Rabbi Zecharya Greenwald helps newcomers navigate life after teshuvah
IT was the first day of Chol Hamoed Pesach in 1978, and 19-year-old Zecharya Greenwald — today a veteran mechanech, sought-after educational consultant, and longtime head of Me’ohr seminary in Jerusalem — was heading back to Monsey with his larger-than-life father, whom he’d just picked up from the airport. Rabbi Ronnie Greenwald a”h, famed communal and political askan who passed away in 2016, had just spent the first two days of Pesach in South Africa where he was involved in a complex four-way international spy swap that would include the release from a Mozambique prison of Miron Marcus, an Israeli businessman whose plane had crashed in that country. Rabbi Greenwald was flown in for the final negotiations on the first night of Pesach, after Rav Moshe Feinstein ztz”l had authorized him to travel on Yom Tov because Marcus’s release was a question of pikuach nefesh.
“My father, who was always discreet about his behind-the-scenes intrigue and never went into too much detail, broke his silence and began rehashing some of the really incredible and unbelievable things that went into securing the deal,” Rabbi Greenwald remembers. “It sounded pretty far-fetched to my young mind, and I told him, ‘Tatty, that is impossible.’
“He looked at me and said, ‘Zecharya, don’t ever say something’s impossible. The difference between possible and impossible is 15 more minutes of effort.’”
It was that credo that always reverberated in the back of Zecharya Greenwald’s mind, pushing him to rise to the daunting challenges and fateful opportunities that would come his way over the ensuing decades.
Create a free account to keep reading.
