Yosi (Joel) Gordon

Rabbi Yosi (Joel) Gordon was born and raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where Judaism was experienced more through a sense of deprivation than through everyday realities. His earliest influence was his grandfather, Yosef Binyamin, his namesake, whom he knew through his mother’s stories. Hebrew school, BBYO, and Camp Ramah introduced him to the joy and intensity of Torah and Jewish life. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he was eager to master Hebrew and Jewish studies in classes and at Hillel. His junior year in Israel was notable, not only for his studies at the Hebrew University, but for his job with troubled Israeli youth in Kiryat Yovel, his work teaching English at the YMCA, and his successful efforts to learn to speak Hebrew well enough to fool some Israelis.

During his six years at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Yosi devoted himself to becoming a master teacher of Jewish texts. Upon graduation, in 1972, he began his first full-time position as Assistant Principal at the Los Angeles Hebrew High School. There, he worked for six years in various administrative and programmatic capacities but, most important, as a teacher. His students gave Yosi his greatest satisfaction. When asked to send samples of his “products” to the Covenant Foundation, Yosi objected, “They won’t agree to climb into envelopes.”

In 1978 Yosi moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, to become Director of the communal supplementary school, the Talmud Torah of St. Paul. Working alongside a talented faculty, he guided the school to excellence. He helped create a communal day school, which now numbers 200 students and has inspired a sister school in Minneapolis as well as a Twin Cities middle school. Students from Yosi’s adult Rashi study group founded Beth Jacob Congregation, his shul, in the early 1980s, and other students in his teenage Rashi study group and his Sunday night adult chug have gone on to provide extraordinary Jewish leadership in their adult lives.

After twelve years as director, Yosi resigned to devote himself full-time to teaching, which he had been doing part-time for eighteen years. At the Talmud Torah schools in both cities, at the new Twin Cities Jewish Middle School, with hundreds of new Americans from the former USSR, and at three universities in Minnesota, Yosi’s courses in Jewish texts, Hebrew literature, and Jewish thought have attracted hundreds to serious Jewish learning. In addition, Yosi became the spiritual leader of a thirtythree-household synagogue in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, allowing him to claim the title of “Chief Rabbi of the Chippewa Valley.”

Yosi is always teaching. Last year he taught forty-five class hours per week. The “call” from the Covenant Foundation interrupted his eighth-grade Tanakh class. Even over the summer Yosi teaches and tutors children and adults while writing voluminous textbooks for his own classroom use.

Asked to list teachers and friends who have shaped his thinking and work, Yosi notes rabbis and educators Nathan Reisner, Max Ticktin, Hershel Matt z”l, Burton Cohen, Lou Newman, Moshe Bailiss, Sheldon Dorph, Arnold Band, Nehama Leibowitz, Dale Lange, Helaine Minkus, and Morris Allen, and his many students. “I hear their voices echoing in my conversations with my students; it reassures me that I am really teaching Torah.”