Finger on the Pulse

With Rabbi Joey Haber’s unique blend of Sephardi mesorah and a yeshivish education, he gracefully straddles different demographics while promoting life-enhancing messages common to us all

The most popular speaker at TAG’s Nekadesh event last June at the Prudential Center in Newark wasn’t a venerable Ashkenazic rav with a long beard. Instead, people in the audience found themselves riveted by a dynamic young Sephardi rav from Brooklyn. It wasn’t long before his speech about the dangers of technology had, ironically, gone viral.

Rabbi Haber was already a highly sought-after lecturer in the Syrian community, both in the US and abroad. But the asifah changed the game completely. Now he finds himself asked to speak to Jewish communities across the spectrum, not just about tech, but issues like chinuch, shalom bayis, shidduchim, and the challenges of a society focused on materialism. Personable, articulate, and impassioned, he has his finger squarely on the pulse of both the yeshivah community and his own Syrian kehillah.

“I’m very yeshivish, and I’m very Syrian,” he says when we meet at his Brooklyn home.

Currently the rav of the Magen David shul in Flatbush and the Beit Yosef shul in Deal during the summers, Rabbi Haber has been immersed in both Torah and the Syrian community since earliest childhood. Rabbi Joey grew up in Deal with his eight siblings, and his father, Rabbi Michael Haber, a talmid chacham and the author of many seforim, served as the rav of shuls in Brooklyn and Deal.