Chicago to send them to.”

On the other hand, growing up as ambassadors of Torah molded her children into strong, mature, independent young people. “They came out great,” Ellen avows gratefully. “Maybe it would have been different for them in a bigger community, where there are many shades of how to be religious. My kids never had any confusion about who they were.”

Shidduchim presented the same problems faced by every out-of-town family: establishing a presence for yourself in the shidduch scene, making connections, flying children in for dates. Now, with several children married in several states, their circles have naturally widened.

Ellen says she never felt like a “rebbetzin.” People simply call her Ellen, and know her as a mom and preschool teacher. She’s proud of her husband’s dedication to the community, even when it slows down his own projects. “He just finished a book about Rabbi Yaakov Rosenberg, which took longer than he expected because of the community obligations,” she says (the book is now going to print). “Just establishing the eiruv was an eight-year process, start to finish.” She notes that her husband also derives tremendous satisfaction from a weekly Gemara study session with middle-aged men from Palo Alto, who are extremely intelligent, mostly Conservative-affiliated, and deeply enjoy discovering the Talmud’s depths.

Some have even started coming to their shul. “Changes happen slowly,” Ellen says, “but we always see progress.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 737)