Rebbetzin Judy Brodt is a fixture of Nachlaot. Not only are her programs, trips, and classes with Yeshivat Simchat Shlomo and Shevach Torah legendary, but her life is quite remarkable.
Judy was born the day after Yom Kippur in 1944 in Budapest, Hungary, to parents determined to bring life into the world in the midst of the Holocaust. Bombs fell during her birth, and her father was a prisoner for the first 13 months of her life. After the war ended, Hungary suffered the horrors of Communism for 44 years. On January 24, 1956, at age 12, Judy escaped with her large family during a brief window of freedom, via Austria, to Miami, Florida. Every year, out of gratitude on the anniversary of her family’s escape, Rebbetzin Brodt retells the story. This year’s telling can be found here.
At age 26, when her daughter was born, she switched from working as an interior designer/architect to working on the “interior interior,” focusing her career on natural cooking, bodywork, teaching yoga to children, massage therapy, labour coach/doula, and teacher of kallahs (brides.) She discovered Israeli folk dance, which led her to Rabbi Zalman Schachter, the founder of the Renewal movement, and Reb Shlomo Carlebach, in 1977. She lived in Reb Shlomo’s shul and Reb Zalman’s house. The latter is where she met her husband, the late, great Rabbi Sholom Brodt, when he visited Philadelphia from Montreal for Pesach. (Barak Hullman’s book about Rabbi Brodt can be found here, and Rabbi Brodt’s book Exodus: The Model of Personal Liberation can be found here.)
Rebbetzin Brodt shared with me little-known stories from her life, including happy childhood memories, how she met her husband, and how Yeshivat Simchat Shlomo was founded.
You can easily attend classes on arts and Torah, in person and online, at Yeshivat Simchat Shlomo here and women’s classes with Shevach Torah here.
Judy wants to share this message with the world: Be glad that you’re here and use every moment to the advantage of your soul, and therefore everybody else’s soul, because we are connected.
Rebbetzin Brodt is very proud of her 3 biological children, her 4 step-children, “and all the other ‘adopted children’ all over the world,” including a couple of thousand babies she helped birth, and, she adds, “the thousands of Shabbat and Yom tov guests, the many shidduchim, learning with kallahs weddings, classes of learning, giving over, sharing Torah, for all this and more, I’m immensely grateful, b”H!” She also wants to share that many of the students at YSS have become leaders, and continue to give over Torah and Yiddishkeit in a way that they want to give over — joyfully. These include Nili Salem, Reb Leibish Hundert, Sheva Chaya, and many more.
Her gratitude and desire to keep giving is moving.
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