The Bridge Builder: The Life and Continuing Legacy of Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein
272
The Bridge Builder: The Life and Continuing Legacy of Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein
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Overview
When the Anti-Defamation League sent a young Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein to Chicago to foster interfaith relations in the late 1970’s, he was surprised to see how responsive Christian evangelicals were to the cause of supporting and defending Israel.
Eckstein founded The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews in 1983 to promote cross-cultural understanding and build broad support for Israel, Soviet Jewry, and other shared concerns. The Fellowship has grown and thrived over the last three decades, raising more than $1.1 billion, and is one of the largest 50 NGOs in America today. American Christians have become one of Israel’s most reliable sources of financial and moral support.
Few people realize that Eckstein and The Fellowship have done an unprecedented good deed in bridging an ancient cultural gap. Renowned journalist Zev Chafets explores Eckstein’s role in this important interfaith evolution, showing how an American rabbi made major progress in promoting dialogue, cooperation, and mutual respect in the face of harsh and unrelenting opposition.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780698137813 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 08/11/2015 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Author’s Note
The first time I met Yechiel Eckstein, in 2004, I was a columnist at the New York Daily News, looking for a story. Someone told me about an Orthodox rabbi out of Chicago who was raising millions for Jewish philanthropy in Israel and the former Soviet Union. This surprised me; in my experience, most rabbis receive charity, not dispense it. Even more surprising—astonishing, in fact—was that these donations were said to come from the evangelical Christians of small-town America, many of whom had never encountered a Jew in person. I was both curious and skeptical.
Eckstein and I met for lunch in New York City, at a kosher pizzeria that he chose. For readers unaccustomed to Jewish dining, suffice it to say that it is almost always a mistake to eat at a place where the kosher certificate in the window is bigger than the menu. This was one of those places.
I should say, right off, that I am not generally an admirer of rabbis. My first brush with one came in Pontiac, Michigan, where I was raised. The Reform rabbi who ministered to our little congregation lived down the street, and my father assigned me the task of mowing his lawn. All I got for the effort was a nod of gratitude. My father explained, ex post facto, that charging a rabbi for labor would be disrespectful. From that day on, I endeavored to be respectful of rabbis from a safe distance.
That became impossible when I moved to Israel at the age of twenty, in 1967. Rabbis were everywhere, and these were the real thing: bearded fundamentalists in black whose worldview and dress code were an unchanging reflection of late medieval Poland. At first, I was charmed by these ancient survivors. That feeling changed to alarm when I realized that they were intent on imposing their absolute rules and retrograde lifestyle on everyone else. Even more alarming, they were organized into political parties that controlled or influenced large swaths of my daily life. Like a great many irreligious Israelis, I became—and have remained—rabbi averse.
As I sat in the kosher pizza parlor, watching Eckstein devour huge slices of double cheese, he didn’t really seem like a rabbi to me. Broad-shouldered and big-boned, he was built more like a retired NFL quarterback. He wore a baseball cap instead of a yarmulke and sported a two-day growth of beard, but there was nothing macho about his affect. He was sincere and friendly, devoid of the irony that enlivens so much Jewish conversation. When I remarked on this, he smiled and said, “I’m from Canada.”
Eckstein proudly confirmed that the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews—which he referred to as his “ministry”—was raising vast amounts of money from evangelical Christians for Jewish charities. But he wanted me to understand that his “mission” went far beyond that. He was building a bridge between Jews and Christians, who had been divided by animosity and mutual incomprehension for two millennia. He saw himself not as a mere fund-raiser or philanthropist, but as a spiritual teacher, able to show Christians how to reestablish their biblical connection to the Land of Israel and the Jewish people. The money, which he raised mostly by direct mail and infomercials in which he starred, was a by-product.
Naturally, I was suspicious. After the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals, televangelists had a bad reputation. And it was extremely unusual to hear an Orthodox rabbi talk about Christianity in any but a disparaging way. But Eckstein checked out. He had a prestigious rabbinical degree. And there really was a Fellowship doing what he said it did. I looked for scandals and found none, and eventually wrote a nice little man-bites-dog story.
