NEW YORK — Yossi Farro, a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, was walking down a street in Los Angeles in the fall of 2022 when he saw a production company filming a TV show.
He started asking those at the scene if they were Jewish. Farro, 18 at the time, had been wrapping phylacteries for strangers on the street since his bar mitzvah, a common form of Jewish outreach for youths affiliated with Chabad.
“I finally find a Jew in an alleyway, ask him if he wants to do tefillin. He agrees, we do tefillin together, take a picture,” Farro said in an interview, using the Hebrew word for the small black boxes observant Jews bind to their head and arm on weekdays, saying a prayer and fulfilling a commandment from Deuteronomy.
As Farro was walking away, the man asked him if he knew who Lil Dicky was.
“He’s like, ‘That’s me,’” Farro said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, cool.’ Walked away, Googled his name, realized he was a famous rapper.”
Farro had opened his first social media accounts earlier that week and posted the photo on Instagram and Twitter. The picture gained some traction in Jewish circles, he said.
The chance encounter marked the first instance of Farro’s mission to put tefillin on Jewish celebrities around the US, an effort he hopes will inspire other Jews to do mitzvahs, or religious commandments. Farro estimates he has put tefillin on thousands of people since his bar mitzvah.
Farro is originally from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, the home base of the Chabad movement, and was studying at a yeshiva in Los Angeles at the time of the run-in with Lil Dicky. He also studied in yeshivas in New York and Israel, and now serves as an assistant rabbi at the Chabad Russian Center of South Florida, in Miami.
The Lil Dicky incident was only his first chance encounter in the city’s celebrity stomping grounds.
Weeks later, he was........