Answering the ‘Kollel’

By Jill Cousins

Growing up in Monsey, New York, a suburban enclave that is a major center of Orthodox Judaism in the United States, Mark Rosenwasser – Meir to his Jewish friends – truly knew what it felt like to live in a thriving Jewish community. But when Meir moved to Orlando nine years ago with his wife and two children, he could sense that his new hometown wasn’t quite there yet.

“I studied a lot of Jewish communities around America and I’ve been to a lot of them, and some I felt were just Jews who happened to live together and some were a real Jewish community,” says Meir, a local real estate developer and home builder who now has five children. “When I moved here, I felt we weren’t yet a community. We were a gathering of people.”

Determined to help change that, Meir has worked with members of Orlando’s growing Orthodox community to help it become a thriving Jewish community as well. Meir is currently president of the Orlando Torah Center, an Orthodox synagogue in the Dr. Phillips area, and one of the things he believed could benefit Orlando’s Jewish community was to bring a kollel to his shul.

A kollel is a group of young, married rabbis whose full-time job is to study Torah. They are placed with their families in select communities, spending a minimum of three years doing intensive study at the local Orthodox synagogue and sharing their wisdom with interested members of the community. The goal is for the rabbis to eventually settle in that community and become an integral part of its Jewish life.

When Meir first contacted a consultant in Lakewood, New Jersey – location of one of the largest yeshivas (traditional Jewish educational institutions) in America – about bringing a kollel to Orlando four years ago, he was initially rejected. He was told Orlando’s Orthodox community was not yet ready to support a kollel.

Challenge Accepted

But Meir was undeterred. Working with Rabbi Menachem Kramer of the Orlando Torah Center, Meir did everything possible to make Orlando ready for a kollel, creating the necessary environment to sustain the area’s burgeoning Orthodox community. To do that, they formed committees and boards, established a more structured environment in the shul, and helped create an infrastructure that centered around Jewish life and Torah.

About a year later, Meir’s request was granted.

“For kollel to get involved, we had to make sure all the pieces of the puzzle were in place,” he says. “They need a synagogue where they will be accepted, a school to send their kids, a place to get kosher food.”

A kollel of six rabbis and their families arrived in Orlando in August 2023 for the start of this past school year, and they have made a great impact. They spend their mornings and afternoons intensely studying at Orlando Torah Center and engage with anyone who would like to come in and discuss a deep theological or philosophical question. In the evenings, according to Meir, the rabbis open themselves to discussions with “people of every stripe and color and religious affiliation” about anything that is on their minds. On any given night, 50 or 60 people show up at the shul to interact with the kollel.

The six scholars of the Orlando Community Kollel: Rabbi Binyomin Wachman, Rabbi Mordechai Littman, Rabbi Barak Taragin, Rabbi Yomtov Goldberger (Dean), Rabbi Yossi Tepfer, and Rabbi Yitzchok Bernstein

“These rabbis are all superstars, the cream of the crop, and they each bring so many different aspects to the table,” says Meir. “Having a kollel that is available and accessible to any Jewish person in Orlando is really a major accomplishment for our community. This makes me warm and fuzzy. It’s a huge deal.”

This story was originally published in print in Fall 2024.