JERUSALEM — Rabbi Noah Weinberg, the founder and dean of the sprawling global
outreach operation Aish HaTorah, was being called a "unique visionary"
following his death in Jerusalem.

Weinberg, a brilliant educator and charismatic lecturer, was suffering from cancer when he died Feb. 5 at his home. He was 78.

With just five students, Weinberg founded Aish in 1974 in Jerusalem.
It now occupies prime real estate opposite the Western Wall and
encompasses dozens of branches around the world. About 100,000 people
reportedly attend Aish programs annually in 77 cities in 17 countries.

The organization also operates a rabbinical training program in
Jerusalem, a hesder Yeshiva for Israeli soldiers and draws untold
numbers of Jewish students and travelers to its introductory courses in
Jerusalem and around the world. Aish.com, the organization’s home on
the Internet, is among the most popular Jewish educational Web sites
and features endorsements from a range of celebrities, including Steven
Spielberg, Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher.

“Rav Noah was a unique visionary who believed that every Jew was
innately interested in their Jewishness, but because of the lack of
education was ignorant of the wealth of their heritage,” said Rabbi
Yitz Greenman, the executive director of Aish HaTorah New
York/Discovery. “He saw it as his mission to make Judaism relevant to
an apathetic generation. He was incredibly successful over the last 50
years at reigniting the spark of Jewishness in hundreds of thousands of
Jewish souls.”

Like the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, whose vast global network
comprises what is probably the best known and most successful outreach
effort in the Jewish world, Weinberg believed the greatest challenge
facing Jewry today was the loss of Jews to ignorance, apathy and
assimilation. He spoke of a spiritual holocaust that was depriving the
world of more Jewish souls than the actual Holocaust. His disciples at
Aish headquarters in Jerusalem would frequently invoke war metaphors to
describe the struggle they were engaged in to save the Jewish people.

To drive the point home, Weinberg led a delegation of Aish rabbis to
Poland in 2006, a journey that became the subject of a film, “From the
Ashes.”

“Why did we come here? Why did I come and ask all the fellas, all
the rabbis, to come?” Weinberg asks in the film. “To wake us up. The
time is drawing closer. We are losing more neshamas [souls] every day
than we’re gaining. We’re in trouble. We got to wake up.”

Weinberg is lauded for taking a non-judgmental approach to outreach.
He welcomed atheists and non-believers to his yeshiva, saying he would
make them better atheists. He even reportedly allowed a practicing
Muslim to study at Aish, even though the student prayed five times a
day to Mecca.

“A lot of Orthodoxy’s outreach was always tinged with judgmentalism
— not always, but often,” said Samuel Heilman, a sociologist of
American Jewry and a critic of what some observers describe as
Orthodoxy’s rightward drift. “Both Chabad and Rabbi Weinberg found you
could reach out to people without having to force them to deny who they
were, and not be quite as judgmental. And that was a key element. Now
we take that for granted.”

Unlike Chabad, Aish principally relies not on the warmth and
charisma of its emissaries but on presenting a rational, cogent
argument for God’s existence and the unique mission of the Jewish
people. For a time, Aish was virtually synonymous with the popular
Discovery seminars, a series of lectures on topics such as Bible codes,
Genesis and the Big Bang, and Jewish history, that collectively attempt
to present a logical and scientific case for the divine origins of the
Torah.

Weinberg’s devotion to programs like Discovery was rooted in his
interest in changing perceptions about Judaism and stressing the
practical applicability of its teachings. One of his most famous
lectures was “Five Levels of Pleasure,” in which he taught that Judaism
wants human beings to derive pleasure from the world, but that the
highest pleasure of all is spiritual connection.

Weinberg once asked a young visitor if he was capable of repaying
all the kindness of his father simply by saying thank you. When the boy
replied in the negative, Weinberg drew an analogy to the relationship
between God and his creations.

“There’s nothing that you can do for God,” said Rabbi Moshe
Mayerfeld, an Aish rabbi in London and the boy’s father, recalling
Weinberg’s message. “He doesn’t become more infinite when you pray. He
doesn’t become more infinite when you eat more matzah on Pesach. He
doesn’t need anything from us. All He wants from us is to gain the
pleasures of the world that He created for us.”

Aish also differs from Chabad in another crucial respect: Chabad’s
emissaries often are the children of emissaries themselves and the
movement’s most dedicated cadre, steeped in its values from an early
age and charged by the movement’s late leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel
Schneerson, to retrieve Jewish souls from the far corners of the world.

Weinberg, after trying and failing several times to start outreach
efforts in the 1960s and 1970s, realized he needed to populate his
organization with individuals who once were secular. Only they, he
believed, understood the urgency of the task.

“He had a way about him,” said Adam Jacobs, a rabbi at the Aish
Center in Manhattan who first encountered Aish as a secular Jew
studying at Brandeis University and eventually found his way to
Jerusalem. “He was so focused on other people and it was so genuine the
way he would interact with other people. He paid attention to people in
a way I don’t recall seeing ever before.”

Over the years, transformations like Jacobs’ have drawn criticism,
with some branding Aish a cult and speaking in hushed tones of their
once-secular friends who had been “Aished.”

Heilman says such reactions are inevitable.

“Anytime you have a movement that causes people to convert — and
that’s what we’re really talking about, conversion — the groups from
which they’ve been converting are always going to say these folks have
been brainwashed,” he said. “To some extent it is. Brainwashing is just
a negative way of talking about conversion. It’s sort of inherent in
the process.”

As the organization has drifted into Israel advocacy work, in North
America principally through its Hasbara Fellowships program, it also
has been branded as right wing and a supporter of Israeli settlements.
Aish is “just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today,”
Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic wrote in October.

Rabbi Shalom Schwartz, one of the original group of students who
joined Aish in 1974, said Weinberg always emphasized the need for
students to apply their studies to real-world problems. He recalled
Weinberg once blasted a Time magazine article that accused Israel of
unleashing biblical justice on the Palestinians and, in later years, he
insisted on confronting the threat of radical Islam.

“He was very, very concerned about the current rise of anti-Semitism
and the situation in Iran,” Schwartz said. “He made a point of pressing
whoever would listen to him that these are not normal times. This is a
time when every concerned human being has to take up the cause of
confronting militant Islam, and especially the threat from Iran, and
that this is a responsible position of every caring — not only Jew,
but every human being. This is from day one in his teaching.”

Greenman recalled once visiting Weinberg at his home on a Friday
night. On entering, Weinberg’s young son was climbing up a pipe.
Expecting the rabbi to scold his son for misbehaving, Greenman was
shocked to discover him offer to lift his son on his shoulders so he
could better reach the ceiling.

“That’s who Rabbi Weinberg was,” Greenman said. “He was a man who
said to everyone, stand on my shoulders and I’ll help you go further.
He helped every Jew try to reach the ceiling.”

 Rabbi Mitch Mandel, a founder of Aish HaTorah Toronto and its director of outreach and event programming, said that anybody who was in Rabbi Weinberg’s presence felt “a combination of being loved and a sense that here is someone who believes in my potential, and has the ability to take Jewish wisdom and make it impactful and relevant to anybody.”

Rabbi Mandel, who studied with Rabbi Weinberg from 1976 to 1980 after meeting him at the Kotel as a tourist, said, “I think that his greatness was in his love for the Jewish people and his love of God, and that they were the truest kind of love, because he understood that to really love God you have to love people, and to really love people you have to love God.”

With files from Frances Kraft