A couple of years later, I wrote a full-length profile of Eckstein for the New York Times Magazine. I went out to Chicago and inspected the premises, saw him in action on the pulpit of a Pentecostal church in Indiana, interviewed his staff, friends, and enemies, and wrote a piece called “The Rabbi Who Loved Evangelicals (and Vice Versa)” in which I referred to him as the rabbi with the biggest Gentile following since Jesus. The piece was respectful, but I was not completely sold. If you go to the Yechiel Eckstein Wikipedia page, you’ll see that most of the material in the “criticism” section stems from what I wrote.
By now, the subject of evangelical-Jewish relations fascinated me, and in 2007, I published a book titled A Match Made in Heaven. Eckstein served as my guide to what was (and remains) mostly uncharted territory. He took me with him to a meeting with Jerry Falwell at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia; walked me through a Christian Booksellers Convention in Denver; and allowed me to come along as he led a group of evangelicals on a ten-day pilgrimage to Israel. Over the years we met often in New York and at his Chicago headquarters, where he let me see for myself how the philanthropic sausage was made.
During these years, Eckstein’s Fellowship grew into the largest private charitable foundation in Israel as well as the underwriter of much of the Jewish life of Eastern Europe. As an adopted Israeli, I appreciated what he was doing. He was also fun to hang around with, full of energy and enthusiasm rare in a man his age (or mine). Over time we became friends.
Occasionally we discussed the idea of my writing a book about his life and times. I was tempted. My last two books were biographies of Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News. Like them, Eckstein is a brilliant communicator, a self-made entrepreneur, and a man willing to stand up for his ideas in the face of vitriolic opposition from the establishment (in Eckstein’s case, several establishments). They all changed conventional wisdom about what was possible. I had no doubt that a book about Yechiel’s life was an interesting and worthwhile project, but I was reluctant to do it myself.
I hope I don’t shock you with the revelation that there is no such thing as objective biography. Nor is it unheard-of for authors to write about personal friends. But it has some obvious dangers, and some less obvious. Offending a friend in print is a good way to put a dent in the friendship. Yet self-censorship guarantees a dull book at best and—unless readers know exactly what you are doing—a dishonest one.
So let me be clear. This book is authorized. My advance against royalties is partly underwritten by the IFCJ. My royalties will go to the IFCJ. This is Rabbi Eckstein’s story, and much of it is told in his words. But that is not the same as saying that this is an “as-told-to” book. I am confident of the essential facts of the narrative because I have covered Rabbi Eckstein and his ministry for more than a decade. If there were skeletons, I would, I think, know about them. Yechiel is not a man who keeps secrets.
As I worked on the book, a writer friend read it over my shoulder, and peppered me with comments like “This will never stay in” or “No way he’s going to let you write that,” or just “You must be kidding!” When Yechiel went over the finished product, he asked me to remove exactly one thing—an unflattering remark he made about a relative. His comments were mostly attempts to explain the spiritual dimension of his activities, which I often didn’t quite grasp. Not only did he accept unflattering descriptions of his character, behavior, and motivations, he actually added examples. If you think I’m making this up, read the book and decide for yourself.
Still, I can’t say that this book is unbiased. I went into it liking and admiring Yechiel Eckstein. After countless hours with him, I like and admire him more. I have seen for myself the good he does with the money he has raised. I have watched him wrestle with his enemies, his critics, and most of all, his own personal doubts and demons. I have even, on occasion, been vicariously moved by his spirituality.
I still don’t really have a rabbi. I’m not the type, I guess. But if I did, he’s the one I would want.
One
“THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE”
On a bleak Chicago Saturday in the winter of 1989, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein and his wife, Bonnie, rose early and put on their Sabbath finery. That morning their firstborn, Tamar, was to celebrate her bat mitzvah, the coming-of-age party that marks the twelfth birthday of Orthodox Jewish girls.
