From the streets of Los Angeles to the White House, a Chabad emissary has quietly become the go-to tefillin wrapper for Hollywood stars, hedge fund titans, and tech moguls — one serendipitous encounter at a time.

In an era when antisemitism is surging and Jewish identity is increasingly contested on the global stage, Yossi Farro has chosen an ancient answer: a small black leather box, a set of straps, and a willingness to walk up to anyone.

Farro, a Chabad emissary who once described himself as “an average Chabad guy,” has become something far more unexpected: the de facto celebrity tefillin wrapper of his generation. His roster reads like a collision of Hollywood, Wall Street, and Washington — James Franco, Jeremy Piven, Michael Rappaport, Jared Kushner, hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, Palantir co-founder Joseph Lonsdale, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein, influencers Aiden Ross and the Nelk Boys, and nightlife mogul Dave Grutman, among others.

I sat down with Farro at the ADL’s Never Is Now conference — the world’s largest summit on antisemitism and hate — to understand how a young Chabadnik from LA quietly built one of the most unusual outreach operations in modern Jewish life.

Courtesy Aaron Herman

‘It Really Just Flows’

Ask Farro about his methodology and he laughs. “To be honest, it really just flows,” he told me. “I wasn’t like, sitting down with a master plan.”

The origin story is almost comically casual. Walking the streets of Los Angeles, he happened to cross paths with David Burd — better known as rapper and comedian Lil Dicky — and offered to wrap tefillin on the spot. It worked. Then came James Franco. Then Jeremy Piven. Each encounter opened a door to the next.

The White House came via Instagram DMs. Joseph Lonsdale of Palantir came after months of persistent Twitter comments. Harley Finkelstein of Shopify came after a campaign of Shabbat Shalom messages until Farro spotted him in New York and seized the moment. “Literally, every single person is another story,” he said.

The Bill Ackman Moment

When I asked Farro which wrap moved him most, he didn’t hesitate: Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard activist who became one of the most prominent Jewish voices in America following October 7.

“It was his first time ever wrapping tefillin — at the age of 58,” Farro recalled. “He got very emotional at the end when I spoke about his father, and how his father’s looking down from heaven, shlepping nachas. It was a really beautiful, beautiful experience.”

This is where Farro’s gift becomes clear. He doesn’t just place tefillin on someone’s arm and move on. He knows who these people are. He knows their stories. He finds the thread that connects a 58-year-old billionaire to his late father, and he pulls it gently.

Pro-Semitism as an Antidote

I put it to Farro that what he’s doing is almost a counterterrorism operation in spiritual clothing. In a moment when antisemitism is setting records — the very crisis that brought thousands to the Never Is Now conference — he’s out here manufacturing Jewish pride publicly, visibly, joyfully. He liked that framing.

“With the rise of antisemitism, we need more pro-Semitism,” I offered. “Jewish joy and resilience — and that’s kind of your sweet spot.” He agreed completely.

Farro has in recent years expanded his platform beyond tefillin. He is now active on LinkedIn, where he spotlights the most accomplished Jews in American business and culture — hedge fund managers, NBA team owners, tech executives — with the explicit goal of showing the next generation of Jewish kids that success at the highest levels is attainable.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the most successful Jews in the world,” he told me. “Platforming them and showing them to the world will show the next generation of Jews that this is attainable — that people in our community who started out in yeshivas made it to the biggest hedge funds, to NBA ownership, to the top of tech.”

Hunting Every Jew Down with Love

Farro grounds his approach in a teaching he credits to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: the Nazis hunted down every Jew with hate, so Chabad’s mission is to hunt every Jew down with love. It is a haunting formulation, but in Farro’s hands it becomes something warm.

He tells a story that illustrates this better than any philosophy. At 14, he approached a shop owner on the street and asked if he was Jewish. The man denied it. Farro came back week after week. Months later, he was walking the neighborhood when a man stopped him — an older man who said he put on tefillin every day but had missed it that morning. They went together to a nearby shop. When they arrived, the store owner recognized Farro and flushed with embarrassment: it was the same man who had denied his Jewishness. The older man was his father.

In the seven years since, Farro has wrapped tefillin with that son over 100 times. They have become close friends.

The Talmudic principle of mitzvah goreret mitzvah — one good deed leads to another — is not an abstraction for Farro. It is his operating model. The tefillin wrapping opens a conversation. The conversation opens a relationship. The relationship opens a door to Shabbat, to tzedakah, to learning, to something the person didn’t know they were missing.

I asked him who was left on the list. He grinned.

“Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Timothée Chalamet, Adam Sandler — and possibly even Drake would be pretty awesome.”

And his ultimate goal?

“Obviously, my goal is to bring Mashiach, God willing.”

He said it deadpan. But he also meant it.

You can find Yossi Farro on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter under Yossi Farro or Farro Yossi. 

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)