Rabbi Yehoshua Ellis’ heart has been linked with the Jewish people of Poland since 2004. Since 2010 he has worked as a rabbi in the Eastern European country. He does so lovingly, following a path that began as a very young boy in Kansas City.
Rabbi Ellis, who plans a three-week visit here beginning today, May 28, has deep roots to Kansas City. {mprestriction ids="1,3"}All four of his grandparents were born here and Keller Foods was part of his family.
“I never knew people bought Pesach food in a store. I thought everybody had it delivered to their house,” he said in a phone interview from Warsaw, Poland, where he lives and works.
The son of Cynthia Ellis Puritz and the late Dr. David Ellis, the 37-year-old rabbi attended the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy through 10th grade. While he was growing up, people here knew him as either Joshua or Josh.
His love for Judaism, he said, began as a student at Beth Shalom Preschool.
“To this day I can remember my teachers Miss Doreen, Skipper and Miss Rose,” he said. “It’s clear to me that I’m a rabbi because of those three people. They instilled in me love for Judaism and being Jewish.”
An Eagle Scout, he also credits his association with Troop 61, “the greatest troop in the world” with helping him become the man he is today. Being a member of BBYO, and helping to re-start AZA Chapter #2, also honed his leadership skills.
His love of Judaism grew while he studied at Naropa University, a Buddhist-inspired, student-centered liberal arts university in Boulder, Colorado, where he had the good fortune of studying with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.
“It’s been written a lot about how he helped Orthodox Jews make the transition to non-Orthodoxy. For me and my friends he did the opposite. He helped us access the spiritual side of Orthodox Judaism.”
When he graduated, Rabbi Ellis said he really wasn’t ready for “a real job,” so he looked into volunteering opportunities. He eventually was selected to take part in a program sponsored by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
“In January of 2004, I landed in Warsaw and I was here for a year as a volunteer with the Jewish community of Poland. Then the situation for Jews in Poland was very different. It was just 15 years after the end of communism. Warsaw today is a very modern and pretty city. It wasn’t like that at the time.”
He called it a good, difficult and interesting year.
“It was the best of times and it was the worst of times.”
“At the end of my time I saw that there was a great need here for rabbis. I also saw that for some reason I have the ability to connect people to Yehadut (Judaism) here.”
So he decided to move to Israel to study the rabbinate. On holidays and school breaks, he returned to Poland to volunteer in the Jewish community. It was during one of those trips that he met the woman who would become his wife.
The road to the rabbinate wasn’t easy.
“The hardest was the first step. I was 27 when I landed in Israel and I started learning at a yeshiva, which is something you are supposed to do at 18, or even at 14. I barely knew what a page of Gemara looked like. It was terribly humbling. On the one hand I was following what I knew to be my path and then again I felt so useless … I was looking at all my friends who were building lives and I was living in a dorm room with three other guys and all of my belongings fit in a closet.”
But he loved learning.
“I really felt I had a knack for it.”
Rabbi Ellis spent six years at the yeshiva, four getting the tools to learn to be a rabbi and two learning to be a rabbi. He also was trained as a shochet (ritual slaughter).
In 2010 the rabbi moved to Katowice, Poland, at the invitation of the head of the Jewish community.
“It’s a big deal. I don’t know of any other community in Poland where they asked the rabbi to come.”
He doesn’t know if the Jewish community of Katowice will survive.
“Right now in Poland there are a number of small Jewish communities, which are disappearing. The old people are dying, their children oftentimes weren’t involved in the Jewish communities or they are leaving, moving to bigger cities or going abroad,” he said, noting that he doesn’t really know how large the Jewish community is, but estimates put it around 1,000.
He was in Katowice for four and a half years. Now he lives in Warsaw and he is in charge of Jewish education and outreach for all of Poland. He’s still getting his bearings with this job and his duties include preparing students for Bar and Bat Mitzvah. One of his biggest programs right now is organizing Shabbatons for teens.
“We invite all the teenagers that we know of in all of Poland, and on the list 60 percent, if not more, are from Warsaw. It’s the place certainly with the most Jews and it’s the place easiest to be Jewish and has the most developed institutions and infrastructures Jewishly,” he said. The Jewish community of Warsaw is estimated to be 2,500 to 3,000.
When he’s here, he plans to be an emissary for Polish Jews, meeting with members of the Kansas City Jewish community to discuss educational programs that have been successful and to help find other programs here that may work in Poland to get Jews connected with each other.
Rabbi Ellis also hopes to collect educational materials he can use in Poland. In the future he, with the help of his wife, hopes to create materials to send to all the Jewish children in Poland.
“When I was last in America one of my cousins who works in Jewish education in St. Louis gave me some very simple Jewish books she made for our son. We want to make similar books to get a child used to seeing Jewish symbols and saying their names in Polish. No one’s thought to make it. It’s so simple you wouldn’t even think to make it but these are the essential building blocks of Jewish identity,” he said.
Even such simple things and programs cost money. So Rabbi Ellis may do some fundraising while he is here as well. But he has help in Poland when it comes to raising funds.
“Thank God the chief rabbi — he’s my boss and my friend — he’s happy to allocate funding for this but he also needs to fundraise.”
More than anything else, he hopes to begin establishing a partnership between Jewish communities of Kansas City and Poland.
“I would like to create a cultural exchange where we can borrow from Kansas City’s wealth of knowledge and experience and we can share our wide eyes and our hunger for Jewishness.”{/mprestriction}
