At 79, Leon Weissberg can look back on a life of many accomplishments.
But the one that makes the Cooper City educator especially proud happened just five years ago — he became a rabbi.
Many have asked him: Why become a rabbi so late in life? He already had a doctorate and three master’s degrees and had been a teacher, a school principal and administrator. He has taken students and adults on March of the Living trips to concentration camps in Poland for three decades, and has a loving wife, two children and four grandchildren.
But Weissberg said he has wanted to be a rabbi since he was a little boy and as an adult was yearning for something deeper in his Jewish life. He tells the story of his clerical journey and dramatic early years in a recently published autobiography, “A Great Miracle Happened Here: A Rabbi’s Musings from Akiva to Zionism” (Hamilton Books; $19.99).
“The rabbinate was always in the back of my mind,” Weissberg told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “I wanted it for the sake of wanting it, without looking for a reward. Now I have a tremendous feeling of accomplishment.”
Many South Floridians who have attended Jewish day schools or taken Jewish studies courses know Weissberg, who speaks French, Hebrew and Yiddish, as an accomplished and gregarious teacher. He specializes in the Holocaust but can speak with erudition on almost any Jewish topic.
His ordination from Chabad, an Orthodox Jewish movement, allows him to officiate at Jewish life cycle events and teach a wider assortment of subjects, said Rabbi Pinny Andrusier of Chabad of Southwest Broward, who worked closely with Weissberg during the ordination process and wrote the foreword to his book.
“Before he became a rabbi, his emphasis was the Holocaust,” he said. “Now, his emphasis is more global. He wants to ignite sparks. What’s especially admirable is it wasn’t an easy task, and he put in extraordinary effort.”
Weissberg said he has developed faith in Divine Providence, or a belief that God steers the work of human beings as part of a holy plan. He said the theory helps explain several episodes in his life, including his birth in a displaced persons camp in Germany after World War II. Near the end of the war, his father, Sam, emerged from hiding in a Polish forest and searched for his wife, Esther, in the Lodz Ghetto but learned she had been sent to the Chelmno death camp.
The Soviet Army liberated the Lodz ghetto in January 1945, freeing Weissberg’s father and a friend, Eva Krufka. They married in the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp in 1946, and Weissberg was born in the camp to Sam and Eva a few months later.
“Everything that was set in motion here was driven by Divine Providence for my parents, and subsequently for me,” Weissberg wrote in the book.
His mother died four months after his birth. His father then moved them to Paris, where they had family who set him up with a 22-year-old Auschwitz survivor, Vickie Baruch. The couple married and had a son together, Albert.
When Weissberg was 5, the family moved to Miami and then New York City. He attended a yeshiva and The City College of New York and became a public school teacher and a religious school teacher.
He returned to South Florida in 1977 to take a job as a day school principal in Hollywood. He later led Donna Klein Jewish Academy in Boca Raton and the Jewish Education Commission at the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County.
He retired in 2017 and teaches at the Melton School of Adult Jewish Learning, a program at B’nai Torah Congregation in Boca Raton, and still leads an annual trip to Poland for the March of the Living.
“He is one of the most knowledgeable teachers I have ever been acquainted with,” said Delray Beach resident Katie Colburn, who has been taking Weissberg’s classes at the Melton school for three years and went on a March of the Living trip with him in April. “You can feel his love for Judaism coming through in the way he teaches. He has the type of Jewish spirit we need at this time especially.”
Some have told him he knows so much about Judaism that becoming a rabbi should have been almost intuitive. He said it was actually incredibly difficult.
For Chabad’s online course, he had to take classes twice a week for three hours at a time, and had follow-up sessions with a tutor for two hours each week. They studied the Shulchan Aruch, a 16th-century compilation of Jewish laws on prayer, holidays, mourning, marriage, finance and keeping kosher. There were many tests, including oral exams, when he was asked questions in Hebrew but was allowed to answer in English.
Rabbi is more of an honorific for Weissberg than a job that takes up his time. He said he has only performed one funeral, one bar mitzvah and one wedding since he got his ordination.
He is focused more on writing curriculum about antisemitism and resistance during World War II with his wife, Toni, a retired Broward County teacher and principal, for the Holocaust Learning Center at the Posnack Jewish Community Center in Davie. And he’s planning more trips to Poland, including a fall journey for 10 JCC docents and, in June, the Ride for the Living, a 60-mile bicycle trip from Auschwitz to Krakow. Weissberg said he will ride a bike in the peloton.
He still studies every day with Andrusier and relishes his move from secular teacher to spiritual leader in the Jewish world.
“When I put all this together, I think about where God stepped into my life,” Weissberg said. “If you open your eyes, you see it. But you have to be open to it.”
