Forty years and going strong

Few shuls in South Africa can celebrate 40 years with the same rabbi and rebbetzin. Chabad of Sandton is one of them, with Rabbi Yossie and Rebbetzin Raisy Hecht at the helm.

The Hecht’s never-say-die, indomitable spirit has kept this small, tightly-knit community afloat for four remarkable decades of extraordinarily good times and some bad.

“Most shuls see 40 years as a time to sit back and relax, but at Chabad of Sandton, we see it as a springboard for new things,” said Hecht, 70.

“We’re up against crazy odds: people are leaving the country, the community is dwindling, worldwide shul attendance is down, but Chabad of Sandton is committed to maintaining and growing the shul,” he said.

In spite of being relatively small, it’s also the only Chabad in Johannesburg that’s a community centre with a shul, a nursery school, a mikvah, and a function hall.

It also gets minyanim twice a day, come rain or shine, where Hecht arrives reliably on time to greet at least 15 to 20 congregants.

The sound of children’s laughter and strollers piled up at the entrance to the shul on a Shabbos morning are signs that the shul is resuming a post-pandemic vibrancy. It has recently created a special changing and feeding room for mothers to cater for the growing young community.

The rabbinical couple met in New York in 1975. Raisy, now 65, was an 18-year-old frum teenager from Golders Green in London – the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. The rabbi, five years her senior, was a shy boy from Brooklyn, New York. He spent time at 770 Eastern Parkway, the iconic centre of the world headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. There, he learnt Torah in the presence of the revered Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Hecht’s late father was the Rebbe’s assistant and translator for 45 years.

Theirs was a shidduch followed by a short courtship and a blessing from the Rebbe himself.

They moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where the young couple took up the position as the first Orthodox spiritual leaders, running a Chabad House on campus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After four years and three children, they decided it was time to move to a place that would ensure a Jewish education for their growing family.

With the Rebbe’s blessing, they went to South Africa.

With guts, two children, and a six-month-old baby, Raisy, 22, and the rabbi, 27, arrived in Johannesburg during the turbulent 1980s. It didn’t deter them.

After two years at Chabad of Yeoville, they chose to venture out to Sandton, where they heard about young couples wanting to start a community.

An ordinary-looking house in Aberfeldy Avenue in Morningside Manor caught their eye because it had a double garage converted into a dance studio with windows and a finished floor.

This was the start of Chabad of Sandton, with the couple creating the first satellite Chabad in Johannesburg. Shul services took place in the garage, a brocha in the couple’s dining room, and a children’s service in the living room. Soon new, larger premises were sought in Satara Avenue, Gallo Manor, this time a house with space for a nursery school, giving birth to Chabad of Sandton Nursery School.

The community continued to expand and with it came a new address at 1 Chabad Way, Hampton Court Road, where it exists today.

Looking back, the couple remember each new Torah as a “magical moment” – dancing in the streets and being ushered into the shul with song. They recall the opening of the mikvah and later its renovation, together with breaking ground for the function hall.

“When we first moved into the area, we were one of the only families to build a sukkah and had the only lulav and etrog. Now, practically every family has a sukkah, and the rabbi orders up to 70 sets of lulav and etrog annually,” said Raisy.

In the early years, it was just the two of them with strollers who went in search of running water to perform tashlich on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. As the family symbolically cast off the sins of the previous year, she said, “We felt like idiots standing alone by the river. Now between 60 to 100 people perform the ritual at different places each year.”

The couple is cognisant of the ever-changing, disparate needs of a shifting community, and has had to embrace new ideas from younger members in a bid to survive and thrive.

“We have been blessed to have capable family members who have wanted to come back and invest in the community they grew up in,” said Raisy.

A young, energetic shul council has been appointed, “which is able to think out the box and inspire with fresh, innovative ideas”, she said.

“The biggest challenge remains staying relevant and becoming a place where teenagers and young people want to come,” said Hecht. But he’s optimistic about the future of the shul. “We’re reaching one of the most exciting periods now – a watershed time passing the torch onto the next generation, and we have lots to look forward to.”