The Ecksteins had come to Chicago from New York eleven years earlier, after he finished rabbinical school at Yeshiva University and she completed her BA at Barnard College. For the first six years, he worked in the local office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), promoting interfaith activism on First Amendment issues. In 1983, he left to found his own organization, the Holyland Fellowship of Christians and Jews. The Christians with whom he fostered friendship were not the usual mainline liberal Protestants and Catholic dignitaries with whom the heads of American Jewry were friendly. They were evangelicals: born-again, Bible-loving Christians of a kind that most Jews rarely encountered. To the extent they were thought of at all, it was as the Other—a pack of Bible-thumping racists and Jew haters from the hinterlands. But Yechiel had learned to see past the stereotype. The evangelicals he came across in the Midwest were everyday Americans whose religious beliefs made them eager to meet and befriend the Jews, God’s chosen people. He saw the potential for a great Judeo-Christian alliance that would serve as a force for Israel and Jewish causes around the world, and help America stay on a moral course at home. It was a vision shared by virtually no one else in the Jewish community, but he pursued it with single-minded energy. To make ends meet, he held down weekend pulpits in small Orthodox congregations around the city, performed concerts, and sang at weddings with a band he put together.
In the Chicago newspapers, articles described Eckstein’s work for the ADL—teaching a course in Judaism sponsored by the Roman Catholic archdiocesan school board, leading sessions for Christian doctrine teachers on “the Jewish roots of Christianity,” addressing a conference of priests and nuns on “how God speaks to us.” One story noted that he had put together perhaps the world’s first Jewish-evangelical conference. Still, he was far from being famous, and now that he was out on his own, leading his own ministry, he worked hard to garner the attention needed to expand.
Bonnie, his wife, saw this work as evidence of emotional neediness, and she didn’t like it. She had fallen in love with a rabbi’s son, a big, good-natured jock who had played basketball for the Yeshiva University High School team and performed Hebrew folk music for adoring audiences on the kosher college music circuit. Now he seemed different, a driven and exhausted man with a dream she neither understood nor shared. Bonnie had nothing against Christians. She had known some at Barnard. It was the sort of Christians Yechiel was working with, and sometimes dragging home for Sabbath dinner—Republican Christians, Reaganites, full of Jesus talk and pious curiosity about the Shabbat rituals. Yechiel, thank God, was still a Democrat, but he was also a friend of Pat Robertson’s—had actually appeared on his TV show, The 700 Club. No one she knew watched, but still . . .
Family tensions were put aside that Shabbat morning, as they headed for the small Chabad shul in a strip mall near their home in Skokie. Yechiel’s downtown synagogue was too far for their friends and neighbors to reach on foot (Orthodox Jews are not allowed to travel by car on the Sabbath) and, in any case, he didn’t want a repetition of his own bar mitzvah, when the stress of performing in front of his father’s congregation gave him an unstoppable nosebleed that forced him to scratch his sermonic “D’var Torah” speech. Tamar wouldn’t be commenting on the weekly Torah portion during the service—Orthodox girls don’t do that—but she would be the belle of the morning, asked to speak at the party afterward. Yechiel wanted to make sure that she would be relaxed and happy. She and Bonnie had decorated the small social hall with blue and white balloons and replaced the stained white tablecloths with festive blue ones. A large cake inscribed with the words “Mazel Tov Tamar” was placed at the head table.
As Bonnie and Tamar surveyed their handiwork, a severe-looking young rabbi appeared, gave the decorations a disapproving once-over, and informed them that balloons were not allowed in his synagogue, a heretofore unknown prohibition. He also ordered them to remove the new tablecloths and replace them with the old ones. And, after inspecting the cake, he ruled that it was not kosher: it was forbidden to cut letters of the alphabet on the Sabbath. Yechiel was upstairs at the time, taking part in Shabbat prayers. He knew nothing about the rabbi’s hostile attitude, or the pressure it had put on his wife and eldest daughter.
After the Torah reading, Yechiel was planning on leading the prayers. It was the usual thing, especially for a father who was also a rabbi and a cantor. He went to the lectern and began with the opening prayer. Then the young rabbi came up and said, “No, no, no.” Yechiel was confused, but he stepped away from the pulpit. “I knew I was a controversial person, but I had been praying in that Chabad shul for a long time and at first I was shocked to be turned away like that.”
