By: Ch, Capt Levy Pekar, USAF
Life in the United States military is unlike anything else I have ever experienced. It asked me to push myself physically, mentally, and spiritually in ways I didn’t know I was capable of. Rabbinically, there is a challenge or novel problem every few months that I was simply unready for initially, which requires me to operate regularly in a halachic gray zone. It’s exhausting, it’s exhilarating, and it’s deeply rewarding. Like the adage about people who like to blog that can be applied to Jewish military chaplains: “Never has so few, done so much for so few.” There are 15,000 Jewish personnel spread across all 750 US Military installations worldwide with only 23 Active Duty Jewish chaplains caring for them that are backed up by another 70 reserve and National Guard chaplains. This makes our assignments strategically placed; we must be constantly postured to respond to Jewish needs expeditiously, and we develop a degree of flexibility, acceptance, and bitachon (trust in G-d) that is maddeningly annoying to others.
I realized the chaplaincy was for me after spending a few Jewish holidays supporting military bases. I recognized I wanted to be a rabbi but did not have the bandwidth for politicking. I was trained to be a therapist but did not want a life of pay scales and chasing insurances. Finally, I wanted to be a shliach (Chabad emissary of the Lubavitcher Rebbe). It has been quite the journey since I started and I will share several stories of life as a rabbi in the Air Force where I experienced incredible opportunities to serve my fellow Jews.
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I swore into the Air Force Reserves on June 28, 2016, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and began preparing myself physically for Officer Training School which I would attend in January. While visiting New York during the high holidays that year, a man name Mendel Winter approached me and shared that his mother’s cousin, Staff Sergeant Yaakov Yisroel “Jack” Weiner, a Brooklyn kid who served as air crew on a Superfortress B29, had been shot down over Kyushu, Japan on August 10th, 1945 (the day after the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki). He had been accidentally buried under a cross at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii. Mr. Winter told me that he had attempted to change the tombstone but was not able to identify a point of contact, and everyone he reached out to either declined to help or never responded to him. As a brand-new First Lieutenant and an extreme optimist, I made several calls to different agencies that I would not have called if I’d had the experience to know better. Eventually, I was able to connect Mr. Winter to the right people to make the change from a cross to a Star of David on the tombstone. On February 28, 2017, I flew to Hawaii and, with the support of the local Air Force chapel we held a rededication ceremony, giving SSgt. Jack the ceremony and Kaddish (mourner’s prayer) he deserved. It was a moving experience when Jews from all over the island came to pay their respects and then, together, recited kaddish for him.
A month later, I received a call from my unit at Nellis Air Force, Nevada, that there was a thick envelope sitting at my desk. In the envelope I found a letter from a Mrs. Mariellen Miller of Phoenix, Arizona who shared with me that she read my story about Jack Weiner and that her uncle, 2nd Lieutenant Kenneth E Robinson, who had been shot down on August 17, 1943, was also buried under a cross. She had reached out many times to Senator McCain’s office and others but no one was able to help her. I went back to the grindstone but quickly came across an issue I couldn’t resolve: 2nd Lt Robinson had clearly stated on his paperwork that he was a Christian. I communicated that with Mariellen, and together, we tried speaking to different organizations while collecting an immense packet of information on her Uncle Kenny. However, we simply couldn’t prove to the officials that he wanted to be buried as a Jew. Eventually, I received a direct command from my leadership to stand down and focus on what I was being paid to do and not assume duties outside of my official Air Force duties.
A year later, I attended the Jewish Welfare Board Military Conference in New York. On one of the days, Rav Schacter gave a talk about a new organization that he and Shalom Lamm were about to launch named Operation Benjamin, which works to change the tombstones of Jews buried under crosses. I could barely believe the Divine Providence, and quickly cornered him after his talk to discuss the case of Lieutenant Robinson and pass it on to them. Thank G-d, with the material I collected and a few well-placed calls, Operation Benjamin was able to correct this terrible mistake. Within two years we were able to have a beautiful ceremony, at the height of Covid-19, with Mariellen in attendance, to change her Uncle Kenny’s grave marker.
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In 2019, my wife and I decided that we were going to go Active Duty. We were expecting to go somewhere in the United States that would be far away from a Jewish community. We even heard a rumor we were being sent to Keesler Air Force in Mississippi but were very shocked, surprised, and excited to then find out that we were being sent to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan!
Okinawa is a tiny island that is most known, to Americans, as the location of some of the most intense and bloody battles in World War II. Kadena Air Base is the closest frontline to China, with two squadrons of F-15Cs ready at any moment to take off and engage in air-to-air combat with America’s only near-peer rival. Every time the president uses the word China, or something happens politically in Asia, Kadena Air Base postures itself to fight and defend American interests and friends. A very intense mission for a very intense geographic location. As far as Judaism is concerned, it is just about the most remote Jewish community on the planet, and that’s where we were headed.
