Yovel for the Yudins

Photos: Naftoli Goldgrab

How to build an infrastructure

“Our Shabbos table was always a home run, even if my derashah wasn’t”

When the Yudins arrived in Fair Lawn in 1969 with a three-year-old child, Fair Lawn was still Jewish frontier land. Yeshiva University had helped the few Orthodox families who’d moved in from nearby Paterson organize a shul; the original 17 families bought a split-level house for the rabbi with a room downstairs for the “kehillah.”

“On Friday afternoons, I’d drive around and knock on doors to try to ensure a minyan,” Rabbi Yudin says. “We invited people for meals, to our succah. Our Shabbos table was always a home run, even if my derashah wasn’t.”

The relentless outreach, plus the lure of the rebbetzin’s Shabbos fare and Shabbos Mevarechim cholent, helped them slowly grow a community. By 1983 the congregation had built the current building, which included a mikveh in the back, supervised by Dayan Yaakov Posen from K’hal Adath Jeshurun (Breuer’s) and with Rav Moshe Bick as rav hamachshir. “I appreciated every step of our growth,” Rabbi Yudin says. “After the mikveh we put up an eiruv, which was another huge project. We had to work with the town, plot the boundaries — it was quite exciting.”