In July 1996, my wife and I, together with our three children at the time, moved to Israel from Chicago. We were not yet ready to make aliyah officially. In those pre-Nefesh B’Nefesh days, we had known of several families who had sold their homes, made aliyah, and returned to Chicago a few years later. We wanted to try out living in Israel for a year before taking the formal step of aliyah.
At that time, I was working as the vice president of Davka Corporation, a leading company in the nascent field of Jewish software. Several months earlier, Davka had signed an agreement with Rabbi Berel Wein to produce a multimedia version of Triumph of Survival – The Story of the Jews in the Modern Era 1650-1990, the best-selling history book written by Rabbi Wein in 1990.
Rabbi Wein was not only a well-known figure in the Jewish world but was also a longtime family friend. His grandfather, Rabbi Chaim Zvi Rubenstein, was one of the founders of the Hebrew Theological College in Chicago, and my great-uncle, Rabbi Louis Lehrfield, was one of his first students. Decades later, Rabbi Wein and my father, Rabbi Irving Rosenbaum, Davka’s president and founder, studied at the school.
In the 1950s, they were members of a young adult minyan in Chicago, where Rabbi Wein served as the rabbi, and my father was the president. My mother had been close friends with Rabbi Wein’s first wife before they left Chicago for warmer climes in the early 1960s, and the prospect of my working with Rabbi Wein was a good match.
The late 1990s were the early days of computer multimedia, long before YouTube, and the ability to display video clips in postage-stamp size on the screen was considered revolutionary. We had assembled a team of editors, programmers, researchers, and writers in Israel to adapt the book to the screen.
Rabbi Wein, who had filmed segments in New York, came to Israel to film on location. We would travel to a landmark, Rabbi Wein and the cameraman would hop out, and he immediately began his description of the place and its significance in his inimitable Midwestern accent. Rabbi Wein had even written a special chapter for the computer version, updating events through 1996.
Triumph of Survival - one of the first Jewish multimedia software products
By late summer, we anticipated that Triumph of Survival would not only be among the first Jewish multimedia software products to be released but would become one of our top-selling programs of the year.
It was slated for release before Hanukkah, and we expected significant sales. Realizing that a computer product featuring Rabbi Wein was a major marketing event, we invested significant resources in designing a colorful box and printed information sheets that were distributed to Jewish bookstores throughout the United States.
The florid information copy, which I wrote, promised that “This CD-ROM expands far beyond the scope of the original book, with film clips, extensive historical photographs, audio excerpts, and much more. With Rabbi Berel Wein as your multimedia guide, you’ll read, view, and understand 340 years of Jewish history in a way that you never thought possible.”
Our Israel-based archivists scoured libraries and film archives to find historic videos and photos. Today, these videos are available at the click of a button with Google and YouTube, but in those days,they were not easily accessible. We hired a composer to write original music for the program.
Unfortunately, like so many early multimedia projects, things didn’t go as planned. The lead programmer left the project, the project director was dismissed, and the program’s release was delayed for months. Those of us who remained working on the project speculated that the project might never be completed, and we dubbed it “The Survival of Triumph.”
Triumph of Survival was eventually completed several months after the anticipated release date of December 1996 and came out in the spring of 1997 for Mac and Windows PCs. It received largely positive reviews and was an artistic success, but it never lived up to its potential.
Rabbi Wein, of course, continued to produce and develop his works, in print, cassette tapes, and eventually on CD and DVD. Davka Corporation continued to produce Jewish software programs until it closed some 20 years later, at the end of 2017.
The gift of storytelling
Despite the failure of the project, our family and Rabbi Wein remained on good terms, and both sides accepted its fate with equanimity. I interviewed Rabbi Wein in his Jerusalem home in 2019 for a Jerusalem Post feature, spending several hours talking with him about his projects at the time and our shared Chicago roots.
During our interview, he attributed his overall success to his storytelling ability. “I am telling a story, and people like stories,” he explained. “The history of the Jewish people is a story. The Torah is a story in a certain respect. That’s why it is full of details about people, about incidents, because that’s what we are.”
Throughout his stories and lectures, he attempted to impart one basic message. “Jewish history is the key to faith and to belief and to explain what we’re doing here in Israel. If you have no idea of where you are coming from, you have no idea where you are going.”
In his later years, Rabbi Wein teamed up with noted film director Ashley Lazarus, making dozens of films, including documentaries and animated features on Jewish history. Lazarus says that while Rabbi Wein’s storytelling skills endeared him to his audiences, what set him apart was his ability to absorb tremendous amounts of material and relay that material to his audiences with humor and wit.
“I think he was a natural storyteller, but he was an absolute absorber of everything he read and everything he heard. He had this innate way of respecting other people through humor. All his humor was to disarm you in a way that you would say, ‘This is somebody I could talk to.’”
Storytellers convey their version of an event to their listeners, and occasionally Rabbi Wein’s versions of events that took place in Jewish history seemed a bit far-fetched and unlikely.
One of his students told me that when listeners would ask him, “Are all your stories true?” he would reply jauntily, “They’re all true. Some just haven’t happened yet.”
Rabbi Wein passed away this month on August 16. Yehi zichro baruch – may his memory be for a blessing.