The island of Okinawa has always had a Jewish community since the Second World War. Renowned author and Navy veteran Herman Wouk wrote in his book, This is my God, that he had received Yom Kippur’s prestigious honor of reading the Haftarah from the Book of Jonah on the island in 1945. With 80,000 Americans on Okinawa, all moving to and away every three years, the Jewish community hovers from 100 to 250 Jews on the island. Traditionally, this is a Navy Jewish Chaplain billet; I was the first one ever from the Air Force. My placement raised some eyebrows and required some relationship building with the Navy rabbi who I was taking over.
As far as remoteness goes, the closest Chabad House was a four-hour flight away, and the closest kosher restaurant was a seven-hour flight to Thailand. Prepared kosher food on the island was non-existent and incredibly hard even to obtain through the military channels. Whatever did come was often joked that its yartzeit has come and gone, leaving most of what we get not suitable for human consumption. For my wife’s observation of the mitzvah of mikvah, we had the entirety of the East China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. But Okinawa has a downpour for two months straight through May and June, and then typhoon season starts, which averages about three a year and involves an exotic mix of dangerous sea life. So that mitzvah had its significant hazards and challenges.
We arrived there a few days before Rosh Hashana and immediately got to work trying to provide for the community. We took out the single pot and pan we had brought and started cooking a meal with our extremely limited supplies. A Jewish KC-135 pilot, Alexis, who had also just arrived, was our only guest in our empty house with a single plastic table, four plastic chairs, and a plastic couch. Over the High Holiday season, I met with the majority of the community. The range of observance among Jews on the island was extremely wide—from formerly Orthodox with a full yeshiva education to “Humanist Jews” and descendants of the Kaifeng Jews, with the common denominator that they all loved Hashem and Torah even if they couldn’t agree on what that looked like. On almost every step of my rabbinic journey on this island, I needed to consult a rav, as the typical go-to halachic texts often didn’t cover the issues we dealt with.
Among the more exciting and novel Jewish problems we had to wade through was the Brit Milah for my son during the height of Covid-19, a wedding for two of our Jewish airmen, and organizing a homemade Passover seder for 75 people with no electricity, in 80-degree weather with 80% humidity, during a global pandemic.
It is often hard to gauge the impact one has on the world around them and harder still when my world shifts so frequently. For me, the journey of community building in Okinawa can be summed up when I invited everyone to come learn Torah during my final Shavuot on the island and encouraged them to stay up the whole night with me. Incredibly, eight people came and stayed until 4:00 am. They did this knowing that all of them would have to go to work the following day in three hours!
Finally, the unique opportunities to serve are often unthinkable. I was once able to get a seat on a KC-135 that took a small group of Airmen to visit the island of Iwo Jima and hike the infamous Mount Suribachi. Of the 1,500 Jewish Marines that fought on Iwo Jima, 150 were killed and 400 were wounded. I was honored to pray for those 150 Jewish Marines on the actual hallowed grounds where they died, and I read Chaplain Roland Gittelsohn’s famous invocation to all the Airmen who joined us.
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Perhaps the hardest part of this rabbinate is the transience and frequent need to establish and re-establish communities. In July 2022 we moved from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. We said goodbye to our younger, mostly single, community and moved to establish another community which was predominantly military families with an incredible abundance of young children. Where one community needed connection and lots of personal attention another community needed more children’s programming and more family friendly holiday meals, even when Shabbat and holiday candle lighting could be as late as 9:45pm. Germany is a different mission with different problems to overcome and different hurdles to overcome.
Since coming to Germany and due to the presence of dozens of bases spread across Germany, I needed to support, sustain and develop smaller communities in other bases. This led me traveling across Germany over Chanukah and Purim and having a 75-person seder with service members traveling from all over the country to join us. The mission never stops, and the needs of the Jewish community continue to evolve and expand. Within a couple months of arriving I was truly blessed to be the representative for the Army’s V Corps, EUCOM, and the United States at a historic event of a Hachnasat Sefer Torah for the newly minted Ukrainian Chaplain Corps and their first Jewish chaplain. Recently I was able to, once again, represent the military and meet with my dear friends at Operation Benjamin, co-led by Rabbi Schachter, at the rededication of Jewish soldiers buried under crosses and the discovery of a long-lost Jew, but that is not my story to tell.
The Air Force takes and pushes my family and me to limits we didn’t know we had. My children’s Jewish education is through an online school and the home we build, their friends often don’t look like them, and their country-visit count can rival many adults. My brilliant wife completed her Ph.D. while moving twice, leading a community, and teaching our children. The Air Force has sent us to care for Airmen and Jews in places at the end of the planet Okinawa but also Guantanamo Bay, Northern Alaska, Korea, and many other places I can’t share. There are Jews in places most people cannot imagine or never heard, who crave a relationship with Hashem; their only desire is to have matzah on Pesach, Chanukah candles to light, or a simple meetup for some tea on a Tuesday to talk Torah. The Air Force gives me the ability to do that and serve the absolute most invisible and transient Jewish community in the world, the US military Jewish community.
Originally published in the Chanukah/Purim 5784 issue of The Jewish American Warrior.
