Shluchim in Fly-Over States

From Jerusalem Post

Jackson Hole is far from the thriving Jewish communities in Toronto and Ramat Beit Shemesh where Raizy Mendelsohn was born and grew up.

There is no regular morning prayer service during the week and sometimes not even on Shabbat, except during the busy summer tourist season. The closest actual mikvaot are in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Bozeman, Montana, which are both five hours away in the few months when there is no snow and up to 10 hours during blizzards.

But Mendelsohn who codirects the Chabad of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with her husband, Rabbi Zalman Mendelsohn, has no complaints.

Raising three smiley daughters aged five and under and with another child on the way, she is the picture of contentment living in a place where a moose moving into her front yard is par for the course.

“If you’re in the middle of nowhere, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the North or South,” Mendelsohn says, in an interview in her living room. “This is an opportunity to reach out to people. In life, everyone has challenges. At least I knew going in what mine would be.”

The Mendelsohns are one of four families who cover enormous swaths of territory in America’s mountain time zone for Chabad, along with Mendel and Esther Lifshitz in Idaho, Chaim and Chavie Bruk in Montana and Benny and Sharonne Zippel in Salt Lake City, Utah. Together they are in charge of the small Jewish communities in what – thanks to a hit song by country singer Jason Aldean – have become known as “fly-over states.”

While South Florida, where Zalman was raised has Chabad houses every few blocks, he is the only full-time, resident rabbi in the state of Wyoming. He started visiting Wyoming regularly as a teacher at Chabad’s rabbinical college in Morristown, New Jersey.

As a rabbinical student, Mendelsohn visited Nepal, Beijing, Singapore, and Bali in Asia. But in 2007 he asked for and received a lifetime appointment by Chabad to make his home in Jackson Hole, an old western town with a ski resort in a national park.

Mendelsohn estimates that the town has “500 Jewish souls,” the overwhelming majority of whom are intermarried. He also services some 40,000 Jewish tourists a year who visit, including hundreds of Orthodox Jews.

There is no synagogue yet in Jackson Hole, but Mendelsohn is receiving donations and he believes it will soon become a reality.

Meanwhile, he conducts Shabbat services at his home in the winter and a hotel in the summer and always has many guests at his table on Friday night.

There are synagogues without rabbis in even smaller Jewish communities in Cheyenne, Casper, and Laramie, Wyoming, the latter of which has a small Hillel Jewish student center at the University of Wyoming.

Mendelsohn visits each city four or five times a year, officiating at weddings and funerals and helping Jews observe Passover, Hanukka and other holidays.

“We are here to serve every single Jew with our hearts and souls, doing whatever it takes,” he says. “We know we are on the front lines.

It’s not easy here. But if we survive and thrive, the rest of the world will say that if they can have a growing and vibrant Jewish community in Wyoming, there is no excuse to not have one where they are.”

Mendelsohn describes his goals as both mundane – “just helping a Jew do another mitzva today” – and lofty – “making the world a better place.” His surroundings in the mighty Teton mountain range on the edge of Yellowstone Park create a special environment for both mundane and lofty aims.

“The Tetons are the most dramatic mountains in the Rocky range,” he says. “The mountains unearth the soul, and we feed it Judaism.

Seeing me here has the same shock value as finding Chabad in Nepal.

The last thing people expect to see in a cowboy town is a rabbi with a beard.”

Raizy adds that “when people are far away and in nature, they are more open, relaxed and receptive. The people look at the mountains and say there is a God in this world.”

Like the Mendelsohns, the six Lifshitz children go to school on the Internet with peers around the world, thanks to a unique online education system run by Chabad. There are twice as many Jews in Boise as Jackson Hole, but no Jewish life, except for the store-front Chabad and a 100-year-old Reform/Conservative temple that prides itself as the oldest continuously used synagogue west of the Mississippi.

After meeting in New York, Brooklyn-born Mendel and South African Esther married and moved to Boise in 2004. Mendel did Jewish outreach before that in more than 30 countries as a rabbinical student. He served for three years as assistant rabbi at The Shul of Bal Harbour in Miami, the largest Chabad outreach synagogue in the country.

The Lifshitzes recently had a speaker from Israel who attracted more people to their synagogue than on Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur. Passover and Purim are more popular, but the biggest Jewish holiday in Boise is Hanukka, when Mendel says “the Jewish side of intermarried families feels competition and wakes up.”

One disadvantage to the Lifshitzes’ efforts to build up a Jewish community in Boise is that when families become more religiously observant, they move to cities with Jewish schools and kosher restaurants. But the rabbi, who was raised in Cincinnati, says there are Jews who would be lost in a city saturated with Jewish life but receive full attention in such a small community.

“In Idaho there are very few Jews, but someone has to be here on the ship to look after the stragglers,” he says in an interview in his synagogue office.

“This is the real work in the trenches. If it weren’t for us, they wouldn’t think about their Judaism or Israel. The people here reignited their Judaism through us. The Talmud teaches us that if you save one neshama [soul], you save the world. Here you see it, and when you see it, you appreciate what it really is.”

Read about the Lifshitz family from Idaho, Bruk from Montana and Zippel from Utah on From JPost.com