The small shul was filled that day with friends, virtually all of them Orthodox Jews. Silently he walked to the back, covered his head in his prayer shawl, and sat there, half listening, praying that his daughter’s special day hadn’t been ruined. “I was mortified.” Still, he understood. He knew that Halacha (Orthodox rabbinical law) prohibited Jews from entering Christian churches. It was considered avoda zara, idol worship, to teach Torah to Gentiles—a crime he committed every time he preached to an evangelical congregation about the blessings God had promised those who bless the Jews, or quoted the Zionist prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah. Senior rabbis at his alma mater, Yeshiva University, had denounced him. His own father disapproved of what he was doing. Orthodox Judaism is about maintaining borders between the Jewish people and the Gentile world, and Eckstein had transgressed those borders.
And yet, huddled under his prayer shawl, Yechiel Eckstein felt something else: a sense of defiance. He was a seeker and a self-examiner, a chronic critic of his own motives. But at this moment he trusted his vision. A bridge uniting Christians and Jews could be built, and he felt destined to be the engineer. He had no idea how hard the work would be, the price it would exact. He only knew, with a certainty he had never before felt, that he had no choice but to go ahead.
More than thirty years later, Eckstein recalls that certainty. “I felt humiliated and alone. It was the worst day of my life. But I never thought I was wrong. It didn’t even occur to me to quit. I have a personal relationship with God and I felt at the time that it was a divine mission, what is known in Hebrew as shlichut. Sitting in the back of the shul that day, I thought about Abraham and Isaac. In the book of Genesis, God commands Abraham to take his son ‘to the land I will show you.’ He doesn’t tell Abraham where it is. He simply expects Abraham to obey. I had a moral certainty that came from God. And I still feel it. That’s what has guided my work and my life, from the beginning until today.”
Two
CORNERSTONE
Being called out as a bad Jew during your daughter’s bat mitzvah would be a memorably awful experience for any father. It was especially traumatic for Eckstein, the scion of a family whose tradition of piety and community leadership went back centuries and spanned continents. The family name can be traced back to the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Until 1787, the Jews there were known to one another, and the authorities, only by a Hebrew first name and the first name of their father; but that year, an edict of Emperor Joseph II required all his Jewish male subjects to choose a Germanic family name or have one chosen for them by a government official. Many picked colors—Roth (red), Weiss (white), Schwartz (black); occupations—Kaufman (merchant), Kravitz (tailor); or their towns of origin. Yechiel’s ancestors chose Eckstein, which means “cornerstone,” a name that reflected their view of their place in the community. For generations, the clan had produced rabbis and religious judges, ritual slaughterers and mohels (ritual circumcisers), synagogue cantors and balebatishe lamdanim, scholarly laymen. Eckstein men married the daughters of similarly esteemed figures. “Cornerstone” was a proud name, but not an inaccurate one; families such as this helped bind together the sometimes nomadic and often embattled Jews of Middle Europe.
The position of Hungary’s Jews slowly improved during the nineteenth century. In the Revolutions of 1848, Jews fought side by side with Hungarians, and in 1867 they were granted full citizenship. For the first time they were free to leave their towns and villages and to live and work as they chose. Ambitious young men made their way to Budapest, enrolled in universities, and pursued professions. Some became socialists. Others were attracted to the radically liberal Reform Judaism that was newly imported from Germany. A small but increasing number converted to Christianity. Everything seemed possible. The most intrepid souls set out for foreign destinations—the great cities of Western Europe and the golden streets of America.
