3 Lubavs in ’36 Under 36′

NY Jewish Week

The New York Jewish Week’s third annual “36 Under 36” section highlights a new crop of three dozen “forward-thinking young people who are helping reshape the Jewish community.”

The article says the group of 36 are “revitalizing established Jewish organizations by launching new models of young leadership programs, empowering micro-entrepreneurs here and in Israel, fostering new forms of spirituality, and raising our eco-consciousness.”

Three Lubavitchers were included in the list:
Professional boxer Dmitriy Salita, 28, iVolunteer founder and director Sheva Tauby, 28 and Manhattan Shliach Rabbi Mendy Weitman, 26.

Dmitriy Salita:

Like most professional boxers, Dmitriy Salita spends hours each day training. Though he lost a junior welterweight championship fight last year, he is hoping for another title shot. Like some boxers, he spends hours each day studying. He’s a business major at Touro College. And unlike any, he spends time mentoring teenage Jewish boys at a New Jersey day school, planning and helping to lead a youth center that bears his name and establishing a foundation that will support a Jewish cause (Chabad of Flatbush) and a secular one (Starrett City Boxing Club).

For the last year, “Kid Kosher,” a Ukrainian-born baal teshuvah, has served as part-time boxing adviser and full-time role model at The Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston, N.J. Meeting Salita, says Rabbi Richard Kirsch, guidance counselor and athletic director, “transformed” the students. “To see a religious boxer … so proud of his heritage … was mesmerizing.”

Sheva Tauby:

Growing up in Flatbush, Sheva (Frank) Tauby didn’t hear many stories from her American-born parents about the Holocaust even though many relatives on both sides of the family had perished.
Today, she hears stories all the time.

As founder and director of iVolunteer (iVolunteer.com) she and her husband, Rabbi Tzvi Tauby, arrange for volunteers to visit and assist isolated Holocaust survivors. They meet survivors, screen volunteers, conduct training sessions, raise money and run an array of social events and Shabbat-holiday programs.

Rabbi Mendy Weitman:

A native of Brazil and former resident of Argentina, Rabbi Mendel Weitman heard the same thing over and over upon his move to New York four years ago: young Jewish men and women, mostly professionals and college students from his continent, would come here, attend synagogue services or some other Jewish function, feel ill at ease in an unfamiliar and often unwelcoming culture, and drop out of Jewish life. They didn’t feel at home.

So Rabbi Weitman decided to create a “home away from home.”

The result is the year-old Latin Jewish Center (jewishlatincenternyc.org), a religious-educational-social program based at the Chabad of Gramercy Park in Manhattan.