No More Reservations

An Indian reservation in Montana isn’t the most likely place for a Jewish awakening, but for Ben Klempner — a teenager trying to make spiritual sense of the world — all the mysterious tribal symbols and rituals were a bridge to sorting out his own ambivalent, even hostile feelings toward traditional Judaism.

Eighteen years later, Reb Binyamin Klempner heads his own organization called the Yad L’Shuv Foundation to help other baalei teshuvah and geirim navigate the intricacies of the Orthodox world, using the patterns of communal support and advocacy he actually learned about on the reservation.

He might be young for heading an international support and mentoring organization, but Binyamin Klempner has been an activist since he was a kid. “I was raised to be a protester and an advocate,” he smiles, remembering how his picture graced the front pages of New Jersey papers as a 14-year-old protestor against America’s invasion of Iraq in 1991. When he was in high school, he brought the administration to its knees over some students’ rights issues. And at 17, he left his suburban Teaneck to spend the summer on the Blackfeet Indian reservation in Montana to help the tribe secure land rights.

It was there that he met his first “rebbe.” Buster Yellow-Kidney was the ceremonial wartime chief of the Blackfeet, a kind, refined, insightful man who was employed as the local FBI agent for Glacier County, responsible for Glacier National Park and other vast tracts of federal land, to make sure hunters weren’t poaching (shooting animals without a permit).