Simcha Bunam Eckstein, a prosperous young businessman from the town of Weitzen, joined the exodus in 1867. But his destination wasn’t Budapest or New York. Instead, he and his wife, Yutel, traveled east to Jerusalem, the ancient Jewish capital, which had been ruled by a succession of Roman and Christian emperors before falling to the Ottoman Turks. As part of the Ottoman Empire, the fabled city was little more than a dusty provincial town of about fifteen thousand people, a third of them Jews. Political Zionism was still a gleam in Theodor Herzl’s eye, but Jewish Jerusalemites like Simcha Bunam weren’t Zionists. They were religious pietists—Sephardim who had returned to the Holy Land from exile in Islamic countries; Hasidim from Europe who practiced a fervent style of worship; and more traditional Orthodox Jews. Whatever their differences, they shared a belief that a Third Temple would be established in Jerusalem only when God was ready and only through his agency.
Simcha Bunam Eckstein bought a small home in a new neighborhood within walking distance of the Temple Mount, now under the sultan’s control. The neighborhood, called Kollel Shomrei Hahomot (Guardians of the Walls), was built by fellow Hungarian Jews. He and Yutel were childless, but they raised three orphan children—two girls and a boy, the son of Simcha’s dead brother Yechzkel. The boy’s name was Yechiel Zvi Eckstein.
The young Eckstein had a typical religious education, meaning that he received almost nothing in the way of secular learning. Most of the Jews in the Holy Land spent their time studying Talmud. Work was the exception; people were sustained by alms and contributions from abroad. When Yechiel Zvi came of age, he married a young woman, Gitel Preuiss, whose father, recently arrived from Hungary, was a cloistered mystic. The elder Preuiss’s days were spent in the synagogue declaiming “Time is short and the work is great!” and his nights were given over to the study of kabbalah with a rabbi from Yemen—behavior that was considered extreme even among the God-struck pietists of the Jewish community of Jerusalem.
That community occupied a place of precipitous change. In World War I, the British captured Jerusalem from the Ottoman Empire, and established sovereignty there. In November 1917, British foreign minister Arthur Balfour sent a letter to Baron Walter Rothschild, the leader of British Jewry, promising support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The letter, known as the Balfour Declaration, recognized the extraordinary momentum Zionism had gained since the first secular Jewish pioneers arrived in the Holy Land in 1880. The modern Zionist movement was barely twenty years old, but it had captured the imagination of Jews around the world. Young socialist idealists came to create communal farms in the Galilee, seeking “to build and be rebuilt” in the soil of their ancient homeland. At the time, there were about forty thousand of these pioneers in the country. The ultra-Orthodox had little to do with them; for the pietists, these new settlers were heretics who profaned Hebrew by using it in daily speech and who sought, through their activism, to replace God’s timetable with their own. Jews like the Ecksteins felt no need to be “rebuilt” by physical labor or self-defense. They were content to live as their ancestors had, honoring tradition and observing the laws and practices of the Torah.
In the decade after the Balfour Declaration, the pioneer population nearly quadrupled, to almost 150,000. This alarmed the Arab population, which had its own postwar aspirations. In April 1920, the pious Jews of Jerusalem were set upon by mobs incited by local Islamic leaders. A few of the men tried feebly to defend themselves with rocks and boiling water, but they really had no idea how to fight. The rioting lasted three days and ended only when British troops stepped in and declared martial law. By then, five of the city’s Jews had been murdered and more than two hundred injured.
Yechiel Zvi Eckstein and his family couldn’t have known that this was a prelude to a battle for the Holy City that is now in its tenth decade. What they did know was that Jerusalem had become an inhospitable and possibly dangerous place. In 1928, they decided they had had enough and decamped for the United States. On the boat to America, Yechiel Zvi cut off the side curls of his nine-year-old grandson Shimon, who would henceforth be known as Simon, or Sy. It was a gesture of assimilation, a sign that the ultra-Orthodox family was willing to make at least a cosmetic effort to fit into their new country.
In America, Yechiel Zvi found work in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Jewish peddlers and merchants had established a small community. His business card announced the arrival in Dixie of “Rabbi Y. Z. Eckstein, Practical Mohel, and Wedding Ceremonies Performed.” Gitel took a look around, pronounced the place unfit for Jews, and left, to make her way back to Jerusalem. Yechiel Zvi, for reasons known primarily to himself, stayed on, with his son and grandchildren; it took him eleven years to rejoin his wife in the little house not far from the Wailing Wall.
