The Yabloner Rebbe as a young man[Missing Credit]
Yet he did not end his days in the USA. In another twist to his unusual life, he moved back to Israel and returned to Kfar Hasidim, where he was welcomed and resumed his status as the Yabloner Rebbe, until his death in 1986.
His story might have been lost in the slipstream of Jewish history had it not been discovered by Rabbi Pini Dunner, rabbi of Beverley Hills Synagogue (and formerly of the Saatchi Shul in London). As the title of his 2018 book shows, Mavericks, Mystics & False Messiahs – Episodes from the Margins of Jewish History, Rabbi Dunner has an eye for unconventional characters and the Yabloner Rebbe intrigued him.
He spent many years searching for a manuscript that Nagel had written of his time as the librarian at Paradise Cove, helping to drive residents to the appointments or shops, listening and chatting to them, an attentive presence who was keen to do what he could to help. Two years ago Rabbi Dunner finally located a copy and has now published Nagel’s book with an introduction and footnotes, Paradise Cove: They Escaped the Cuckoo’s Nest – a homage to a remarkable man.
While he occasionally alludes to his past in Poland and to the Talmud, Nagel gives no clue about his rabbinic pedigree in the book. He had even joined a Reform Temple. Yet for Rabbi Dunner, in his work at Paradise Cove, he remained a rebbe who “felt a divine imperative to lift people out of their brokenness and lead somewhere better”.
With gentle irony, Nagel repeatedly refers to himself in the book as acting as a “good Christian”. His kindliness is apparent in its pages. He told himself he had “no right to despair” and that “even a small improvement – just in one of the residents – is a great gain”.
George T Nagel on his graduation[Missing Credit]
Without knowing the rebbe’s background, what he did at Paradise Cove might have seemed banal, Rabbi Dunner explained in an interview. “He is a cog in a wheel in a way, he is not a significant person in this psychiatric facility, he is a low-level volunteer.”
But he was “totally happy” giving help where he could, Rabbi Dunner said. “He genuinely feels he is fulfilling an important role. Lots of people have leadership qualities or are very talented. He is a talented person [but ] no task is too insignificant or too small or below his dignity. That’s an amazing character. When I see that in someone of that calibre, that impresses me.”
The Yabloner Rebbe proved to a “master of reinvention. He started off not wanting to be the rebbe, he becomes the rebbe, then he becomes a Zionist, he goes to Palestine, then he comes to America, he works in a shipyard [during the War], then he becomes a businessman and then he becomes a volunteer.”
But then in the twilight of his life, he “reinvents himself back to what he originally was. How many people succeed at that? It is a very difficult thing to do – to embrace what you once were and had abandoned and do it successfully.”
He was finally prevailed to go back to his Israel by his great-nephew Ehud Yonay, a journalist who wrote an article about an airbase in San Diego which was to inspire the Tom Cruise film Top Gun. Nagel might have gone back to Israel once or twice before “on private visits… but very secretly. Nobody recognised him.”
Rabbi Dunner has spoken to some of those who witnessed the return of the rebbe to Kfar Hasidim who were children at the time, who recalled “this little old man shuffling to the front of the room. There are a couple of hundred people there but it’s suddenly electric as one after another, the older people got up and said, ‘You saved our life. If it wouldn’t have been for you, we would be dead, all our family was killed.’ Suddenly the penny drops, not just for him but for all the people in the room.”
Among those who had come to Kfar Hasidim with him as a child was Shlomo Goren, who grew up to be Chief Rabbi of Israel. How would it have been if there had been 20 others like the Yabloner Rebbe, Rabbi Dunner reflected. “Can you imagine if it tens of thousands of Chasidic Jews rather than a few hundred would have taken up the call and moved to pre-state Israel, how different the country might have been?”
But ultimately, the Yabloner Rebbe’s story is “a tale of redemption. I love stories about curious people, but usually they don’t end well. They don’t have this very satisfying arc that ends this way.”
[Missing Credit]
Paradise Cove: They Escaped the Cuckoo’s Nest, George T. Nagel, edited by Rabbi Pini Dunner, Manhattan Book Group, is out now
