San Diego (special) -- Rabbi Chaim Hollander, a longtime teacher at Soille San Diego Hebrew Day School and the new part-time rabbi at Young Israel Synagogue, can remember the occasion as a teenager when he first decided to go to Orthodox services. 

"I stood the whole time because I was embarrassed not knowing whether to sit or to stand," he recalled with a smile during a recent interview with HERITAGE. 

Richard Goodwin, the congregation's president, had a similar story to tell. He decided several years ago to attend the Kollel in San Diego, an institution in which rabbis were paid to learn and to share their learning with the community. "They would be learning Talmud and they would say 'HaShem says this' and 'HaShem says that...' and finally after two weeks, I turned to this guy next to me and said 'who is this Hashem anyway?' And the man explained that 'HaShem' is a way of saying 'God.' And then I didn't say another word for another week because I was so
embarrassed--not that anyone caused me to feel that way." 

The Kollel, which used to meet in the apartment building near Beth Jacob Congregation, subsequently folded for financial reasons, but Goodwin's interest in learning more about Orthodox Judaism remained unabated
. 
Goodwin decided to study with Rabbi Daniel Korobkin, who was one of the members of the Kollel and who also was serving as the first rabbi of Young Israel Synagogue. Korobkin, who now leads a congregation in Allentown, Pa, subsequently was succeeded as a part-time rabbi by Elchonon Snyder, a rigorous Torah scholar. Hollander, who will begin his formal contract with Young Israel just as soon as he can find a home within walking distance, will be the third rabbi to serve the small congregation. 

With Hollander and Goodwin both having come to Orthodox Judaism from less observant Jewish backgrounds, Young Israel consciously is developing itself into a congregation that tries to welcome, and to teach, the newcomer about Orthodox Judaism without causing embarrassment.  "Everybody here wants to reach out to other people," says Rabbi Hollander. "In synagogues in other major cities--I won't say where--the first words a newcomer hears upon going into a synagogue is 'You are in my seat.' Here that doesn't happen. ...Here people try to make others feel welcome. They reach out to other people."  Hollander speculated that Young Israel may be the only congregation in San Diego County to utilize a number chart with flipper pages to help people who are unfamiliar with the Hebrew-language service to know where in the prayer book the congregation is reading.

Rabbi Chaim Hollander of Young Israel

"Because there are certain parts of the service where you are not supposed to speak, we have a few people who voluntarily take it upon themselves, flipping the pages," the rabbi said. 

Furthermore, he said, "we use the Art Scroll siddur, which I think is the most well-produced siddur that is made. I have a Reform rabbi who told me that when his congregant came to him and asked what is a good siddur to study from, he suggested the Art Scroll." 

Not only for its English translations and the commentaries is the prayer book so popular, but also because it has "very clearly stated instructions when to stand, when to sit, what to do, things like that...so I don't think a person will be uncomfortable just because he doesn't know Hebrew." 

"I still don't know Hebrew," says Goodwin, whose election as president was a recognition of his dedication to the congregation and his enthusiasm in embracing the Orthodox life style. 

Hollander said he believes that the congregation, which is now located in an office building at the northwest corner of Navajo Road and Golfcrest Drive in the San Carlos area, is poised for growth. 

Although today it has about 30 family memberships, there are a lot of other Jews who live in the area. Across Navajo Road, for example, are apartment and condominium complexes, with nearly 200 more units scheduled to be built in what formerly was a small shopping center. Behind the synagogue is a residential single-family home neighborhood in which Goodwin resides with hiswife, Julie, to whom he was introduced by Korobkin. 

As Hollander has been teaching Jewish subjects for 18 years at Soille San Diego Hebrew Day School, as well as at the two campuses of the High School of Jewish Studies, he is very well known not only by the Orthodox community but also by non-Orthodox. 

He said he plans to teach adult education courses twice a week at Young Israel Synagogue, choosing as his subject matter whatever members of the congregation would most like to learn. But as the last four centuries of Jewish history are Hollander's particular love, it won't be surprising if one of the courses they choose will consider how Jews have developed
religiously since 1600. 

After accepting an invitation to share a Shabbat with an Orthodox family who lived in the same Youngstown, Ohio, neighborhood as his Holocaust survivor parents, Hollander decided to learn more about Judaism--the decision that led to his initial exposure to an Orthodox shul. Later, Hollander decided to attend Yeshiva University. 

Initially, he expected to spend four years as an undergraduate at the religiously oriented school, and then to study for a Ph.D. in history perhaps somewhere else. But he found that he greatly enjoyed the study of Talmud, and following his graduation he went to Israel, and
later enrolled in the Rabbinical Seminary of America, a New York institution better known as the Chofetz Chaim. 

