An introduction is supposed to encapsulate and provide a brief overview of the subject. In my introductions for this column, I try to do just that, giving the reader a taste of what’s to come. In the case of Rabbi Dovid Fuld, it’s particularly difficult to summarize how he made his parnasah, the chesed projects he has undertaken, and the values he fights to uphold.
But difficult doesn’t mean I won’t try.
Rabbi Fuld is an accomplished mohel who has performed over 13,000 brissim. He was a ninth- and tenth-grade rebbi for five years, and today he gives shiur in a yeshivah that he established for medical students at the Technion. He built a real estate empire with a heavy focus on government-funded housing, creating housing for homeless families in a way that no one else was doing. In Queens, New York, he founded the first universally accepted eiruv for a large city in America. He later moved to Eretz Yisrael and is a strong advocate for moving there. He also launched a training program to help rabbanim learn more about the latest medical developments and how to apply those findings to halachah.
But perhaps his greatest achievement has been creating and funding a groundbreaking lab in Shaare Zedek Hospital that is dedicated to helping couples who are carriers of a genetic disease to have healthy children, even (and especially) after giving birth to children with a genetic disease. This lab, which has helped bring thousands of healthy children into the world—a feat that was once thought impossible—is Rabbi Fuld’s pride and joy. In his words, “If one parent discovers information that will help them have healthy children, then this entire interview will have been worth it for me.”
While talking about his life growing up in the Manhattan of old to two parents from Frankfurt am Main, Rabbi Fuld interspersed his story with a myriad of anecdotes and doses of impassioned life advice. A proud Yekke who is never late, Rabbi Fuld works on behalf of a number of causes with purpose and poise.
It’s pretty amazing what one can accomplish when “you truly feel that you are a messenger from Hashem.” Wishing you a chag kasher v’samei’ach. May this Yom Tov bring you simchah, serenity, nachas and health.
—Nesanel
The Megillah uses the term “Divrei shalom ve’emes.” However, Chazal tell us (Sanhedrin 6b) that shalom and emes can sometimes be in conflict. Moshe Rabbeinu’s middah was emes. His motto was therefore “yikov hadin es hahar—let the strict letter of the law pierce the mountain.” Aharon, by contrast, sought compromise between disputants, as he “loved peace and pursued peace.” The Rebbe’s father was known as an ish emes, a man of uncompromising truth.
“I was born in the Bronx, but I grew up in Manhattan. My parents are both from Frankfurt am Main, Germany—we are Yekkes. In fact, if you look in the beis almin in Hamburg, Germany, I have grandparents going back 15 generations, all the way back to the year 1520.
“I did some research, and we are probably from the megurashei Sfarad, the Jews who escaped from the Spanish Inquisition. My mother, a”h, was called Shprintza. It comes from the Spanish name Esperanza, which means ‘hope.’
“My parents came to America in the beginning of 1939, right after Kristallnacht. My father was in Dachau during the war. At that time, Hitler was so anxious to make the country Judenrein that he just wanted all the Jews out, but no one wanted to take us in. My parents couldn’t go to Israel because the British were in control. It was a cousin in America who ultimately got visas for my parents, and my mother used that visa to get my father out of Dachau.
“My father was a very wealthy entrepreneur in Frankfurt, but he left with nothing. In America, he got a job as a butler and chauffeur, and my mother worked as a maid and cook, all while trying to raise a frum family. They sacrificed a lot for Shabbos. My father ended up manufacturing pens and pencils. He was a partner in a company called Reliance Pen & Pencil Corporation.
“I grew up in the Upper West Side and we davened at Ohab Zedek. The world of the Upper West Side was different back then. The Sassover Rebbe and the Bobover Rebbe both lived there; we truly had gedolei Yisroel all around us.
“Times and attitudes have changed over the years, but slowly. When I finished graduate school, I applied for a job at the pharmaceutical giant Parke-Davis. I scored in the 99th percentile on the IQ, achievement and aptitude tests, yet they told me that the beard and yarmulke had to go. If someone told that to your kid today, you could sue them and take the company.
“Everything was tougher back then. Before my bar mitzvah, my father used the retzuos of my tefillin for two months so they wouldn’t be so hard on my skin. Today, when I get retzuos for my grandchildren, they are as soft as a leather glove. Today, if you serve kids chicken, they complain. Back then, a simple meal of chicken involved hours and hours of work.
“I went to Manhattan Day School, and from there I went to MTA for high school. Rabbi Emanuel Gettinger had a yeshivah for boys who were part-time students at City College, and I learned there. Afterward, I went to Brooklyn to learn by the Tenker Rav, Rav Shlomo Zalmen Friedman, and I got my first smichah from him in 1969.
