By Cindy Mindell

FAIRFIELD – It’s been a busy two months for Rabbi Yirmiyah Moldovan, the globe-trotting rabbi who arrived from Israel in late December to take over as the new spiritual leader of Congregation Ahavath Achim in Fairfield, Modern Orthodox synagogue. From 2013 to 2015, the synagogue was led by interim Rabbi Ephraim Meth.

Moldovan is a native of Sydney, Australia, where he developed a passion for body-surfing on the famous Bondi Beach. While his mother is Australian-born, his father’s family are Hungarian Holocaust survivors, as were many members of the Orthodox Jewish community where the Moldovans lived.

Moldovan attended the local Jewish community day school and a selective boys’ high school before graduating from the University of New South Wales with a degree in commerce and a double major in accounting and finance. He then worked as a bookkeeper and financial analyst, volunteering in the local Jewish community.

“I was teaching and organizing programs and I enjoyed working very much but just got much more fulfillment from being involved in the community,” Moldovan says. “I decided that that was where I wanted to invest my life.”

At age 24, he left his job and moved to Jerusalem to study. Over the next 11 years, he attended the Ohr Somayach and Mir yeshivot and the Jerusalem Kollel, studying a wide range of religious topics. Along the way, he became qualified as a sofer in Israel and as a mashgiach in Japan, and finally sought rabbinic ordination.

Six years ago, Moldovan married Hadassah, a Kansas City native living in Denver. The couple has three young children: Yocheved, Tzvi and Mordechai.

At the Jerusalem Kollel, Moldovan studied with Rabbi Yitzchak Berkowitz, whose students are sent into the Jewish diaspora as rabbis and teachers.

“I wanted to help out a Jewish community and help out the Jewish people, and those opportunities are very limited for Anglos in Israel,” Moldovan says. “We felt that there was a lot of potential at Ahavath Achim: it’s a small community but there’s a lot of good work that can be done here, and a lot of good people in the community with a lot of good skills and talents and who are good at organizing. We’re excited to try to do things to reach out to the broader community, and to reach out within our community.”

While Hadassah teaches at the Yeshiva K’tana elementary school in Waterbury, the rabbi organizes regular classes at the synagogue and has helped revitalize the once-thriving local chapter of NCSY (formerly National Council of Synagogue Youth). He is one of three local rabbis responsible for the Bridgeport and Fairfield eruvim.

Moldovan infuses his work with Mussar, the ancient Jewish tradition of character development that he has practiced over the last decade.

“In yeshiva, I was exposed to different methods of learning and approaching Judaism and Mussar is what spoke to me the most in terms of my service of HaShem,” Moldovan says. “The idea is to get all your different attributes in balance and be in control of each attribute and know when to use each attribute.”

For Moldovan, Mussar is a key to a meaningful Jewish life.

“People think that Judaism is just about ‘The book says do this, don’t do this,’ but I try to make them aware that the idea of perfecting your character traits is just as important a part of Judaism and maybe even more important,” he says. “Once you have that under wraps, once you can control that a bit, it makes it so much easier and so much more fulfilling to do all the other things that you have to do in life and in Judaism.”