No Jew Left Behind  

Although there are 13 years and a bit of a generation gap between them, you can’t miss the mutual admiration and farginning, as they’ve  come together for a nostalgic interview to reflect on the place where it all began, the home in which they grew up, their successes and failures, and to try to answer the question: How to stay focused on the bigger picture, on humility and on your shlichus, in the shadow of so much hype and fame?

For them one thing is clear: More than they chose their professions, the professions chose them: “I think that at the end of the day, each of us sees ourself as an emissary of HaKadosh Baruch Hu,” says Fried.

We sit together in Rabbi Manis Friedman’s modest Crown Heights living room, a few blocks away from his brother Avraham Fried’s home. For Reb Manis, being back in Brooklyn still takes some getting used to — for close to five decades he carved out his niche in Minneapolis, Minnesota as director of the Beis Chana Women’s Kiruv Institute, as a world-class lecturer and even the disembodied voice of “Tanya in English” on international call numbers (although the younger generation mostly knows him as “YouTube’s most popular rabbi” for his abundance of online lectures and seminars).

“We grew up in a home of mesirus nefesh,” says Reb Manis, noting that the roots of Jewish activism have been in the family for generations. “Our grandfather, Rav Meir Yisroel Isser Friedman, was the rav of Krynica, or Krenitz, a vacation spot in western Galicia that was frequented by many of the pre-World War II gedolim. He was close to the Sanzer and Bluzhever Rebbes, and his children — including our father, Reb Yaakov Moshe — grew up in the presence of the rebbes and gedolei Yisrael who came to Krenitz in the summer months. One of them was the Kedushas Tzion of Bobov Hy”d, and our father attended the yeshivah he established in the city.”