Just Call Him “the Mash”

“We try to find what is special in each bochur and we connect with that and try to rebuild his self-confidence which in most cases he lost while going through ‘the system’”

Rabbi Chaim Yisroel Blumenfeld knows a thing or two about what the Holy Land can do for kids.

Fifty-five years ago the teenage Yisroel (then Pete) was there on a yearlong study program when an encounter with a young kollel scholar named Rav Noah Weinberg turned him on to Torah initiating a lifelong relationship with the man whose name would later become synonymous with Jewish outreach. Five years later Yisroel’s father made the trip toIsrael to visit his son who had by then become a Torah scholar. Upon finally meeting Rav Noah the elder Blumenfeld’s first words were “I’ve been waiting five years to punch you in the nose.”

Instead the two embraced.

In an ironic turnabout the young man whose odyssey of Jewish return initially put him at odds with his parents has spent nearly four decades working to infuse new life into teens who’ve had their own fallings-out with distraught parents. Yeshivah Neveh Zion was founded in 1977 and since joining its staff a year later Reb Yisroel — known affectionately by generations of Neveh students as “the Mash ” shorthand for mashgiach ruchani — has navigated the school through both calm and turbulent times while helping thousands of young Jewish men succeed in leading fully Jewish productive lives.