Bnei Brak is one of Israel’s richest cities, and poorest cities — depending on the yardstick chosen to measure it. It has taken a vast leap from its early days as a shantytown, to become one of the world’s leading Torah centers, but there is much remaining to be accomplished. Enter Bnei Brak's Mayor Rabbi Yaakov Asher — a man with a mission and a bold plan for a brighter future, which he shared in this exclusive interview with Mishpacha on his recent visit to Brooklyn — which also happens to be Bnei Brak’s sister city.
Having traditionally put all its efforts into ruchniyus, Bnei Brak has tended to lag behind in gashmiyus. From the point of view of mean household income, Bnei Brak is one of the poorest cities in Israel.
“If you’re really a chacham, you know how to resolve problems before they ever get started. I know how to listen to people, to close the door and try to iron things out — Bnei Brak’s Mayor, Rabbi Yaakov Asher”
Bnei Brak’s most precious natural resource, its children, typically attend overcrowded schools that may or may not come equipped to address any individual special needs of its students, and there are many who risk falling through the cracks.
Bnei Brak was set up as a twin city with Brooklyn, and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz visited Bnei Brak to build the relationship between the two cities. There is now an official Vaad, the Bnei Brak Development Fund/Green Spaces, with eight representatives in Israel and the US, and a mission of advancing quality of life projects in Bnei Brak.
Rabbi Yaakov Asher came to politics while still a kollel yungerman “If you want to know how I ended up as mayor, well, there’s a good story,” Rabbi Asher grins. “I became mayor without an election!”
Inauspicious Beginnings
Bnei Brak is first mentioned in the Torah in the book of Yehoshua, as part of the land
in Eretz Yisrael apportioned to the tribe of Dan when the country was divided. Later,
it was the seat of Rabi Akiva’s yeshivah, where, as the Haggadah tells us, his disciples
discussed the story of Pesach until it was time to recite the morning Shema.
Rabbi Hanoch Teller’s account of the founding of modern Bnei Brak describes
how the virulent anti-Semitism of post–World War I Poland drove merchant Yitzchok
Gerstenkorn to dream of moving to the Holy Land. After a disastrous business trip
from Warsaw to Lodz, during which soldiers beat up Gerstenkorn and his colleagues
and threw them into a jail (after which they were forced to spend all the money their
had saved provisions just to buy their way out), he proposed to the mispallelim in his
shtiebel that they all leave Poland far behind them, once and for all.
His fellow chassidim rallied around the cause and raised money to send him off to
Palestine, accompanied by two elderly gentlemen, both of whom did not survive long
enough to help him out. He eventually met a man representing an Arab landowner
who proposed a parcel of land in central Israel, honestly admitting that it was malariainfested, arid, and hilly — and even worse, he said, Arab marauders used to prey on
travelers passing by from the hills of Bnei Brak.
But Gerstenkorn was enchanted when he heard the name Bnei Brak, excited by
the idea of settling an ancient town, and went off to visit the site with two chassidic
rebbes (the taxi got stuck in the sand every few minutes, but they were finally able to
pray Minchah and drink a l’chayim). While Gerstenkorn didn’t have even a tenth of
the ten-thousand-pound asking price, he rushed off a telegram to his kehillah and put
down a down payment anyway. He returned to Poland and brought back a group of
men to begin settling the land; Rabbi Teller jokes that their first purchase was a donkey
“who didn’t even speak Yiddish.” The first street they built they named Rechov Rabbi
Akiva in honor of the Tanna who once had his yeshivah there, and it is has remained
the town’s main artery. They put up the first shul and some houses, and as the men
were rejoined by their wives and children, they began a cheder and Bais Yaakov. In the
spring of 1923, they received a visit (and, presumably, some eventual funding) from
Chaim Weizmann of the World Zionist Organization.
But those early days, with no onsite sweet water, intractable land, and the occasional
dust storm, were terribly difficult; Gerstenkorn himself contracted a serious bout of
malaria. (While the early settlers justly bemoaned their tough living conditions, the
hindsight of history shows they fared much better than the compatriots they left behind
in Poland.) The community always lacked money, and Gerstenkorn took long, arduous
trips to America to raise money. Later, with the arrival of the Ponovezh Yeshivah, he
acquired the aid of the Ponovezher Rav’s prodigious fundraising abilites; when the
Chazon Ish settled in Bnei Brak, yet more people were attracted to the area.
In the end, Bnei Brak was not destined to be an agricultural community; the land
proved too infertile. It became a community better suited first for business, ultimately
finding its most fertile ground in the halls of its yeshivos, seminaries, and kollelim
Source: AJOP
