Last week, Israel lost a great soldier. Rabbi Yehuda Schwartz, of blessed memory, wasn’t a soldier in the normal sense of the term. He didn’t fight in Tzahal, but rather as a former editor of The Jewish Press in New York he fought Israel’s battle in the media. For me he was an important teacher on my path from Hollywood to the Holy Land. While I had written books and movies, Rabbi Yehuda taught me the craft of journalism. He also, by his example, was one of the inspired lovers of Israel who taught me to set Jerusalem above my highest joy.
Two years before I came on aliyah, some 40 years ago, I was a young novelist and screenwriter in Hollywood. One day, I was sitting on a beach in Santa Monica when the Almighty split open the Heavens and hurled down a totally unexpected thunderbolt of T’shuva which set me off on a magical mystery tour and spiritual journey. Traveling to Israel, I was overwhelmed by the beauty and holiness of the Land. If I was truly bent on returning to my roots, this was the place to do it, I intuitively sensed. But I didn’t know where to begin. So I returned to America, abandoned Hollywood for the far more “Jewish” Manhattan, and began to learn Hebrew in the Jewish Agency building on Park Avenue.
One day, two Israelis strode into the classroom. One of them, Meir Indor, was a clean shaven, lieutenant colonel in the IDF. Today, he is the director of the Almagor Victims of Terror Association in Israel. His bearded partner, Rabbi Yehuda Hazani, of blessed memory, had a large knitted kippah, and wore sandals with socks. One of the founders and main activists for the Gush Emunim settlement movement, he was a teacher at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva and founder of the joyous, flag-waving parade to the Kotel on Yom Yerushalayim. That was back in 1982. The first War in Lebanon had broken out, and they had traveled to New York looking for volunteers to help out on the moshavim in the north while the locals were off at war. Actually, Indor and Rabbi Hazani had been brainstorming for a while, trying to think up a project to bring Jews to Israel, and this was their brainchild. Their trip to New York was the birth of the “Volunteers for Israel” program, which later turned into “Sarel.”
I immediately decided to sign up at their emergency New York headquarters, which was located in The Jewish Press building in Brooklyn. Back in those days, although I had been learning a little about Judaism, I still hadn’t made a firm decision about observing the Torah. I owe a lot to Rabbi Yehuda Schwartz and The Jewish Press for giving me the added push to get me out of my life of Hollywood shmutz into the true limelight. Standing on the street, looking up at the formidable, block-long building, I decided to put on a kippah. I had heard that the Jewish Press was an Orthodox newspaper, so to me, a totally assimilated screenwriter from Hollywood, the building was like a mini Beit HaMikdash. From that day forth, I continued wearing a kippah, and it’s been getting bigger and bigger ever since.
In those days, the newspaper was headed by the Gaon, Rabbi Shalom Klass, of blessed memory. His son-in-law, the energetic Rabbi Yehuda Schwartz, was the managing editor, and Arnie Fine handled the printing from his small ink-scented kingdom downstairs in the boiler room. Yehuda, as everyone called him, was a fiery, passionate lover of Torah, the Jewish People, and the Land of Israel.
Entering the fortress-like building, the security guard directed me to an upper floor where the volunteer project was headquartered. The large room was deserted and a dozen telephones were insistently ringing on all the desks. Quickly, I began answering the calls and writing down the names and numbers of the people who were calling to volunteer to help Israel in its time of war. Not knowing what to tell them, I promised that someone would call them back soon. After several hours of frantic activity manning the phones all alone, Rabbi Hazani and Meir Indor appeared in the room and asked who I was. Discovering I was a writer, they shlepped me to the Managing Editor’s office. How happy Yehuda Schwartz was to meet me! I can still feel the bear hug he gave me. “You have to dedicate your writing skills to the Jewish People,” he insisted.
It was Yehuda who opened the door of The Jewish Press to the idealist shlichim from Israel. He brought them mattresses and let them, and the ten other shlichim who arrived in New York to help, sleep in the building for the first two-months of the campaign. He had kosher food delivered to the group around the clock. He took me under his wing and taught me the ins-and-outs of journalism and how to give a news story a creative and eye-catching twist. He “adopted” the emergency volunteer drive and put all of the newspaper’s media power behind the campaign, often ignoring other news stories in the effort to help the State of Israel as much as he could during the Lebanon War. When the Israelis had to return to Israel to set up operations in the Golan to be ready for the hundreds of volunteers who signed up for the program, they put me in charge of the recruitment campaign in New York, where I worked for two years sending literally thousands of volunteers until the Israelis gave me a green light to make Aliyah. During that time Yehuda Schwartz was my mentor, joining me at public sign-ups, guiding me through the maze of Jewish America, always with great passion and keen insight, always with a sense of humor and ability to laugh at the lighter side of Diaspora life, always setting Jerusalem above his highest joy. When news of the “Jewish Underground” broke out and a dozen settlers were arrested for acts of retaliation against Arabs, Yehuda told me to write the newspaper’s lead, front-page story week after week in defense of the imprisoned Jews. And when my flight date to make Aliyah arrived while the Jewish Underground case was still in trial, he swept my hesitations aside and told me that I could continue to send in my weekly headline articles from Israel. “The most important thing for a Jew in Diaspora,” he declared,” “is to make Aliyah as fast as he can.”
Yehuda Schwartz made Aliyah ten years later. During his years at The Jewish Press, he helped hundreds of Jewish causes. That was the joy of his life. May his memory be for a blessing.
