Karate champion, Talmudic scholar, prolific author, and prison chaplain are just some of Rabbi Fishel Jacobs’ qualifications. Whether it’s breaking 15 inches of solid brick with his hand, or sitting on the bunk bed of a murderer talking about repentance, Rabbi Jacobs sticks to his motto: “When you run out of places to find strength, look deeper within yourself.”
Harold Jacobs — Jewish in his heart but not yet in practice — bought a poultry processing factory in Vermont and moved his family out to South Royalton (population 1100) from Brooklyn when Flip/Philip/Fishel was ten. “Dad’s philosophy was let the kids grow up in the country and they’ll be healthy.’ It would have been a good plan if I didn’t almost get myself killed in the process” Rabbi Jacobs reminisces from his well-appointed study in Kfar Chabad surrounded by an extensive library and piles of his own titles.
“It’s a classic hick town and we were the first Jews there. The parents didn’t mind that their children were beating up the new Jewish kid. It’s not a sophisticated Al Sharpton–like anti-Semitism over there more like the Sunday preacher style. So I was getting beat up all the time — in the locker room on the soccer field.”
One day during a visit from his New York relatives Flip came home roughed up and bleeding. “Harold Flippy’s gotta learn to take a bat to school” said his uncle offering a solution.
A few days later a South Korean tenth-degree karate master named Tae Yun Kim advertised that she and her brother were opening up a karate school. Today she’s a multimillionaire living in California but then she was a destitute immigrant fresh out of the mystical South Korean mountains. Flip Jacobs was her first student.
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