“I had a pretty typical Soviet upbringing—just being aware of my Jewishness without really knowing what it entailed. There was little access to anything Jewish until 1991. That’s when the first Chabad summer camps opened there. I went to a camp in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv. It was a four-week immersive exposure to Judaism. I went back home with a kippah, a prayer book, and a mezuzah that my parents were too afraid to put up. About eight months later we left and moved to Los Angeles.
We moved next to a Chabad house, so it was convenient—I hung out there all the time. After graduating high school, I decided to do a gap year in a Chabad yeshiva in Israel. Then I went back to the States, went to college, and then law school—I got married while in law school.
I had a law degree and a practice. Becoming a Chabad representative wasn’t the obvious next step. But when an opportunity at UCLA opened up, it felt like something we couldn’t pass on. For a year and a half I essentially had two full-time jobs—the legal work and the Chabad work—it was hard to find a balance. Someone advised me to choose only one between the two, so I can be fully invested in one. A couple of weeks later, I was laid off from the legal job—so the decision was made for me. That was May 2006. The relationships you build over twenty years are unlike anything else. I’ve officiated weddings, I get calls about career and relationship decisions… life. You can’t graduate from family.
In June 2024, I went to campus to support our students during an anti-Israel protest. Someone approached me from the side and violently knocked my phone from my hand, shouting death threats. It made the news. My incident was one of many—what struck me, though, was how familiar it felt. A lot of what is being hurled at Jews today is Soviet-era propaganda repackaged. The answer is the same too: don’t back down, don’t let them define you by their hate.
That’s what I always tell students—you need to own your Judaism. Not just as your heritage, but something you have your own relationship with. It needs to be something to explore in depth in order to truly take ownership of your identity.”
-Rabbi Dovid Gurevich, UCLA
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