Married by this time to Temi, a graduate of Stern College (the Women's Division of Yeshiva University), with one child already born and the second of his eight children on the way, Hollander began teaching in a Jewish school in New Haven, Conn., to support his growing family. 

After four years there, he decided with some other Yeshiva University graduates to go to New Orleans to seek ordination while participating in a mini-Kollel, "where we taught a half day and then studied for a half day." 

After another four years, Hollander received his ordination--smicha- from Rabbi Nathan Greenblatt of Memphis,Tenn. 

The time at the Kollel had an important impact on Hollander's teaching. In Connecticut, the principal had been so busy dealing with teachers in those classrooms where students presented disciplinary problems that he had little time for the classes, or their teachers like Hollander, who had no such problems. Hollander said he therefore assumed mistakenly that he must have been a pretty good teacher. 

But he learned in New Orleans that his premise was wrong. A principal from a school in Brooklyn--a Rabbi Kramer--came to New Orleans to visit all the classrooms and give critiques to the teachers. 

Afterwards, "he literally took me apart about everything that I was teaching, everything that I thought was fine,"Hollander recalled. As a result, he said, "I really did a lot of re-thinking about my teaching and when he came back down a few months later and again critiqued me,
thank God, it was just the opposite." 

Friends say that Hollander showed major league promise as a baseball pitcher when he was a
student in high school--perhaps accounting for why he chose a baseball analogy to explain what kind of a teacher he had been before meeting Rabbi Kramer. 

"There are pitchers and there are throwers," he said. "When it came to teaching, I was a thrower." As a young teacher, he added, he had focused on throwing out all the facts to the students, but what he should have been doing was to see whether the students were learning anything from those facts. Many a time, he said, he left the classroom thinking, "I taught them a lot today," and the students probably left the same class thinking "I didn't learn anything." 

Kramer taught him to ask questions of his students, to prepare exercises and to engage in dialogues to make certain the students are understanding what is going on. "There are different tricks how to do it, but you have to have that constant feedback." 

"We are very excited to have Rabbi Hollander because he is an excellent teacher," Goodwin said later. "When people ask what did Rabbi Hollander say during the d'var Torah, you can remember what he said. He has a very big gift." 

* * * 

Young Israel got its start in 1989 after some families who had been walking to Beth Jacob Congregation from the Del Cerro area decided they really needed to be able to attend Shabbat services at some place closer. Rabbi Korobkin, then at the Kollel, was recruited to work part-time. 

Eventually, the congregation moved to San Carlos, even farther from Beth Jacob Congregation -- so far, in fact, that some of the originator families returned to Beth Jacob because now it was the closer congregation. 

After Goodwin started attending classes at the Kollel, Korobkin invited him to spend a Shabbat with his family. 

Being shomer Shabbos (a guardian of the Shabbat)  was a new experience for Goodwin, and he particularly enjoyed walking with Korobkin to and from shul. He explained that conversation just flows when people walk together -- even more so than conversations over the telephone or across a table. During those walks to and from shul, Goodwin asked Korobkin many questions about Judaism. 

Around the same time, Goodwin's future wife, Julie, was attending Korobkin's classes on mysticism at Young Israel Synagogue. She wanted to learn more about Jewish views of good and evil, about the heavens and the soul, and was attracted to the "Derech HaShem"-- "The Way of God" -- class taught by Korobkin. 

"I started going there every Monday night," she recalled. "I sat in the front row, me in my jeans, and I couldn't say a word because I was just in awe of what I was listening to. It was exactly what I had wanted to learn and hear and confirm that Judaism stood for -- that there is a God; that there is an afterlife; that there is a good and an evil in the world; that the world is here for a purpose; that it will be a perfect world before the mashiach (messiah)comes; that we will be here for 6,000 years and then there will be some years of desolation and then rejuvenation. 

"It just seemed to make sense to me," Julie Goodwin said. "It was something that I wanted to hear. And the way it was presented was very exciting. Rabbi Korobkin was very funny. He would add some jokes there and it was very palatable." 

Since that time, Julie took a five-week course at the Torah Renaissance Center in New York and the Goodwins have adopted a frum lifestyle, observing a strict standards of kashrut, keeping shomer Shabbos and following Judaism's rules for family purity. She has served as an attendant at the community mikvah in the San Diego State College area. 

While Hollander and the Goodwins exemplify those who are ba'al tshuvah, they say members of the congregation are fairly diverse in their levels of practice. While those who guard the Sabbath walk to the congregation for Saturday morning prayers, they say others who drive are not hassled.
Members of the congregation also come from a variety of national backgrounds. There are members from Israel, Yemen, Morocco and the former Soviet Union, as well as American-born members who grew up in a variety of different states in homes along the entire spectrum of Jewish religious observance.