Having grown up in a non-observant family, Rabbi Ze’ev Smason told JNS that his path to being elected vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values last month was “somewhat unusual.”
The Los Angeles native was raised with “very strong Jewish values” and had a “perfunctory bar mitzvah.” The family didn’t keep kosher, but he was taught to be a proud Jew and Zionist.
“It was a spark—that was the ember that was there that I always carried with me,” he told JNS.
The coalition, which represents 2,500 Orthodox rabbis, “promotes classical Jewish principles in public policy,” per its website. It also regards “Jewish values as those learned from biblical and rabbinic teachings through millennia of Jewish history” and believes “that those values still guide us today.”
Smason told JNS that it is a “tremendous honor” to succeed the late Rabbi Dov Fischer, whom he called a friend, colleague and mentor. “Those are shoes that I could never begin to imagine to fill,” he said.
A graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, with a degree in political science and government, Smason planned to go to law school but decided he wanted something more out of life, he told JNS.
That turned out to be backpacking around the world during a three-month stretch and a four-month period over the span of two years. His itinerary included Australia, New Zealand, Quebec, Europe and the northeast United States.
“I didn’t know where to find what I was looking for, but I thought that breaking away from my routine and comfortable life in Southern California to travel the world might enable me, somehow, to find the answer or answers to the spiritual emptiness I was feeling,” he said.
While backpacking in Europe one winter, he heard that those in their 20s, like he, could do well on a kibbutz in Israel, where they could work on a farm, meet people their age and enjoy better weather.
He found his way to a kibbutz. After he was there for a month, a woman advised him to visit a nearby yeshivah.
“I became absolutely fascinated with the awareness that there was such a depth and a richness to Judaism that I had never been exposed to when I was younger,” he said.
Smason told JNS that “when I saw that there was relevance and meaning, I decided that I owed it to myself to find out what it meant to be Jewish and what being Jewish was about.”
He initially went to the yeshiva for a week before heading back to the United States for nine months. Then he decided to go back to the yeshiva for a year to “intensively” study traditional Judaism.
“I decided that the world needed, perhaps, another rabbi with my background rather than another good Jewish attorney,” Smason told JNS. “There’s a lot of great Jewish attorneys out there, and we need all of them, but I felt that I was positioned to be able to offer something unique.”
Limited backgrounds
Smason stayed in Israel for eight years. There, he met his wife, Chani Siegel, a Chicago native. They moved to St. Louis, where Smason taught adults about Judaism for a decade at Aish HaTorah as the local branch’s associate director.
“Known in Hebrew as ‘kiruv,’ often translated as ‘outreach’ but literally meaning ‘to bring close,’” his LinkedIn profile states, of his time at Aish. “Bringing my fellow Jewish brothers and sisters closer to their Jewish heritage and to God.”
Smason also served as the spiritual leader of Nusach Hari B’nai Zion, a Modern Orthodox congregation in St. Louis, for 24 years. “Many or most of the individuals who attended and eventually joined the synagogue during my tenure came from limited Jewish educational and religious backgrounds,” per his LinkedIn.
“Our orientation at the synagogue was that the goal was to accept people’s level and degree of observance where they ‘were at,’ while encouraging them to grow spiritually and religiously to become better Jews,” it adds.
“I don’t know many Jews who, when asked, state that they would like to become Orthodox,” Smason said, per a quote attributed to him on the synagogue site. “I do know many Jews, however, who want to grow and to become better Jews. Such people will be met with a very warm welcome at Nusach Hari B’nai Zion.”
‘Alphabet soup’
The rabbi told JNS that toward the end of his tenure at the synagogue, he learned of the newly formed Coalition for Jewish Values and found its mix of Orthodox rabbis with varying views, but who agreed on the importance of advocating for traditional Jewish values from a policy perspective, “intriguing.”
He also thought it was giving “voice to a voice that often is not heard in the Jewish world, in the alphabet soup of Jewish organizations and with many Jews—American Jews and Jews outside of Israel, and even within Israel—having, shall I say, more progressive values that are not aligned with traditional Judaism.”
