Destination Dimona 

How did a Brooklyn-accented Boro Parker end up as the 40-year-long chief rabbi of a dusty Israeli development town most famous for a nearby nuclear plant? When you meet Rabbi Yitzchok Elefant, tall, imposing, a magnetic mixture of a Sephardi baba and town sheriff who’s gained the trust of the Sephardim, Russians, Black Hebrews, Gerrer chassidim and amcha who populate this corner of the Negev, you’ll know the answer

It’s precisely 5,722 miles from Boro Park to Dimona — and Rabbi Yitzchok Elefant, the Israeli desert town’s Brooklyn-born chief rabbi, is nothing if not precise. “Make a left at the city entrance and I’ll be at the bus stop at 10:45,” he’d said, and there he is.

After a long drive through the Negev — past Bedouin sprawl, an air-force base, and a largely-barren landscape — the town suddenly appears. One minute there’s desert, the next there’s Dimona.

Standing at the bus stop in his frock coat,  wide-brimmed Homburg, and electric-blue tie, Rabbi Elefant is a commanding presence — a fact that’s reinforced as soon as he folds his tall frame into the dinky car. “Shalom aleichem,” he says briskly in a New York accent that’s the bedrock of his fluent Hebrew. “Let’s go, we don’t have much time.”

It’s that unmistakable sense of New Yorkery that has brought me to this town of almost 40,000, to meet a phenomenon — or rather, to answer a set of questions about the sheer incongruity of it all.