His calling: Wrapping the Jewish rich and famous — and Jake Paul — in tefillin

By Louis Keene
February 13, 2025

It sounds like a Jewish improv setup: A Chabad guy asks Larry David to lay tefillin.

But this was real life, and the Lubavitcher, a 21-year-old self-starter named Yossi Farro, was asking in front of a crowd of thousands of people.

In characteristic Curb Your Enthusiasm fashion, David demurred — once he was done laughing.

“I’m trying to think of the amount of money it would take for me to do that,” was his reply. 

Asking Larry David if he’s ever wrapped Tefflin! pic.twitter.com/RSHpgDD66Q

— Yossi Farro (@FarroYossi) December 6, 2024

Farro may have fallen short — so far — in his quest to defrock the high priest of Jewish secularism. But in a way, whether Larry David actually wrapped tefillin was besides the point. Video of the exchange received thousands of likes on social media, building Farro’s profile and getting him that much closer to hooking his next big fish. And Farro, whose pluck is as much a Chabad trademark as his overgrown red beard, was hardly discouraged by the response.

“I take it as a challenge,” he told me in an interview.

Approaching strangers to invite them to put on tefillin — having confirmed they’re Jewish first — is a familiar Chabad hustle, rooted in an imperative from the late Chabad leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson to engage non-practicing Jews in religious observance.

Farro has adapted this form of outreach to the age of social media. Styling himself a media personality, he wraps the Jewish rich and famous, riding a wave of national spirit during a fraught moment for Jewish identity.

This week he wrapped Jake Paul, the YouTuber-turned-boxer. “We just celebrated his bar mitzvah!” Farro tweeted afterward. He’d previously enlisted the actor Jeremy Piven and the music mogul Scooter Braun in the mitzvah, and countless others, with more in mind. If your name appeared in Adam Sandler’s Hanukkah song, or if you’re Sandler himself, you’re probably in Farro’s sights.

The tefillin practice dates back to the 1960s, when Schneerson included it in a list of 10 commandments the movement’s followers should help other Jews observe. Farro interprets the Talmud to say that a Jewish man who never wore tefillin is inadmissible to heaven; on the plus side, he added, every fulfilled commandment hastens the arrival of the Messiah.

As a teen growing up in Crown Heights, Farro learned the hustle in shopping malls, office buildings, and public high schools. He didn’t have a notion of building a personal brand around it and — to hear him tell it — his first celebrity tefillin wrap was unplanned.

A television show was filming near his yeshiva in Los Angeles, and Farro decided to scope it out.

“I saw a dude in an alleyway,” Farro told me. He asked the man if he was Jewish (he was) and whether he wanted to wrap tefillin (“why not?”). After they wrapped, saying the blessing on each box followed by the Shema prayer, the man asked Farro if he was familiar with Lil Dicky. Farro said yes — though he wasn’t sure. He had just wrapped him.

Farro posted a picture of his encounter with the rapper and Dave star, and it got traction in the Jewish world. A few weeks later, a similar story unfolded with James Franco. (“I met James Franco on the street.”) Farro had found his calling.

Celebrity mitzvahs aren’t worth more, but Farro believes they can act as a force multiplier when his roughly 30,000 followers see them on Instagram. “When an Adin Ross of the world, when a Bill Ackman, when a Joe Lonsdale puts on tefillin,” he said, naming a few of his recent catches, “it inspires millions of Jews to reconnect. I get messages all day: ‘Hey, I saw Jake Paul, I saw Adin Ross putting on tefillin. It inspired me to take out my tefillin bag and put it on.’”

Farro, who by day interns for Chabad Russian Center, a synagogue in Sunny Isles, Florida, has posted his support of Republican elected officials and amplified their talking points. And he gravitates toward figures in the right-wing media sphere, like Aaron Steinberg of the Nelk Boys, though he’s less comfortable talking about it. “To be honest, I’m not a huge political guy,” Farro said. “It just happens to be a lot of people I wrap tefillin with that happen to support Mr. Trump.”

But nothing raised more eyebrows than the Jake Paul photo, because Chabad holds that only matrilineal Jews are obligated to abide by the Torah, and Paul’s Jewish ancestry appears to begin with his mother’s grandfather, whose wife does not appear to have been Jewish. At least one Chabad rabbi commenting on the post called on Farro to take it down. But many others cheered Farro on, and the post remained.

“The fact that he told me that his mother’s mother’s mother was Jewish, I am safe to assume that he’s Jewish,” Farro explained.

He was similarly undeterred by Paul telling him he was Christian. “A Jew could convert to Christianity,” Farro told me, “but he’s always a Jew, know what I’m saying?”

Anyway, he’s moved onto the next star cluster. I asked him who else he hoped to entwine. He named Jerry Seinfeld, David Schwimmer and Mark Zuckerberg. And then, of course, there’s Larry David.

“I think I’ll get him, God willing,” Farro said.

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