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Community Corner

Rabbi Slavin: Thriving SC Jewish Community Started With Cold Calls

Director of Chabad Center of San Clemente connects people back to their faith.

Menachem Mendel Slavin, the director of the Chabad Center of San Clemente, started building the Chabad synagogue in San Clemente by leafing through the phonebook and calling up Greenburgs and Cohens.

Now the Chabad Center is the heart of a thriving community of practicing Jewish people in San Clemente.

Slavin has lived in San Clemente with his wife the Rebbetzin and Chabad Center co-director Tzipporah, and their three children, Shua, Yossi and Zelda since 2004.

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The Chabad movement in Judaism began in the early 1700s with Rabbi Yisrael Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760). Chabad is a Jewish movement that promotes Judaism and encourages common study of the Torah. The Chabad movement has grown, and now there are Chabad Centers across the West Coast.

Slavin sat down with Patch to talk a little bit about the journey that led to the founding of Chabad of San Clemente.

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San Clemente Patch: How do you build a community?

Rabbi Slavin: The way we started was similar to the way Rabbi Kunan, who is the head Schliach (Emissary) started. The way Chabad works is that every state has its head emissary and he controls that state.

So not anybody can just come to California and open up a Chabad house; it has to go through the head emissary of California. Rabbi Kunan is the head emissary of the whole west coast.

He tells the story about when he first came out here, and you can hear this from most Chabad Rabbis. In those days you had pay phones and you had the yellow pages and the white pages.

You went into a phone booth ’cause you were staying who knows where; you went into a phone booth and looked for the Cohens and the Greenbergs and all those Jewish-sounding names.  

You call them up and tell them you are here and are starting a Chabad house and we would like you to come join us. Nine out of 10 people would hang up the phone and the 10th person would most likely kick you out of his house after five minutes.

So you went and you trucked along and, slowly but surely, you got people to come.

You have to realize what the message is we are giving. It is one of love, kindness, one of making Judaism fun, making sure the children are able to learn. That is the message we are trying to give over.

Eventually we had our core of people who started coming.  The first day of Rosh Hashanah when we started we had eight people, the second day 10. So we keep moving along. We meet new people. Sometimes they stop me on the street or in the store.

San Clemente Patch: What made you choose San Clemente to begin your mission?

Rabbi Slavin: For starters, not everybody who has the education that I had chooses to open up a Chabad house. It is choice you make. The Rebbe’s (Chabad leaders’) vision was to try to get as many people as possible to go out and do it, to encourage it and to say that this is a generation following the holocaust, and assimilation has been so high that desperately needs people to go out. People are not coming to us. We need to go to them, to reach out to them in all the different places of the world.

Before we got married we spoke about opening up a Chabad house becoming Shlichim. Schlichim (are) emissaries of the Rebbe to further the Rebbe’s vision and to bring people closer to Judaism. All my friends do the same in places like Seattle, Russian, France, Germany, all over the world. At the time we were thinking of coming out here, they were opening up more places in California, and since my wife Tzippy has family in Long Beach it was something that we were able do.

We spoke to people about what Jewish life was like here and what it would mean to have Jewish center; without doing an extensive amount of research, we came to the conclusion that this is the place where a Jewish center could be built and we decided to come.  There has been a lot of growth here.

When we came there were 11 Chabad houses in Orange County and now there are 20. 

San Clemente Patch: When did you first arrive here?

Rabbi Slavin: We came here six and a half years ago in 2004.

San Clemente Patch: Did you have to sell people on their Judaism? What were some of the challenges you faced? 

Rabbi SlavinPeople who have come to live in San Clemente are here because—and someone told me this—they have come here to get the furthest they can from a synagogue, from practicing their Judaism. The challenges we have here primarily is that people have not been connected to their Judaism for the longest of times. 

It is not that they do not like it, they are just not used to it. They have carved a different kind of life out for themselves. My task is to make them uncomfortable so they should want to come seek Judaism; telling them that materialism is not necessarily what it is; you have to connect to your Jewish roots.  

The way we are going about it is to build a network for social events: Friday night dinners, the holidays that are social like Purim and Chanukah.

When they come to these events and meet other Jews that they didn’t know lived here, then they get connected to their Jewish roots and start to come to services already. It is an easy sell after that.

San Clemente Patch: What would you say is the most important part about what you do in your work? 

Rabbi Slavin: I have a two-fold answer for this. One, in the economy that we are in right now, people are struggling. The help that we can offer to people is one that I consider to be of extreme importance—whether it’s helping people with their job through the network that we connected, or helping people financially or just being there for people to speak to giving them guidance based upon what Judaism teaches us; how to get through these tough times.

Equally important is getting somebody to do a mitzvah (an act of kindness performed as a religious duty). We find ourselves in a time now where we are awaiting the Mashiach (Messiah) every day.

As we say in our prayers three times a day … we want Mashiach to come right now. The way to do this … You have to look at the world as equal, fifty-fifty, good and bad, and if you do a good deed you tip the scale to the good and Mashiach will come.

This means every time I get somebody to light a Shabbos (Sabbath) candle, put on Tefillin (a holy amulet containing scrolls with passages of scripture), give charity, come to Shul (worship at the synagogue) do another mitzvah that could be the one mitzvah that will make Mashiach come.  

For more information on Chabad of San Clemente click here or to contact Rabbi Slavin or call 949-489-0723.

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