When Rabbi Heshy Wolf and his wife Chani announced to their family and friends that they were moving from Los Angeles to Fairbanks, Alaska, they were met with skepticism.

“Everyone was looking at us like, ‘What are you doing? You’re crazy,’” Heshy told The Journal on a Zoom interview from his home in Fairbanks, where he now lives with Chani and their two children. “Now that we’re here, everyone is so excited about it,” added Chani. “They came to visit and saw how beautiful it is here.”

Before the Wolfs’ arrival 18 months ago, Fairbanks had never had a Chabad rabbi. The local Jewish community of approximately 1,000 people had been managing life events on their own — brit mila, weddings, funerals, and everything in between. To date, Heshy has only conducted six or seven funerals, but hopefully there will soon be weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Rabbi Yosef Greenberg, who has served as the regional director of Chabad in Alaska since 1991, offered Heshy the opportunity to come to Fairbanks and see if he would like to open a Chabad house there. Heshy was interested, but first he needed to convince his wife.

At first, Chani admitted, she wasn’t thrilled about the idea of moving to Alaska. She was born in Australia and moved to Los Angeles with her family at age 12. She had spent her entire life in a warm climate. “I said, ‘No way. It’s way too cold there,’” she said. “Then he suggested we just come for a summer trip to meet the people. My daughter was only a few months old then — now she’s two. We went for a week and really connected with the community right away. They were begging us to come, teach Torah and give them the Jewish experience they’d been missing.”

There was one big perk about moving to a place where the temperatures in the winter can drop below -50°F.  One of the Jewish community members, Jay Ramras, really wanted the couple to move to town and open a Chabad house. He was born and raised there and felt it’s time the Jewish community have a rabbi in town. “So when I told him we are planning to move, he said I’m going to help you out,” Heshy said.

Ramras, a local businessman who was a Republican member of Alaska House of Representatives, offered to help the couple find a place where they could open a synagogue. Heshy traveled back to Alaska, and soon after they began looking, a church came up for sale on two acres of land. Ramras immediately made an offer and purchased it. He renovated the entire building. The Wolfs later built a mikveh on the grounds.

“When Chabad opens in a new town, it usually takes time to raise funds and secure a building,” said Chani. “You start in your home, expand, grow and eventually purchase a place. But here, we already had a building thanks to Jay.”

On their first Rosh Hashanah, they hosted around 20–25 people. The following year, attendance grew to 60, and last Hanukkah, about 100 people came to the candle lighting and party — even with temperatures at -20°F outside.

The cold doesn’t seem to deter anyone from attending Friday dinners, Shabbat services or weekly lessons with the rabbi.

“A couple of weeks ago it was 45 below zero, and people still came over. Nothing stops them here,” said Heshy. “I feel like in a big city, people are more scattered. But in a place like Alaska, far from everywhere else, people really want to connect and engage with their community.”

Ten months ago, Chani gave birth to the couple’s second child, a boy. They had to fly in a mohel from Los Angeles. They also need to ship dairy products and meat from L.A., but they insist on focusing on the positive aspects of living in Fairbanks. While kosher products in local stores or Costco are limited, they have plenty of fish.

“In order to fish salmon here, there’s a quota on how much you can catch, but it’s pretty generous,” Heshy said. “We went fishing during the salmon run and caught 55 salmon. Now we have them in our freezer.”

Living as an Orthodox Jew in Alaska brings other challenges that one may not necessarily think about before moving there. In the winter there are only three and a half hours of light and during the summer, it’s mostly light and a few hours of darkness.

“Sometimes my daughter wakes up and asks me, is it morning or night-time?” said Chani. “It can be very confusing. Often the cold temperatures here get a lot of attention but for us it’s a challenge during Shabbat because then Shabbat enters really early or ends really late.”

Raising two children in a town without Jewish schools or daycare presents unique challenges, but the Wolfs are finding creative solutions. Chani has been connecting with other moms in the community, building friendships, and creating activities where children can play, sing and learn together.

“My kids come with me to everything,” she said. “We want to build a community where Jewish moms can raise their children together. My daughter already knows her entire alef-bet, and she isn’t even three yet – she knows how to pray and knows almost everyone in the community by name.” For now, the Wolfs plan to homeschool their children, using online programs, but in the future, they might even open a Jewish school in Fairbanks.

Some of the people who attend their Shabbat dinners and services are students, professors and researchers from the local university, personnel from the nearby Air Force and Army bases and locals who are grateful to finally have a synagogue in town.

