VANCOUVER — Rabbi Avraham Feigelstock launched the city’s Ohel Ya’Akov Community Kollel in 2000.

The Ohel Ya’Akov Community Kollel had its annual Chanukah party, attended by 350 to 400 people, at an Irish pub in downtown Vancouver.  

Rabbi Feigelstock, who moved to Vancouver from Montreal in 1982, recognized a need in Vancouver for a non-conventional Jewish institution. After speaking to local Jewish leaders and getting their support, he secured financial backing for the kolel.

One of the kolel’s most notable successes is that it has become a meeting place. To date, about 35 couples who met at the kolel are engaged or married. Many more couples who met at kolel events are currently dating.

Intermarriage rates are 41.3 per cent in the city’s general Jewish population, while rates under the age of 30 are estimated at 71.1 per cent, according to a 2001 census analysis of the Jewish community of Greater Vancouver.

In the summer of 2000, Rabbi Avraham Feigelstock’s eldest daughter, Rivki, married Rabbi Shmuel Yishayahu, who became the kollel’s outreach director and administrator.

An outgoing Yemenite Israeli, Rabbi Yishayahu, 31, saw that many Jews were dating outside the faith, often with the excuse that it was difficult to meet Jews, and he wanted to give them a place to meet.

The Yishayahus moved to the trendy beachside Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano. Though far from an Orthodox shul, a group of around 50 young Jews  attended a Kabbalah class that Rabbi Feigelstock had been giving in Kitsilano for a couple of years. The Yishayahus decided they would test the waters and see if the group could grow into something else.

Over the course of the first few years, Rabbi Yishayahu built up their Friday night dinners from 10 guests in their apartment to 40 or 50 in a rented house.

When he first started these dinners, Rabbi Yishayahu remembers people telling him, “You’re crazy.” It was difficult for them to believe that a group of young Jewish adults in Vancouver, of all places, would come to Friday night dinners on a regular basis.

Friday night dinners have now become events attended by 70 to 100 people each week.

“I wasn’t looking to open up a shul,” he said. “I was looking to open up a centre that Jews, unaffiliated, not connected to the community, will feel comfortable to go [to].

“We have to market Judaism as something very cool,” he added.

Rabbi Yishayahu estimates 2,000 people attend at least one kolel event a year. Besides the Friday night dinners, the kolel runs a business club, and offers pub nights, summer barbecues, High Holiday services (300 people attended Kol Nidrei and Neilah services last year), Circle of Friends for Jewish special needs children, and youth clubs in public high schools during lunch breaks.

The kolel currently operates from the second floor of a building that it recently purchased, and it hopes to eventually use the whole building and to create a Jewish centre for young people there.

Rabbi Feigelstock and Rabbi Yishayahu see the kolel as a gateway into the community. If they succeed in getting Jews to connect to their heritage and each other, Rabbi Feigelstock said, they’ve fulfilled the purpose of the kolel.

For more information, visit the Ohel Ya’Akov Community Kollel’s website at www.communitykollel.org.