Rabbi Chaim Block first met Julian Castro when the Texas politician was a young city councilman. He spoke at Chanukah on the River Walk, a holiday celebration the rabbi and his Chabad-Lubavitch of South Texas coordinate annually, drawing on themes Castro explored years earlier as a participant in dialogues between the Latino and Jewish communities.
Last week, Castro, now S. Antonio’s fifth-ever Hispanic mayor, was received by Israeli President Shimon Peres in an official ceremony that had all the trappings of a state visit. Block, who accompanied the mayor as part of a municipal delegation to the Holy Land, witnessed it all transpire as one of Israel’s most-senior statesmen gave advice to an unassuming, youthful man many analysts say has many years of public service ahead of him.
“Since he’s become mayor, he and his wife and child have joined us for Sabbath dinner, and we spent many hours discussing Torah lessons relevant to public service,” says Block, who has lived in South Texas since 1985 and in that time, has gotten to know social, religious and political leaders of all stripes, including Castro’s Jewish chief of staff, Robbie Greenblum. “He’s a very bright, humble and understated person.”
For Castro, last week’s tour, which was organized by the City of S. Antonio, the Jewish Federation of S. Antonio, and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was all about his city. He joined industry leaders and utility executives on a whirlwind fact-finding mission that took them to a water desalination plant, the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and a hi-tech incubator in Israel’s north, and resulted in the signing of three groundbreaking agreements, including one between BioMed SA and BioJerusalem signed at the historic King David Hotel that is expected to fuel collaboration between American and Israeli scientists on diabetes research, battlefield medicine, and cancer treatments.
Castro also visited the Western Wall and Yad Vashem – Israel’s national Holocaust memorial and museum – and toured the Golan Heights to gain an appreciation of Israel’s security needs. But to hear him explain it, the focus of the five-day trip was South Texas.
“Israel’s is an inspiring story, because if Israel, given the challenging circumstances it operates under can excel in a 21st century economy, certainly communities in the United States like S. Antonio can do so as well,” says the Stanford University and Harvard Universty-educated mayor. “It was eye-opening for me in terms of how a nation can overcome diversity, how they can come together and create something truly amazing in terms of entrepreneurship, and it spoke to me about what S. Antonio can accomplish.”
As a local rabbi, Block’s presence on the trip – and those of the other Jewish community leaders who attended – was part of making S. Antonio stronger through cementing connections in Israel.
In addition to the business accomplishments, the trip “gave a richness and context to [the mayor’s] understanding of Israel, the Jewish people, and the Jewish community of S. Antonio,” explains Greenblum.
After walking through Yad Vashem, a memorial service gave “great depth and meaning” to the experience, says the chief of staff.
Michael Beldon, a local businessman and past Federation president who served as Castro’s campaign treasurer, agreed and pointed to another episode as illustrative of the trip’s unique blend of economic, political and Jewish concerns. After one of the business meetings, the mayor was presented with a shofar, a specially-crafted ram’s horn traditionally blown on the High Holidays.
“Chaim Block blew the shofar,” recalls Beldon. “That was a great moment.”
Federation president and CEO Howard Feinberg, however, goes further and rejects the premise of the trip’s presenting two different business and Jewish tracks. In his estimation, the value came in the Jewish community’s very ability, in spite of its minority status – official estimates say just 9,200 of the city’s 1.3 million people are Jewish – to enrich S. Antonio’s economic future.
“Jews must be a part of the community in which they live, and must support it as their own,” asserts Feinberg. “We are here to facilitate major elements of exchange” between leaders and decision-makers.
Block agrees, and sees the trip as further cementing connections between the Jewish community and the municipality, to everyone’s benefit.
“It was a great opportunity to broaden our base in terms of making meaningful friendships and connections throughout the community, Jewish and non-Jewish,” says the rabbi, who helped some of the trip’s Jewish participants don the prayer boxes known as tefillin each day. “It gave me a further opportunity to appreciate the diversity of our community.
“I learned about S. Antonio by going to Israel,” adds Block, laughing. “But my role there was to lend a spiritual background to the trip. Judaism has much to say about public service, about business leadership, about making the world a better place.”
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