“I went to City College for my undergraduate degree in business management and my graduate degree in economics. I had no plans for a career. I tell my grandchildren who are afraid of what the future holds that I got married before I knew what I wanted to do. It’s wise to get married young. My wife Anita got used to my meshugasen and grew up with them. If she met me now, she might not be able to live with it.
“I was not entrepreneurial as a teenager, but I was interested in becoming a mohel. By the time I was 21, I had six kabbalos in bris milah. There was a very strong mesorah by the Yekkes that one should not take any remuneration for performing a bris, and so I never did.
“There is a mesorah that we don’t allow someone to be a sandak twice in the same family, because just like bringing ketores made someone wealthy, being a sandak is supposed to make someone wealthy, so that honor shouldn’t keep going to the same person. Now, we generally don’t see many people who are sandak becoming wealthy. And if you look at a bris, who looks like they are being maktir ketores, the sandak or the mohel? Something interesting I noticed is that a mohel who didn’t take fees from the parents but relied on Hakadosh Baruch Hu to pay him back tended to do pretty well. It’s a fascinating phenomena.
“This Pesach will be the 56th year that I’m a mohel, and I’ve performed a bris on more than 13,200 children. I came late exactly nine times. You know what they say about us Yekkes: A Yekke says to his friend, ‘I came late to Minchah and I missed Ashrei…but I made it to yoshvei.’ The times that I was late were when things were truly out of my control. Once my block was snowed in; once a wheel fell off my car. Another time, there was a strike on the one drawbridge in Brooklyn. The guy whose job it was to raise the bridge simply took off. There were no cell phones in those days. What could I do? I arrived an hour and a half late. Rabbi Leo Jung, z”l, was there, and he said to me quite loudly with his thick German accent, ‘The young Rabbi Fuld arrives as 100 people await his grand arrival! Classic tircha d’tzibbura through chillul sheim shamayim.’ So right before I did the bris, I said, ‘Rabbosai, you will see on the news that there was a strike. It was well beyond my capacity to overcome, and I apologize to every one of you for being so late.’
“I am in a mixed marriage, as my wife comes from a Litvish background. She thinks I’m crazy, but I usually come to a bris half an hour early and rest in my car until they’re ready to begin. What if there’s traffic or some other impediment to make me late?
“When you come late you are mezalzel kevod hatzibbur. When you get an aliyah, the halachah is that you should take the shorter way up to the bimah. People believe that’s because of tircha d’tzibbura, but that’s not what the Shulchan Aruch says. It says ‘mipnei kevod hatzibbur.’ They shouldn’t be waiting while you strut to your aliyah at your leisure.
“After my wife and I got married, we lived in Kew Gardens Hills. I was in yeshivah full time and in college when we got married. My father insisted that before I got married, I had to get a letter from the rosh yeshivah stating that I was learning well, show him my grade point average, and be earning enough money to support a wife. I worked as a ninth- and tenth-grade rebbi in a talmud Torah and as a youth director, and I also learned morning seder in Rabbi Gettinger’s yeshivah. The only time I had with my wife was on Shabbos; even after Havdalah on Motzaei Shabbos, I went to run a youth program.
“I became a rebbi because my father pushed my brothers and I to pursue careers in klei kodesh. My older brother Yonah was a renowned mechaneich who recently retired; his son was Ari Fuld, Hy”d, who was mortally stabbed by a terrorist and used his last strength to protect other Jews. And my younger brother Michoel, z”l, was a sofer. I believe that my father wanted us to pursue klei kodesh because his whole world had been eradicated, and he wanted his children to have a part in rebuilding Yiddishkeit. I was a rebbi for five years, one year before my marriage and four years after.
“After my bechor was born, my wife could no longer leave the house or pick me up from shul on Shabbos because there was no eiruv. She was stuck at home. This pushed me to work on creating the first eiruv in America that had the haskamah of gedolei Yisrael. I thought to myself, ‘My parents had an eiruv in Germany, and I had an eiruv during the years I studied in Eretz Yisrael, so why shouldn’t there be one here?’
“People laughed at me, but we ended up with all the gedolei Yisrael supporting the eiruv—Rav Moshe, Rav Yaakov and more. This was in the early ’70s. Today, there are approximately 250 to 300 eiruvin in the US that were born out of my labor and vision with the Queens eiruv. In the beginning, I was called upon to consult for and help strategize the planning for dozens of other eiruvin. The Queens eiruv made shmiras Shabbos in America easier.
“When I was 25, I began working as a salesman for a company that made disposable angiocatheters. Before these existed, doctors would use a thin woven dacron and sterilize it between uses, but there were tremendous issues with that, as sometimes there was clotted blood remaining in the tube. This company was also at the forefront of helping to heal bones that normally wouldn’t heal, using many of the methods known today. It wasn’t your everyday sales position. We also trained surgeons at the hospitals that bought our products, teaching them how to use the products.