• • •
Sy Eckstein, despite his Grandmother Gitel’s concerns about the viability of Jewish survival in America, grew into a talented Talmud student and a precocious synagogue singer and choir director. Only a year before the Ecksteins arrived in America, Al Jolson had starred in the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, a film about a gifted singer, the son of a rabbi, who left the fold for the allure of show business. But young Sy wasn’t a jazz singer. He was an Eckstein, a cornerstone of the Jewish community, no more drawn to the lights of Broadway than his ancestor Simcha Bunam had been by the pleasures of secular Budapest. He finished high school and enrolled in Yeshiva University in New York City, where he was eventually ordained as a rabbi. While he was there, he met his future wife, Belle, at a dance sponsored by Young Israel. It was a daring thing to do—previous generations of Ecksteins had found their brides through carefully arranged marriages—but Sy and Belle belonged to the “modern Orthodox” world, an American attempt to fuse strict adherence to the Torah with an embrace of scientific knowledge and contemporary culture.
After being ordained, Sy took a job as the assistant rabbi at the Jewish Center on West Eighty-Sixth Street, one of the most prominent modern Orthodox synagogues in America. From there he went to Winthrop, Massachusetts, a heavily Jewish suburb of Boston, as head rabbi. A pair of notable events marked his three-year tenure in Winthrop. His eldest son was born, in 1951, and named Yechiel Zvi, after his deceased great-grandfather. (As was the custom, Yechiel also received an “American” name—Joel Harris Eckstein—although nobody ever really called him that.) The other extraordinary moment came when Sy saved the life of a drowning man at a local beach. In landlocked Jerusalem, the city of his birth, Jews generally didn’t know how to swim, and even in America, Orthodox rabbis were rarely found at the beach. The story became a part of Eckstein family lore.
Then and now, young rabbis building a career tend to move around a lot, and in 1952 the Ecksteins departed for Ottawa. The Canadian capital had a few hundred Jewish families divided among four synagogues. Over a few years, Sy Eckstein consolidated them into one congregation, Beth Shalom. Many of the members were only nominally Orthodox, but Rabbi Eckstein decided it was better to include everyone, even at the cost of compromise. So if his congregants drove to the synagogue on Saturday in violation of Sabbath rules, or disobeyed kashrut (Orthodox dietary laws), he turned a blind eye. Such flexibility won him a reputation as a liberal and welcoming rabbi. But he was strict in his own observance. There was only one other home in Ottawa where the food was deemed kosher enough for the Eckstein children to eat. When Yechiel visited his other playmates, Gentile or Jewish, he brought his own refreshments.
On the pulpit, Rabbi Eckstein cut a commanding figure. He was well over six feet tall, his height accentuated by a formal silk top hat. He was a stickler for decorum, not a notable quality of most Orthodox shuls. At Beth Shalom, good manners and the right appearance mattered. “It was a very proper, somewhat pompous place with a sort of British atmosphere,” recalls Yechiel. “I remember as a young boy watching my father standing on the bimah [the platform around the altar] in his black robe, in a very formal pose. He could be very intimidating.” As the rabbi of the Canadian capital, he was invited to represent the Jewish community on state occasions, such as visits by Queen Elizabeth and other British royals, and at the annual opening session of Parliament. He also participated in brotherhood events on behalf of the Ottawa Jewish community.
Sy relished his ecumenical public role, but the ecumenism was superficial. Like most Jews of the time and place, he and his wife very rarely socialized with Gentiles. A Catholic church stood next door to the synagogue parsonage where they lived, but the Eckstein kids were forbidden to enter—and in any case Yechiel doesn’t remember being especially interested in what went on inside. Yechiel had only a few Christian friends, neighborhood kids with whom he played ball. One of them, Brian Hawlee, became a priest. There must have been evangelical Christians in Ottawa, but they didn’t get invited to state dinners or parliamentary openings, and Sy and Belle and their children probably never ran into any of them.
