Nefesh B’Nefesh’s Rabbi Fass facilitates geulah

He’s low-key, reassuring and rabbinic, speaks easily to his charges and could easily be one of them, as he brings North American Jews closer to geulah [redemption].

In ten years, through Nefesh B’Nefesh, Rabbi Yehoshua Fass, along with Tony Gelbart, has succeeded in moving 35,000 Jews along the path to accomplish their dream of living in Israel.

After gently retrieving a child who wandered up the aisle of the plane, carrying him back to his mom, he quietly explains his own path to aliyah [immigration to Israel] and his role as facilitator to an unprecedented flow of Jews back to their ancient homeland.

“I always wanted to move to Israel,” he told The Jewish Star, during last week’s NBN flight that carried 231, including 106 children, to renewed lives in Medinat Yisrael. Fass said that he and his wife had a “ten years or bust” attitude to aliyah. His original life plan included medical school but he switched to “rabbinics.”

At Yeshiva University he earned his smicha [rabbinic ordination] and degrees in education and biology, taking the position of associate rabbi at the Boca Raton Synagogue in Florida. But the murder of a 13-year-old cousin by a Hamas suicide bomber in May 2001 shook him out of his complacency.

“It made us recalibrate,” he said.

The Fasses shared their desire to move to Israel with their peers, expecting to be called “crazy.” Instead, others echoed their thoughts on aliyah and voiced similar yearnings but worried that they were held back from living in Israel by “bureaucracy, lack of a social network, strikes, employment.”

He decided to confront the problem using market research and, together with his congregant and partner Tony Gelbart “from day one” in this enterprise, worked to smooth the financial, professional and logistical problems. He noted that before then “no one was addressing the obstacles” that capped at about 1,000 a year the number of people making aliyah from North America. The founding of Nefesh B’Nefesh in 2002 “created an organization that made a robust new wave of modern Zionism possible.”