In a podcast interview, Rabbi Uri Perlman, founder and director of the Wilkes Yeshiva, now based in Canadensis, Pennsylvania, shares his own journey from a struggling teenager to the head of a yeshiva built around treating bochurim the way a Chabad house treats its guests.

Rabbi Perlman grew up in Kingston, a small town outside Wilkes-Barre, where his father served as the local shliach, ran the mikvah, and occasionally filled in as rabbi. “It wasn’t this strong identity of a Chabad House; we were just a family in town, low-key,” he recalls.

As a teenager, he began wrestling with questions of identity and belief, a struggle that deepened when he went away for high school in Los Angeles.

R’ Uri describes the disconnect he felt there as mostly religious rather than social. When he asked to spend his day learning seriously alongside older bochurim instead of sitting through secular studies he had already mastered, he was turned down and threatened with expulsion if he pushed the issue.

“Sincere wanting more and better and authentic was met with, ‘How dare you question the way we do things?'” he says.

The experience pushed him further away, and after three difficult years he left yeshiva altogether, drifting for a period through Boston and elsewhere.

A turning point came when he enrolled in a yeshiva in Melbourne, Australia, under Rosh Yeshiva Rabbi Binyomin Cohen. Placed in an environment that gave him space instead of scrutiny, he began learning seriously. That year in Melbourne, he says, became the single biggest influence on how he would later run his own yeshiva.

At twenty-two, while still a bochur himself, Rabbi Perlman started what would become the Wilkes Yeshiva with seven students, in the same small Pennsylvania town where his parents were shluchim. He had intended it only as a pilot, expecting established mechanchim to take over once he proved bochurim who didn’t fit the standard mold could succeed.

His mashpia told him otherwise. “No one else is going to do it, so do it. You have to keep doing it.”And he did, despite having little interest in management and administration.

During those years, the bochurim became visible assets to the town, leading the bochurim to feel productive and successful. One of the first major donors, a doctor unaffiliated with the community, gifted a building after watching a group of the yeshiva’s bochurim rollerblading down the street in their tzitzis.

Rabbi Perlman describes the core philosophy behind the yeshiva as an extension of the Chabad house model as applied to chinuch itself. “Start treating the bochurim as your community; make their life your priority,” he says of how mainstream yeshivos should operate.

Structure and standards, while necessary, should never be the point in themselves. “It’s not order versus chaos,” he explains. “Is there order so that the bochurim can be better people or so that the hanhala can sleep better at night?”

He cites internal data tracking of many bochurim who don’t make it through yeshiva, and argues that even among those who do, many are merely surviving rather than genuinely engaged.

Rabbi Perlman describes how his great-grandfather, the renowned mashpia Reb Shilem Kuratin, came to Lubavitch as a boy from a secular gymnasium dressed in shorts. Lacking background, he was driven simply by a search for truth.

He closes by pointing to what he sees as the real obstacle facing mainstream yeshivos: not indifference, but fear of criticism and judgment from parents. Still, he remains hopeful that reality will force change.

“People don’t want to suffer themselves, they don’t want to watch their kids suffer, they don’t want to watch their students suffer,” he says. “We tell ourselves stories to push off the reckoning, but it’s going to come.”

The podcast was conducted by Homesick for Lubavitch.

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