• • •
The Eckstein marriage was a love match that lasted; in 2014 they celebrated their fifty-eighth anniversary. To their children they often seemed like a closed partnership. Rabbi Eckstein was an aloof and sometimes harsh father, Belle an elegant consort and helpmate and a dutiful but distant mother. Thinking back, Yechiel can’t recall a single time either of his parents hugged him or told him they loved him. “We kids were irrelevant,” he says. Husband and wife dined alone, after the children had been fed and sent upstairs. A family joke was that Rabbi Eckstein called home each evening from his office to make sure the kids were already out of the way. “As they got older, my parents grew more mellow and loving,” Eckstein says. “My siblings and I can only smile at how giving and attentive they have become toward us and especially their grandchildren.”
The absence of money was a constant in the Eckstein family. “I desperately wanted a football helmet like the other kids. I begged for one. Finally my father bought me a helmet—made of cardboard. I begged for a bike too. My father eventually brought one home. It was used. And it was a girls’ model.” Sy and Belle maintained a front of grand style, but Yechiel knew it was a facade. He was humiliated when he was periodically called down to the principal’s office and reprimanded because his father had missed a tuition payment. And he was mortified to overhear his mother begging her husband to ask the president of the congregation for money to replace the threadbare carpet in the parsonage.
Sy and Belle entertained their friends graciously, but their kids didn’t get any of the goodies that were served. As a small boy, Yechiel was so hungry for sweets that he drank an entire bottle of honey-flavored cough syrup and had to be rushed to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. When he was caught trying to sneak cookies, or violating other house rules, he was punished, sometimes severely. His parents believed in the Talmudic injunction that a man who refrains from chastising his son shows hatred for the boy.
The one break in the routine was the Sabbath meal that followed services. Sabbath songs were sung, in accordance with tradition, and occasionally Rabbi Eckstein even joshed with the kids. Sometimes Yechiel was allowed to invite a friend—Jimmy Shalom, who lived nearby, or Mel Rosenberg, a classmate at Hillel Academy. After the final benediction, Eckstein’s parents adjourned to their second-floor bedroom for a nap. After they were safely asleep, the boys played soccer in the downstairs hallway. When the hall got too dark to see the ball, Mel and Yechiel decided that while turning on the lights with their hands was forbidden (“probably punishable by death” Rosenberg wrote more than fifty years later) there was no biblical prohibition against using their teeth. They used the same method to turn on the television to watch Ottawa Rough Riders football games. Changing channels was difficult, but Yechiel mastered it “one click at a time.”
Yechiel was a standout athlete at Hillel Academy, bigger and more athletic than the other boys. “During the winter, we would play football during recess,” Rosenberg recalls. “On one occasion, Yechiel had caught the ball and was on his way to a decisive touchdown. I was the lone defender. I lunged at his feet as he confidently ran around me and managed to trip him up in the snow. Tackling Yechiel was such a rare and exceptional incident that I remember this brief moment of childhood glory to this day.” Eckstein does too. “To be honest, it was embarrassing to be tackled by Mel,” he recalls.
Yechiel Eckstein may have been a schoolboy hero, but he harbored deep doubts about himself. When he was nine, he and a friend, Frankie Rosen, walked past the swimming pool outside the Jewish community center and saw a body lying at the bottom. Rosen, acting instinctively, tried to scale the fence to reach the drowned body. Yechiel stood frozen. He didn’t even shout for help. The body was already dead; there was nothing that either boy could have done. But Yechiel couldn’t help contrasting his hesitance with his father’s quick action at the beach in Massachusetts. He felt that he didn’t measure up, a feeling Sy Eckstein did nothing to dispel.
“My father never believed in me, and he let me know it,” says Eckstein. “He thought everything I said was foolish. The Rough Riders had a quarterback I looked up to, Russ Jackson. Whenever I came up with an idea, my father would dismiss it as a stupid fantasy. ‘Jackson to Eckstein for the winning touchdown,’ he’d say in a sarcastic, mocking tone. ‘Like you’re really going to save the game.’”
