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As for the financial questions, Pil says the operations were growing so quickly that he couldn't keep up with the filing requirements of the state Attorney General's Office. (Once contacted, he says he settled that matter with a $54 fee and an $81 fine.)
He says his organization's seemingly high administrative expenses -- taking upward of 79 percent of all outlays by one reckoning -- are caused by heavy advertising costs, high repair bills for the donated cars, and his practice of employing unskilled emigres as apprentice mechanics. He also says that he and his wife are taking home a combined $65,000 a year after taxes, and that that is still much less than what executives are paid at other charities.
Repeatedly, over weeks of interviews and phone calls, mention of "Rabbi Pil" would elicit earsplitting silences. Respected leaders such as Rabbi Pinchas Lipner, the head of the 300-student Hebrew Academy and himself not loath to taking outspoken positions, twice chose not to comment. Likewise Wayne Feinstein, executive director of the Jewish Community Federation, S.F.'s leading fund-raising agency for Jewish charities, stayed mum.
Langer, for his part, lost his characteristic twinkle on being asked about Pil. He declined to reply directly, other than to allude to the fact that Pil no longer celebrates the Sabbath with him. It is not seemly to take part in "Loshan horah," he said. (The loose translation is "evil tongue," he explained, or "speaking ill of someone." )
"The problem is that he's too much of a lone wolf," says Tracy Salkowitz, currently director of the Northern Pacific Region of the American Jewish Congress but formerly with Jewish Family and Children's Services, the city's leading resettlement program. "He's not a bad man; he wants to help Russian Jews," she continues. "He doesn't care if he steps on toes or breaks rules. He's a man with a mission who doesn't have all the tools he needs to dot all his i's and cross all his t's."
Bob Sherman of the Bureau of Jewish Education was a bit more blunt: "The original mission of serving the emigre community seems to have been overshadowed by their car business."
Even if Pil has come close to crossing ethical lines, there's no denying that he is a source of aid for an immigrant subculture that is doubly downtrodden -- first in its home country, and now, as its members start all over again, here in the United States. Though younger than many of the emigres arriving now, Pil is old enough to have been forced underground in his Hebrew studies in Russia and to have known of Jews banished to Siberia for studying Hebrew texts.
Yet when he arrived in New York at the age of 16, he felt no particular religious calling. Yes, he rode around in the Lubavitcher "mitzvah tanks," Winnebagos stuffed with Jewish religious tracts and trinkets that were handed out to potential converts. But he was planning to become an engineer. He wanted to design cars that would run on cushions of air.
At 18, however, while he was living in one of Brooklyn's Russian neighborhoods, he noticed one day "Jewish people drunk in the street, teen-agers selling drugs." At first he wondered "why nobody takes care of this." He decided to join the Lubavitchers and attend the yeshiva to become a rabbi.
The Lubavitch sect blends ancient mystic beliefs with a modern, pragmatic, even worldly instinct for self-promotion, based on the conviction that "[t]he world really wants to see the colors of the Jew," as Langer put it. Lubavitchers also aggressively recruit young Jews. Over the last four decades, the Lubavitchers' numbers blossomed under the charismatic leadership of the late Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as their "rebbe," a term Hasidics prefer to "rabbi." By the time Schneerson died in 1994, at the age of 92, they had become a well-organized, potent force both here and in Israel. The official tally is 250,000 members in more than 30 countries, though skeptics say that may be a vast overstatement.
The modern-day Lubavitchers practice a gaudy, boisterous, and yet extremely rulebound form of Judaism. The sect was founded in the small Lithuanian town of Lubavitch (the "city of love") roughly 200 years ago, and its leadership was passed on from one rabbi to the next over seven generations. Schneerson died before he could designate an heir.
That was his only, and possibly fatal, stumble in his carefully orchestrated drive to promote his sect. His fame grew to the point where billboards proclaiming his Messiah-hood sprouted in Brooklyn; celebrities and wealthy patrons were welcomed into the fold. Schneerson granted audiences to the likes of Bob Dylan and Ron Perlman, steward of the Revlon empire. (The rebbe also accidentally sparked the Crown Heights riots of 1991 when a car in his entourage ran over two black youngsters, killing one.)
Vendors still sell memorabilia on the sidewalk outside the house he occupied. But the key to the Lubavitchers' enduring strength is a carefully managed network of individual missions, chabads, planted now in hundreds of locations in the United States. Outside of New York, California is one of the places they've been most successful.
When Pil finished his studies in the yeshiva in Brooklyn, he "looked for the hardest place in America," he said, and concluded that the anemia of S.F.'s Jewish community made it the place to test his mettle. It's also arguable he was looking for a base large enough to sustain his empire-building ambitions. Although Los Angeles counts more Jews -- and faster growth of the Lubavitch sect -- S.F. is home to the third largest resettlement effort for Soviet emigre Jews, after New York and Chicago.
Whatever his motives, Pil came here with a missionary zeal to make his brand of Judaism bloom in the "desert."
It was a cold and blustery Monday night in the middle of Hanukkah. The Schneerson Day School, at Balboa and 34th Avenue, the four-story former home of the Lycee Francais' junior and senior highs, was brightly lit. Knots of middle-aged and older people drifted in and out of the lobby.