“The Swiss Orthopedic Group used to have a major conference every year in Davos, Switzerland, and in Vegas, and they conducted training seminars for doctors using cadaver bones. I attended these conferences as part of my job, but halachically, the cadaver bones were problematic. The conference organizers were very accommodating. They actually made a custom bone out of plastic that reacted the same way as human bone (for the purposes of the training), so that I would be able to participate.
“It was interesting work, but I didn’t think I could make enough parnasah to support a family; tuition alone was more than I earned. I knew I needed to look elsewhere, and so after four or five years, I turned to real estate.
“It was 1953, and I joined up with a neighbor who became my partner, Moish Horn. We bought a small property, a 52-room hotel in Jamaica, Queens, and that was the beginning of our company, Family Center Associates. I renovated the building and brought in homeless families, and starting then, we set a new standard for homeless housing in New York. All the bad things happen in public spaces, so we had the first private kitchens and bathrooms in this type of building. Think about it—normal families eat together. Communal meals are for the army, jail and summer camps. Later, private kitchens and bathrooms in government housing became state statute.
“We provided the housing, and the government reimbursed us. I think that when you treat people well, they behave better. And if you don’t, you might meet their Creator. We didn’t make extra profit from having renovated; the city paid the same amount for government housing whether you renovated or not. But doing those renovations meant that maintaining the properties was easier and cost less. Providing people with decent living conditions was not a question. The renovations were necessary, so we did them.
“Next, I bought an old hospital that had gone out of business and renovated it, turning it into another housing facility. We went from one to the next, and baruch Hashem, we amassed a nice number of buildings.
“As we grew, people joined us. People brought us deals and wanted partnerships in the deals they bought us. I started as a one-man show. Slowly but surely, we acquired more properties, bringing along partners who helped us grow the business. I also brought in my son and two sons-in-law, and they run it for me today. Moish has since passed away, and my partner today is Joel Schafran.
“Before I get to how I started my lab, which I feel is my ticket to Gan Eden, I want to share with you a bit about my nature. I’m a curious person, a bit strong-minded, and I believe that no project is too big to be attempted. For example, I was curious about techeiles, so I did lots of research into it and went diving in Nachsholim, south of Haifa, to find actual techeiles.
“Another example is the eiruv. It was a big undertaking, but I felt there was a need, so I went for it. I also started a yeshivah for medical students at the Technion in Haifa, which is one of the world’s top universities for science and technology. I use my curiosity combined with a strong sense of purpose to get things done. The same concept applies to my lab.
“One of my children was born with skin stains that doctors said might indicate a terrible disease that causes tumors in the body. I traveled all over the world to try to determine what was wrong with my child. I was in Brussels, Paris, Baylor University in Texas, and more. I became an expert in this disease. During my research, I came across two doctors, one in Detroit and another in Chicago named Yuri Valinsky, who were developing research in PGD, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Often, when a child is Rachamana litzlan born with a genetic disease, the parents feel helpless, afraid that all their future children will be doomed to suffer the same fate. That’s where PGD comes in. With IVF technology, it is possible to ensure that a child will be free of any genetic diseases that the parents carry.
“Dr. Valinsky developed a technique that analyzes an IVF embryo in order to determine whether a particular mutation is present or not. In other words, if a child is born with a particular genetic disease, the parents can identify and eliminate the disease from the next child. This is revolutionary for people who are carriers of diseases such as cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, Gaucher and many others. Of course, if one or both spouses know in advance that they are a carrier of a specific disease, they can work with us from the beginning to make sure that none of their children are affected.
“Baruch Hashem, my child did not have the disease I was worried about; it was only skin stains. But because I had been exposed to this real-world tragedy of people having multiple children with genetic diseases, I had learned that there was a way to save lives and prevent much heartache. Now that I knew about it, I could not walk away. I knew I had to help parents have healthy children.
“I sat with Yuri in his fancy office with his mahogany desk and had a heart-to-heart. Now, recognize that Yuri only became a geneticist because the Russians would not allow him to go to regular medical school.
“I told him, ‘Yuri, I’m a capitalist and you’re a communist who doesn’t believe in G-d. In America, everyone buys life insurance. So let’s buy life insurance, you and me. If I’m right about G-d, you’re going to be in big trouble in the next world.
“‘Let’s open a lab in Israel. I’ll fund it, and I’ll make everything happen. You give me the scientific backing and the know-how, and that will be your life insurance. After 120, if something happens to you, you can tell G-d, “Remember what I did.”’ He liked the idea and agreed to join me.
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