• • •
Despite Yechiel’s resentments, he kept up a facade. “Honor your father and mother” was an injunction he took seriously, and he didn’t want to do anything that might harm his father’s image. Yechiel quickly developed a performer’s ability to fake his moods. “I knew how to show people what they want to see,” he says. “I figured out how to turn it on and off.” For many years, he starred in the role of the dutiful son of the Canadian capital’s First Jewish Family.
From the age of seven, Yechiel and his elder sister Rachel (known as Rock), his younger sister, Ahuva, and eventually, his baby brother Berl were sent to Morasha, a modern Orthodox summer camp in the Poconos. He and Ahuva—remembered by her fellow campers for her vivacious personality and good looks—entertained the other kids by singing duets of Hebrew pop songs and Canadian folk tunes. Once again, Yechiel was a star and, although he was lonely, he didn’t really mind being away from home.
There weren’t enough Orthodox Jewish children in Ottawa to support a religious high school, and so Yechiel and a few other local boys were sent to New York, where they could get a proper yeshiva education. Girls were supposed to stay home and attend public school, but Ahuva rebelled, and after a struggle she was allowed to go to New York, where she boarded with an observant family and studied at the Hebrew Institute of Long Island. After his bar mitzvah, Yechiel followed. The bar mitzvah itself had been a bloody-nosed fiasco, and his misery was compounded when his parents seized his gift money to pay for the party.
From the time he left home at thirteen, Yechiel saw his mother and father two or three times a year, rarely for more than a few days. Every Friday before sunset, he dutifully called home to wish them a good Shabbat, but it was clear to him that he was basically on his own, especially after Ahuva left to study in Israel. At fourteen, he transferred to Yeshiva University High School and lived in the dorm in Washington Heights. It has since come out, most recently in a class-action lawsuit, that there were sexual predators among the faculty, known to touch the boys under the pretext of making sure they were wearing their tzitzes (fringes of the ritual undershirt worn by Orthodox Jewish men). A number of times Yechiel found himself cornered by a rabbi who came too close for comfort. But he didn’t complain; nobody complained back then, and in any case there was no one to complain to.
• • •
Orthodox Judaism of the Yeshiva University High variety did not place a high premium on spirituality. Prayer was a thrice-daily routine, an obligation, a set of words to be memorized and declaimed in their proper order. Yechiel wanted more; he sought a personal connection with God in his davening (the Yiddish term for praying). “I desperately strove for devekut, literally a union with God, that would bring spiritual euphoria. I prayed so hard for it that when I couldn’t get there, I became depressed.”
Some of his classmates and not a few of his teachers saw his conspicuously emotional style of prayer as an affectation. His father felt the same way. Once, during a school vacation in Ottawa, Yechiel remained standing, lost in prayer, while the other members of his father’s congregation were seated. This violation of ritual decorum brought him a parental reprimand as well as some personal discomfort. “I never liked attracting attention to myself,” he recalls. “But at the yeshiva in New York we stood for the Kaddish prayer, so I stood in my father’s shul. Being different from all the others made me cringe. But at the same time I felt grown up, like a real yeshiva student, and I wanted people to know it.”
As a teenager, Yechiel had two extracurricular passions: music and sports. He was a self-taught guitar player and singer, a folkie who loved Peter, Paul and Mary and idolized Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the itinerant spiritual guru, composer of sacred music, and dynamic performer who was later immortalized in the Broadway show Soul Doctor. As a basketball player, Yechiel was a six-foot-two forward, a rugged rebounder with a sweet eighteen-foot jump shot.
Table of Contents
Author's Note ix
1 "The Worst Day of My Life" 1
2 Cornerstone 6
3 Rebel in a Skullcap 21
4 Sweet Home Chicago 47
5 Fellowship 69
6 "Questionable" 81
7 Over Troubled Waters 102
8 Potomac Fever 118
9 Isaiah 58 126
10 Guardian of Israel 142
11 Attack of the Black Hats 164
12 New Beginnings 176
13 Under Fire 194
14 "Before You Were Born, We Cared About You" 210
15 Reflections 226
Epilogue: "Where There Are No Men…" 236
Index 245