Israel Matzav: Rahm Emanuel's rabbi making aliya

Rahm Emanuel's rabbi making aliya

The JPost reports that Rabbi Asher Lopatin is making aliya (immigrating to Israel) in 2011 to a new community in the Negev. What the Post doesn't mention is any reaction from Rabbi Lopatin's best-known congregant: Rahm Emanuel.

Lopatin, the rabbi of Cong. Anshe Sholom, a modern Orthodox synagogue in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood, will leave the Windy City in 2011 for the dry air of Carmit, located 15 kilometers northeast of Beersheba.

He would settle there now, except Carmit does not yet exist.

One of the towns that former prime minister Sharon had planned for the Negev to achieve a strategic presence near the Green Line, Carmit quickly became a project of the Jewish National Fund and the Or Movement in their quest to make settling in the Negev a viable option for American Jews.

"If you bring 200 such families to a place like Carmit, people will come here - not necessarily for the idealism, but for quality of life," JNF Executive Officer Russell Robinson told The Jerusalem Post in 2006.

But since then, Lopatin, who became involved in Carmit through the JNF, has shifted the focus back to the idealism.

Lopatin is trying to found Carmit on the basis of "environmental friendliness, egalitarianism and nonjudgmentalism." I wish him all the luck in the world. He will need it.

Maybe he can convince his best-known congregant to become a toshav chozer (returning resident) with him? At least that way, Rahm would make less trouble for us in the White House.

By the way, I believe Lopatin grew up in the same community as I did and may have attended the same synagogue as my parents (I had already left the Boston area by then).

Israel Matzav: Rahm Emanuel's rabbi making aliya