“A lot of them know very little and didn’t have much exposure to Judaism in the past; however, they aren’t scared of us. They want to learn, they say, ‘Teach us more,’ they really come out of the woodwork,” said the rabbi. Chani added that “even though they haven’t been practicing their whole life, they are excited to start now.”

Before moving to Alaska, the couple held a fundraiser in their community in LA and are planning to do another one soon. They admit it’s not as easy to raise money when you live in a small, less wealthy town. The hope is that with the establishment of Chabad in Fairbanks, there will be more Jewish tourists coming to the area.

“The northern lights are incredible here,” said Heshy. “It’s like a winter wonderland. It’s a beautiful place to live in and visit.” And in the summer, Chani said, people love coming here for the beauty and nature.

Despite all the challenges of living in the northernmost Chabad in the world, the Wolfs never had a second thought about their decision. Fairbanks is now their home for life. “We are going to stay here forever,” said Chani.

“Until Mashiach comes,” added Heshy.

To donate to the Chabad of Fairbanks’ fundraising drive on Feb. 15-18, visit Charidy.com/NorthernLight. Email Rabbi Heshy at Rabbi@jewishfairbanks.org

On Sunday night at UCLA Hillel’s “Celebration of Jewish Resilience,” about 275 people gathered to honor Distinguished Professor Stuart Gabriel and Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino). Speakers and guests tried to answer a timely and practical question: what does resilience look like when it’s being tested in real time?

Chancellor Julio Frenk opened the event by calling on attendees to “celebrate Jewish resilience — the intergenerational passing down of Jewish pride, Jewish leadership, and Jewish persistence.” He cited Jesse Gabriel’s role as co-chair of the California Jewish Caucus and Stuart Gabriel’s leadership of UCLA’s Initiative to Combat Antisemitism, describing the work as ongoing rather than ceremonial. “These are lived values,” Frenk said.

Dan Gold, Hillel at UCLA’s executive director, framed the evening as both a celebration and a checkpoint. “Tonight is both a powerful celebration and a meaningful opportunity for us to come together at Hillel to reflect on the past few years, to recognize the enduring strength of Jewish resilience, and ultimately to celebrate the promise of a strong and united Jewish future,” he said. The decision to honor a father and son, he added, reinforced the theme of continuity across generations.

One of the most personal moments came from Maayan Goldman, a third-year psychology major and the only Jewish undergraduate member of UCLA’s Initiative to Combat Antisemitism. She asked the audience to think back to their first weeks on campus — meeting friends, finding routines, settling into a new life. Then she described her second week at UCLA: “For the first time in my life, my identity and existence was threatened.”

Goldman pointed to Oct. 12, 2023, five days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, when the first pro-Hamas rally took place on campus. “UCLA students are marketed as the future leaders of our world, and yet my peers were chanting ‘our people are occupied, resistance is justified’ after over 1,200 of our friends and family members were murdered, raped, or kidnapped just five days prior,” she said.

Goldman described what she saw as the limited set of choices Jewish students felt they had in the months that followed. “There were several options for Jewish students to take following the rising cesspool of antisemitism: Hide, assimilate, Hillel,” she said. For students who leaned into Hillel, Goldman described a place that offered routine as much as refuge. “We were welcomed with a loving embrace, with a kosher cafeteria, with free coffee, and with a community that grieved together and supported one another unconditionally,” she said.

Additional speakers defined resilience not as an exercise in quiet endurance but as seeking visibility supported by institutions. They spoke of the need for spaces, programming and leadership that allow students to show up as themselves without feeling exposed to discrimination and harassment as many Jewish students have in the last two years.

Frenk connected the evening to International Holocaust Remembrance Day and emphasized the administration’s responsibility for campus climate. “As chancellor of UCLA, I will always be clear: hate has no place on our campus,” he declared. The statement drew applause, but it also carried a subtext familiar to many attendees. Those commitments are measured not in speeches, but in how the university responds when protests, policy and student safety collide.

Gold closed by describing initiatives he said Hillel is pursuing, including the Fund to Beat Campus Antisemitism and efforts to bring non-Jewish faculty to Israel. He presented the work as concrete and resource-dependent, and a reminder that, for the organizations tasked with supporting Jewish students, resilience often looks like budgeting as much as inspiration.

Goldman ended on a carefully optimistic note. “While it’s been over two years since Oct. 7 and the campus climate has improved, we can never let what happened repeat itself,” she said. “The need for a place like Hillel will always exist in order for future generations of Jewish students to thrive.”

By the time the program ended, the theme of the night — Jewish resilience — had taken on a specific meaning in the room: not a slogan, but an ongoing set of choices, and a set of responsibilities shared by students, institutions and university leaders.