Community Power Station

For the right-wing community, much of the growth over the last 25 years had its seeds in the founding of the Los Angeles Kollel. With the goal of setting up a "yeshivische" community in Los Angeles, Rabbis Chaim Fasman and Moshe Rubinstein came out to Los Angeles from Lakewood, N.J., home to one of the country’s largest kollels [institutions that support men and their families as they spend all day and evening studying Talmud and other Jewish texts].

To get the Los Angeles Kollel started, Fasman promised the community that the 10 men he was bringing, and their wives, would also go out into the community to teach. The Kollel also brought out top East Coast rebbes to teach at Toras Emes, the elementary school to which they would all be sending their children.

"We took an attitude of responsibility toward many challenges that were facing the community and got involved in other things," Fasman says.

That turned out to be a prescient arrangement, as the record of the Kollel alumni in building community institutions is impressive. Rabbi Gershon Bess, one of the original 10, is one of the most respected halachic minds in town, an educator who has his own shul, Kehillas Yaakov, with about 100 families. His wife, Carol, is principal of YULA High School’s girls’ school. Kollel wives are also principals at Valley Torah High School, Toras Emes and Bais Yaakov, and are teachers throughout the community.

Alumni Rabbi Yitzchak Kurzner founded the Jewish Learning Exchange, which today continues to be one of the most successful organizations in reaching out to and educating previously unaffiliated Jews. The same is true for Rabbi Moshe Zaret and his wife, Bracha, who ran the adult-education program called Ashreinu, now at UCLA, and have opened their own home to hundreds of Jews looking to grow in their practice.

Yeshiva Gedolah, a boys’ high school that recently renovated a beautiful building at Olympic Boulevard and Cochran Avenue, and moved into it, was founded by Kollel graduate Rabbi Eliezer Gross, and Rabbi Shlomo Gottesman founded the Mesivta Academy, a boarding school in Calabasas.

Rabbi David Zargari, one of the leading Persian rabbis in town and founder of Torat Hayim, a school for Persian children, studied for many years at the Los Angeles Kollel. Rabbi Baruch Yehuda Gradon, who came to Los Angeles with the Kollel about 19 years ago, is one of the top adult educators in the city.

Many of the shuls in town have as their rabbis men who first came to Los Angeles to study at the Kollel.

Fasman tells of the speaker at a recent dinner, a philanthropist who compared the Kollel to "a power station that fuels all the other institutions in town."

With a budget of $750,000 contributed by the community, the Kollel now supports 12 men and their families at about $36,000 a year, and recently purchased a building on Beverly, west of La Brea. The Kollel runs about 35 study groups all over the city.

Bess says it marked a turning point for the community.

"The big thing was the fact that there was a core of people, so that young people wouldn’t feel they would drift away and be lost, but would have some nucleus, somewhere they could hear a shiur [class], somewhere they could have a place to daven similar to where they had been in yeshiva, where they were comfortable," he says.