Yacov Fruchter: The new Spiritual leader of the Annex Shul

I looked up at the Yacov Fruchter’s pink kippa, then down his cream coloured cardigan all the way to his jeans. This was new rabbi of the Annex Shul?

As it turns out, not quite. Instead, Yacov is the spiritual leader of the Annex Shul.

About a year and a half ago, the Annex Shul needed a new rabbi. They heard of Fruchter- who had been a student leader all through McGill and then moved to Toronto in 2007 to work at the Hillel head office after graduation- and signed him up part-time.

He started full-time last month, and will be officially welcomed at a party this Sunday at Bang & Olufsen. To understand why the Annex Shul would hire a rabbi who’s not a rabbi, one has to understand what both the Annex Shul and also Fruchter are all about.

Fruchter, it seems, is the shul’s desired demographic. If he weren’t leading the service, he would probably be attending: 25-40, professional, with a wife (but not yet a kid), intellectual, urban, just bought a house in the Annex.

The shul, which holds its Shabbat services in the Wolfond centre at the University of Toronto, wants to provide something for the hip, urban Jew who hasn’t found what he’s looking for in the giant shuls north of St. Clair: a place where Jews of all denominations can pray comfortably a place where both men and women can be active in services a place with a lively atmosphere and a place for Jewish growth and learning.

“We want as many young Jews as possible to have an active role in their own Jewish experience. And so for me services is a part of that. I'm dealing with young professionals who basically own every part of their experience in the rest of their life. They’re really active parents if they already have kids, in their professional life they work really hard and they strive to really succeed so when they come to our shul, the Annex Shul, I would be surprised if they just wanted to sit back and not take an active role,” Fruchter said.

Fruchter has taken an active role in his Jewish experience since he was nine. It was then he started learning how to lead services in his family’s small, Modern Orthodox, Montreal shul. Later, while double majoring in biology and Jewish studies at McGill, he lead services part-time at a geriatric centre. He got involved with leading services at an egalitarian synagogue and it was there he had the most significant departure from his Modern Orthodox background, mostly because women were included in services.

His life and resume has been a straight line to this point. He seems like he has been involved in Jewish leadership since it became a term: working and volunteering for Jewish acronym after acronym.

But despite that immersion in mainstream Jewish life, he brings a plurality of vision with him. Or, perhaps because of barely knowing a non-Jew or non-Modern Orthodox Jew until he went to university in the early aughts, he strives to be inclusive.

“I became aware of the fact that I didn’t love that when it came to prayer we couldn’t find a way for Jews from different background to find space where they could come together,” he said.

For this reason he sees the advantage of not being a rabbi. Now he is unattached to any particular denomination and able to lead services in a more comprehensive way. “We are trying to run services according to Halacha, according to tradition to Jewish law, but we are pushing the boundaries as far as possible in order to allow both men and women to participate as much as possible,” he said.

He tells me that half of his previous jobs required having coffee with people, talking to them- and I can believe it. He’s charismatic, and relaxed, but passionate. He leans over the table when he tells me of a defining experience in his university years.

When he was President of Hillel at McGill, it partnered up with about 35 different student organization spanning across ethnic, religious and cultural lines to invite Elie Wiesel in to speak.

“When Wiesel came and spoke about the importance of dialogue and understanding each other, he was saying it in a vacuum, he was saying it to a room of 900 mostly non-Jewish people, who came together to support these students and organizations who said we were willing to work together to try to create a peaceful and diverse community.”

He may be a Spiritual Leader, but he has that rhetoric of making every sentence sound like a question, and then answering it himself – exactly like a rabbi.