'Neighbourhood Rabbi' tackles barriers

The Liberal Thornhill Richmond Hill July 29, 2003
Mitchell Brown, Staff Writer - More from this author
    
For the record, Rabbi Mendel Kaplan, Thornhill's "neighbourhood rabbi" has no problem with children enjoying the adventures of British boy wizards and squeaky-voiced mice.

"But I believe all the hype and craze about Harry Potter and Disney World is because we have... a generation of spiritually starved children that are looking for something magical," said the executive director of Chabad@Flamingo, a Jewish community centre affiliated with the international Chabad-Lubavitch movement.

"I don't think Harry Potter does it. I don't think Disney World does it. They're nice, it's entertaining, I don't think they're bad things, but at the same time children need spirituality."

It's a valuable message, but getting young people through the door to hear it... that's the tricky part.

And so, about a year and a half ago, Rabbi Kaplan made the decision to bring another couple into the centre, two people whose only job would be to cater to the community youth that drop in.

Today, the older kids come in to play basketball and hockey and practice some karate in the centre's gymnasium, just a few doors away from its synagogue and one floor up from the nursery school downstairs.

"The message that gets across is a synagogue is not a bad place, that rabbis are not bad people," Rabbi Kaplan said.

"I know a lot of people who are uncomfortable with synagogues and clergypeople and I do my best to do away with those barriers."

'I believe all the hype and craze about Harry Potter and Disney World is because we have... a generation of spiritually starved children that are looking for something magical.'

It appears to be working.

In just five years, the Ernest Manson Lubavitch Centre, located at the corner of Bathurst Street and Flamingo Road, has grown from a series of meetings in Rabbi Kaplan's basement into a 22,000-sq.-ft. facility housing a preschool, synagogue, Judaic library and community centre.

Response from the community has been so positive the centre is already planning a $2-million expansion project that will see a larger synagogue and banquet hall added to the building's south side.

It's a challenging project and just one of many on the young rabbi's plate, but his authoritative presence gives one the sense he's up for the job.

He was born 32 years ago in Norfolk, Virginia, a place he readily admits is not noted for its large Jewish population.

"I grew up living in a place where I was different because my parents were observant, but virtually nobody else was in the community," he said.

"I didn't grow up in a setting where everybody was like myself. I know what it feels like to be different."

His father, who took on the task of reinvigorating a local Jewish school, found himself frequently moving his family around the country as he took on new positions, but it was perhaps the time he spent in New York City that Rabbi Kaplan remembers most fondly.

"There, from the ages of 12 to 20, I saw him every day, prayed with him and he would speak publicly every Saturday, for five to six hours some days," he said.

He's referring to "the rebbe", Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the man who was the spiritual and organizational leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement from 1950 until his death in 1994.

"His message was so intricate and yet so simple. It was again and again the same theme: to help others, to put your own needs aside in order to enhance the life of somebody else."

He can't remember exactly when, but at some time in his early teens he was determined to take those words to heart.

Following in his father's footsteps, he travelled around the world, accepting educational posts in such places as Los Angeles, Jerusalem, Buenos Aires and St. Petersburg, Russia.

He eventually found himself leading a yeshiva (an institute of religious higher education) in Detroit, a 24-year-old scholar teaching post-graduate students just four years younger than he.

For all his traveling and study, though, he still wasn't happy.

'I didn't grow up in a setting where everybody was like myself. I know what it feels like to be different.'

"We wanted to make a difference in peoples' lives," he said, referring to himself and Faygie, his Toronto-born wife.

As luck would have it, Ernest Manson, a local developer, donated the land for the future Chabad centre before his death in 1992 and so Rabbi Zalman Grossbaum, Mendel's father-in-law and leader of the Chabad movement in Ontario, appointed Rabbi Kaplan and his wife to serve as the Shluchim (emissaries) for the rapidly growing area.

"The centre was going up, my wife and I moved here, we knew nobody, but we had high hopes and a lot of optimism and we wanted to help people," he said.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, the young rabbi, frequent media guest and father of four (three boys and a princess, he jokes) confesses his "peripatetic" days are behind him, and he's here to stay, doing whatever he can do to make people comfortable with their spirituality.

"In the Lubavitch movement, when you assume a post... the assumption is that it is a lifetime position," he said.

"This is a lifetime commitment. I'm a neighbourhood man. Nobody knows what life brings, but that's certainly my plan."