The founding rabbi of the new Chabad English Hadera organization has the standard Lubavitch black hat, black coat, tzitzit, and beard. When he rolls up his sleeve to wrap his arm with tefillin, that’s when you see that he also has something decidedly non-standard: a colorful riot of tattoos.
Growing up in the only Jewish family in Beaver, Pennsylvania, Dovid Braslawsce was instilled with Jewish pride by his parents and grandparents, though without a working knowledge ofJudaism.
When he got his first tattoo at age 16, he didn’t know that permanent inking is forbidden by the Torah… but he chose to express his Jewish pride by having the Hebrew phrase "Be’yachad anachnu achim" (“Together we are brothers”) tattooed across his back. Some of his other body art includes a Magen David on his knuckles and the word "hineni" (“Here I am”) on his arm.
“I was like the Christian kids in my town, minus December 25. I had a strong Jewish identity, but Judaism was just a label to me. I never connected with it deeply. So when all my Christian friends were getting cross tattoos, I got Jewish tattoos. It became addictive. It went along with my wrestling and martial-arts persona,” the muscular 28-year-old rabbi and mixed martial artist explains.
In his last year of high school, he started delving into big philosophical questions, “and the Judaism I grew up with didn’t have the answers. So I looked to Buddhism and meditation,” he recounts.
One day in his first year at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, Braslawsce was cornered by the black-hatted campus Chabad rabbi he’d been trying to avoid in the mistaken assumption that the rabbi would be “a bigoted idiot.”
The rabbi invited questions
The rabbi invited him to ask any questions he wanted, and this liberal college wrestler obliged by broaching controversial topics. “He started giving me answers that made me frustrated because I agreed with everything he said, and that’s not what I expected. He said his answers were from the Torah,” he says.
Braslawsce started studying with the rabbi and was amazed to discover reflections of Buddhism and Aristotle in hassidic insights. “I didn’t realize Judaism had these answers, and they were much more complete than anything I’d learned before.”
The summer after his freshman year, Braslawsce attended the Mayanot Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. He tried taking on more religious observances. “Keeping kosher on campus was very hard, so I was eating bacon. It was a back-and-forth journey.”
During semester breaks, he studied at the Lubavitch yeshiva in Morristown, New Jersey. After graduating with a degree in marketing and finance, he worked in marketing in the New York area briefly before becoming a full-time martial arts trainer.
When COVID hit, he accepted a job at the martial arts Krav Maga Academy of San Diego. His religious seesawing continued.
Praying and partying
“Every morning, I’d pray at the Chabad House, and every evening I’d go partying and clubbing with my friends. I moved in with a non-Jewish girl. On Shabbos, I’d sleep on the couch in the Chabad House because otherwise I wouldn’t keep Shabbos,” he recalls.
In 2021, a former college friend got in touch. He was studying in Crown Heights at Hadar Hatorah, Chabad’s yeshiva for male ba’alei teshuva (returnees to the faith). He told Braslawsce about a winter-break program at the yeshiva and found a sponsor to pay Braslawsce’s way to Brooklyn.
The 10-day program made such a profound impact that Braslawsce returned again for three months, and then enrolled as a full-time student, leaving his job and his girlfriend in San Diego.
“I bonded with the guys there and saw my life being much more meaningful and growth-oriented than it had been in California. I was happier going to bed every night. Hadar Hatorah was the sweet spot of Chabad yeshivas – not trying to get rid of who you were in the past but showing how you could use your unique past to help bring Torah and Godly light into the world,” he explains.
At 23, he got his last tattoo. “When I became fully observant, Hashem took the desire away from me,” he states.
However, he has no intention of getting them removed. “At Mayanot, one of the rabbis grabbed my arm and saw ‘hineni’ and said, ‘What a hassidishe tattoo!’ That lit a fire for me to end up where I am today. He didn’t instill guilt, and that helped me deal with it and embrace it. I have this crazy past, but it doesn’t define who I am now.”
Who is he now?
In addition to offering events, daycare, and weekly classes to the growing English-speaking population in coastal Hadera (“We are looking for a place to start an English-speaking minyan; we want to help put Hadera on the map for Anglo olim”), he is the happiness manager for the Chabad.org website.
He’s also teaching classes at a fellow Case Western alumnus’s wrestling gym in Tel Aviv.
And he’s a newlywed. He met Myriam Melky on an Orthodox dating site. She moved to Hadera 11 years ago from Cameroon. He came to Israel before Yom Kippur last year to meet her in person. By Sukkot, they were engaged. They wed in February in Crown Heights, and the following month he made aliyah through Nefesh B’Nefesh. Her mother plans to make aliyah in January; his father is currently enjoying his first visit to Israel.
Braslawsce says his parents originally thought his religious quest was just a phase, “and to be fair, I wasn’t fully committed until I was about 21.” They’ve come to accept and embrace the new rabbi in their midst and are inspired by him.
“My dad found his bar mitzvah tefillin and started wrapping them, and he’s going to classes at a nearby Chabad. My older brother is in the US military. About a year ago, he got tefillin through the Aleph Institute, a Chabad organization. He is doing a lot of Jewish learning and wants to find out more. My family is slowly but surely hopping on the bandwagon,” he says.
And so are the Tattoo Rabbi’s 8,000 followers on Instagram (www.instagram.com/tattoo_rabbi/).
His website is Tattoorabbi.com. More information on Chabad English Hadera, in Givat Olga, is available on Instagram (www.instagram.com/chabadenglishhadera).