“I felt that it was filling a need that wasn’t being met,” he said.
Fischer introduced Smason to Rabbi Pesach Lerner, president emeritus of the coalition, and to Rabbi Yaakov Menken, its founding chief executive, and recommended to them that Smason be considered for a role as an officer of the coalition.
“I was interviewed, and for some inexplicable reason, they took me in,” Smason told JNS. He added that he felt “a little bit like a ball boy who is on the court with Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.”
Smason became the coalition’s Midwest regional vice president and opened its first state chapter, in Missouri, which he chaired.
In that role, Smason testified “on behalf of legislation that reflected traditional Jewish values, which many legislators found to be a breath of fresh air,” he told JNS. That included bills fighting antisemitism and security grants for Jewish institutions and other private institutions, he said.
In his new role as vice president, he hopes to create more CJV state chapters, as he said that, based on what the organization has seen with its chapters in Missouri and Indiana, “there’s been a high degree of impact and effectiveness from state chapters in ways” that “just couldn’t have happened with only a national organization.”
He added that many people believe that the country, or parts of the country, have “strayed” from its Judeo-Christian principles.
“Us being able to influence public policy, not simply for the sake of the Jewish people but for the benefit of and our responsibility as citizens of this country, to be able to support the values of this great country in which we live, it’s a very positive contribution,” he said.
‘A spiritual crisis’
Asked about unique challenges facing the St. Louis Jewish community, Smason cited findings of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis that the number of Jews in the city declined from around 61,100 in 2014 to 45,800 in 2024—a drop of around 25%.
Smason said that reflects national changes. Pew Research Center has charted what it calls the rise of the “nones,” that is people who don’t identify with a particular faith or religious group. Many self-identify as spiritual but not religious.
“Individuals are disaffiliating with Judaism, their Jewish identity is being lost, and the numbers are dropping precipitously,” Smason told JNS.
“We look at it as a spiritual crisis—the disappearance of Jews who no longer feel a connection to Judaism to the point that they no longer identify as being Jewish,” he said.
One solution is to “let my people know,” he said, through Jewish education that focuses on providing an answer to the question, “Why be Jewish?” that makes them “feel pride in being Jewish.”
“We, I think, generally speaking in America over the past 15, 20 years—maybe even longer—have not done as good a job as we can, and now we’re seeing the chickens come home to roost,” he said. “The disappearing number of Jews.”
The major challenge for the Jewish community outside of Israel, he thinks, is “instilling pride in Jews, in being Jewish, regardless of their level of religiosity or observance, and informing them about the beauty and the joy and the importance of being connected to the Jewish people.”
To that end, Smason has penned a weekly newsletter titled Spiritual Sparks since July. His columns are short reads on universal topics, like love, purpose and having a good heart, he said.
“I write in a way that I remove a lot of the Jewish jargon that might be off-putting to someone who thinks, ‘Ah, this is just another sales pitch for Orthodox Judaism,’” he told JNS.
Beyond disappearing Jews in St. Louis, Smason told JNS that antisemitism has increased in the city, as it has elsewhere, since Oct. 7.
“There are agitators, and there’s been attacks on Jewish property and cars that have burned, and there have been antisemitic rallies and various things that have been shared in print and on social media,” he said. “And it’s a problem.”
But there is a “very strong infrastructure within the St. Louis Jewish community” to fight antisemitism, he thinks. And a “very wide coalition” that represented people across denominations and political backgrounds succeeded in voting Cori Bush, a former Missouri congresswoman and member of the far-left squad, out of office, according to Smason.
Smason didn’t name Bush, but said that the representative in question was “stoking the fires of antisemitism by claiming that Israel is committing acts of genocide.”
Wesley Bell, a St. Louis county prosecutor whom AIPAC backed, defeated Bush in the Democratic primary in August 2024 by about 5.5 points.
“Now we have a person who’s much more friendly—and in fact, is friendly—to the Jewish community,” Smason told JNS.
