BANGOR, Maine — Shalom Cheruff and Efraim Davidoff spent Thursday in Bar Harbor, but they did not visit Thunder Hole or take selfies atop Cadillac Mountain.
Instead, the Orthodox Jews reached out to vacationers on the Village Green, offering them prayers, religious materials and a chance to connect with other Jews in an unexpected place.
Reaction ranged from, “I’m Jewish, but not today,” to people who stopped to talk about their own Jewish heritage, Cheruff and Davidoff said Friday at the Bangor home of Rabbi Chaim Wilansky, where they are staying.
Cheruff and Davidoff, both 20, are in Maine for two weeks this summer with the Roving rabbis program. It is part of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, a branch of Hasidim, the most traditional branch of Orthodox Judaism.
Roving rabbis are Jewish college students who visit communities around the globe where Jews are a small minority of the population and may feel isolated from the worldwide Jewish community, according to information on its website. The program also is designed to help non-religious Jews reconnect with the rituals and prayers of their faith.
“What we, especially in Chabbad circles, try to do is to bring more Judaism to more Jews,” Davidoff of Los Angeles said. “In that way we can bring more Jews closer to their heritage.”
What they do also is considered to be a mitzvah, which is most often translated from Yiddish as “a good deed,” but it’s literal Hebrew translation is “commandment.”
“We want to go out to help another Jew and give another Jew a chance to do a mitzvah and bring a smile to another person’s face,” Cheruff of Skokie, Illinois, said.
What the roving rabbis do is offer a mezuzot, which is a piece of parchment with specific verses from the Torah that often is then placed inside a small case that is affixed to the doorposts of a Jewish home, to Jews they meet.
Cheruff and Davidoff also offer to show Jewish men how to use tefillin, two small leather boxes that contain verses from the Torah. They are worn on the head and on one arm and are held in place by leather straps during morning prayers.
Much of their outreach in Bangor has involved visiting local Jews in their offices and introducing themselves in telephone calls.
In their long pants, long-sleeved white shirts, ties, suit jackets, and black hats, the bearded men have turned a few heads in Bangor.
“Just today, I got some shouts from a car, I’m not going to say what,” Davidoff said Friday. “A lot of people are very surprised, like, wow, Hasidic Jews in Bangor. Whoa, where’d that come from?”
People who don’t recognize them as Hasidim have asked about their garb.
“We tell them this is our Jewish uniform,” Cheruff said. “It’s definitely a surprise for people not to see us in T-shirts and shorts.”
Wilansky, the rabbi at Congregation Beth Abraham, Bangor’s Orthodox synagogue, said that Cheruff and Davidoff are able to take a strong message to Jews living in Maine and those visiting this summer.
“A lot of people unfortunately don’t like to come out to synagogue,” the rabbi said Friday. “They’re uncomfortable coming to synagogue. So what we do is we go to them and try to do a good deed with them.”
Cheruff, who will spend next week in Portland, and Davidoff are students at the Rabbinical College of America in Morristown, New Jersey. The young men are considering becoming rabbis.