JLife Magazine and the Jewish community at large has lost a great rabbi, friend and scholar Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer, OBM. Rabbi Dov Fischer, Rav of Young Israel of Orange County, was the only Orthodox Rav in all of Orange County, California who served in both of the County’s non-Chabad Orthodox congregations. He became a Congregational Rav (Orthodox Rabbi) in Irvine, California in August 2005, when he assumed the role at Beth Jacob Congregation of Irvine. Rav Fischer arrived in “The O.C.” from the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, where he had been Rav of Young Israel of Calabasas since that shul’s inception. In February 2008, sixty Beth Jacob membership households joined with Rav Fischer in establishing Orange County’s first new Orthodox Jewish congregation in more than twenty years: Young Israel of Orange County (YIOC).
Rav Fischer was a nationally prominent Jewish leader and speaker, National Vice President and a Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the 2,000-member Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), America’s largest rabbinic public policy organization; served six years as a member of the National Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America, the central body of the Modern Orthodox Rabbinate in the United States, and formerly served on the Board of Directors of the Hillel Foundation of Orange County. Previously, Rav Fischer served as National Vice President of the Zionist Organization of America. Yet Rav Fischer’s first focus was always on the needs of each and every individual in his congregational community. For all his prominence, private pastoral care came first.
As a quintessentially “Modern Orthodox” centrist rabbi—Ivy League graduate, amateur film buff extraordinaire, American History scholar, theater and opera aficionado, and Yankees-Mets/ Giants-Jets/ Rangers-Islanders fan (depending on which teams were having good years! —he created a unique home for educated and critical-thinking Contemporary Jews who observed the Shabbat and for those who were “not yet Shomer Shabbat.” The remarkable synthesis of the population groups in the YIOC community created a distinctive flavor that celebrated the diversity of a wonderfully eclectic congregation of distinguished professionals, accomplished entrepreneurs, and just-plain nice people.
Rav Fischer built YIOC with his dynamic and personable wife, Rebbetzin Ellen, who passed on to Gan Eden in Tamuz 5780 (July 2020). Together they worked together as an inseparable team, often teaching classes together, regularly hosting Shabbat guests and lunch visitors, and frequently dedicating Friday Nights to hosting young people for Shabbat. dinner. Thus, Ellen z”l played a critical role, welcoming new families, hosting a steady flow of Shabbat guests, attending services and helping women with davening, and participating in classes as an additional resource. Rav Fischer frequently spoke of how he owes everything in his career to Ellen z”l.
YIOC established a demonstrated record of reaching out successfully to Jews of all backgrounds, attracting a dynamic blend of younger individuals, more senior families, and “Baby Boomers” in between. In the process. YIOC was awarded a “Year 2022 Best in Irvine” award for its creative programming during the pandemic.
A Rav with a National Impact: Rav Fischer had an eclectic background. Most rabbis are not Kentucky Colonels, but Rav Fischer was named by three different Governors of the Commonwealth of Kentucky—Gov. Brereton Jones, Gov. Paul Patton, and Gov. Ernie Fletcher—as an Honorary Kentucky Colonel for contributions he made to the people and social welfare of that state. (He was born and reared in Brooklyn, but he liked Makers’ Mark and was based in Louisville when he clerked in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.)
Rav Fischer published social, political, and cultural commentary in prominent national outlets. He was a senior contributing editor at The American Spectator and a regular contributor for JLife Magazine and Arutz Sheva / Israel National News. His writings appeared on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, as front-cover banner headline stories in the Weekly Standard, and in Newsweek, the New York Post, the Federalist, the Orange County Register, National Review Online, the Jerusalem Post, Israel Hayom, Jewish News Syndicate, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, the Jewish Press of New York, and Midstream. He was particularly known in Southern California where he contributed several hundred published articles over the past thirty years, emerging as a strong community advocate for Torah values and Jewish community concerns.
Thirty Years of Service to the Jewish Community: After receiving his undergraduate degree at Columbia University, Rav Fischer studied at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS) of Yeshiva University and was ordained a Rav in 1981. In 1983, Rav Fischer was awarded his master’s degree in American Jewish history. His master’s thesis was nationally honored by the American Jewish Historical Society and published in its scholarly quarterly, American Jewish History.
During the first decade of his rabbinical career, Rav Fischer was a synagogue congregational Rav in New Jersey, taught on both the religious and secular faculties of two yeshiva high schools, was Rabbinic Advisor to the largest Soviet Jewry immigration agency in New Jersey and to his city’s NCSY chapter for teens, and served as Jewish chaplain both at the largest private hospital in the city and for the Jersey City Police Department. He also wrote a regular column for the mass-circulating Jewish Press of Brooklyn, authored two books—”Jews for Nothing: On Cults, Assimilation and Intermarriage” (N.Y.: Feldheim, 1983) and “General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine” (N.Y.: Steimatzky, 1985)—and served as national executive director of the Likud Zionists of America.
From 1985 to 1987, Rav Fischer lived in Israel where his was one of 40 pioneering families that created a new Jewish community in Samaria. During that time, he also served as Assistant Director of the American High School at Pardes Hanna, cosponsored by the Los Angeles Jewish Federation Council’s Bureau of Jewish Education and by the Los Angeles Unified School District. He taught in the Overseas Program at Orot Women’s College for Torah Studies, guest lectured several times at Bar Ilan University for a course in Jewish Values taught to members of the Israeli Defense Forces, and he worked intimately with Ethiopian Jews at the Merkaz Klitah Absorption Center in Hadera.
Rav Fischer came to California in 1987 to serve as Rav of a new congregation, Beit Hamidrash of Woodland Hills, and served as Founding Rav and Headmaster of a new Yeshiva Day School in the area, the West Valley Hebrew Academy, also based in Woodland Hills. During his three years in Woodland Hills, the Beit Hamidrash Congregation grew from ten families to more than sixty membership households, and the yeshiva day school expanded into three grades and more than 60 students.
A Decade of Legal Service to the American Jewish Community, Too:
After a decade’s service in the American Orthodox rabbinate, Rav Fischer received his Juris Doctor degree in 1993 at UCLA School of Law where he also was selected to serve as Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review. His Law Review comment on a federal law affecting directors and officers of depository institutions was cited in nine federal judicial opinions, a remarkable and virtually unheard-of honor for a law student. The following year, Rav Fischer served as federal judicial appeals-court clerk to the Hon. Danny J. Boggs, who became Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Rav Fischer thereafter practiced complex business litigation for nearly a decade at three of America’s most prominent law firms.
As part of his practice, Rav Fischer became uniquely positioned to play a significant pro bono legal role when he represented leaders in the Orthodox Jewish community and advocated legal positions important to the greater Jewish community. Thus, Rav Fischer participated significantly on a pro bono legal team that represented the plaintiff class suing certain European insurance companies over Jewish claims arising from the Holocaust era. He also performed a wide range of other pro bono legal services for the Jewish community, including successfully helping women obtain Gittin from recalcitrant husbands, he stopped an unauthorized autopsy from being performed in Orange County, and had another autopsy dramatically modified in scope. He also represented religious institutional leaders in a series of public-interest matters. He contributed to American legal education for nearly two decades as Adjunct Professor of Law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where he taught California Civil Procedure and the Law of Complex Torts, and at University of California at Irvine (UCI) School of Law, where he taught Advanced Torts and Remedies.
Rav Dov is survived by his wife, Denise, and four children of whom he was deeply proud: YJ Fischer, Kineret Yardena, Ayelet Krieger, and Aaron Fischer, and his three precious grandchildren: Sam, Theo and Jamie.