Insta-dram! The rabbi with a VERY neat side hustle

RABBI Amir Ellituv was at his nephew’s bar mitzvah when, as his wife Tova remembers, “a friend of my brother-in-law came over, saw him holding a bottle of whisky and excitedly asked, ‘Are you @whiskyrabbi, from Instagram?’”

Indeed, he was for, as well as leading a 450-strong Sephardi community (the one I’ve attended since childhood) in Manchester, our rabbi, 46, and a father of six, has another gig, as a whisky enthusiast.

And he is not alone in having a “side hustle”. While out shopping for Shabbat last month, the shop owner bounded over to say, “Please tell Tova, my wife will not buy anybody else’s cookies but hers,” referring to his wife Tova’s custom- order kosher cookies, as featured on her own Instagram account, @sprinklesonmyfloor.

Between them, this rabbinical duo, married for 24 years, have more than 10,000 followers and, when you attend their home as I did recently to collect my son from his bar mitzvah lesson, you might find yourself offered a sip from the latest bottle the rabbi has been sent from a distillery keen to tap into his audience and £18 lighter for picking up a box of his wife’s decorated cookies. While influencer rabbis, who disseminate Jewish teachings online, is more of a “thing” in the US, each attracting tens of thousands of observant and interested followers, that Britain’s Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis has just 22,600 followers on the site tells me what a unique situation I find myself in belonging to a synagogue – Manchester’s Shaare Hayim – where the shul’s own instagram page boasts it’s “Home of @sprinklesonmyfloor and @whiskyrabbi.”

It is, we agree, a fun, engaging and savvy way of being modern clergy.

“If it was a cool crowd, at a wedding or a lunch, I used to end speeches saying, ‘Don’t forget to follow @whiskyrabbi’, which always got a smile,” says Rabbi Amir, whose study ceiling is covered with the stuck-on caps of tubular whisky cartons.

People connect with you differently because you have more than 7,000 followers, especially young people

“People view and connect with you very differently because you have over 7,000 followers, especially young people. Being where they are and talking about the same things is important. It’s about relatability.”

Tova, 44, agrees: “A lot of people from the community are able to connect with us outside synagogue. I’m not going to come into shul and start talking about the Shema but they might want to talk about the Bake Off with me or the Harry Potter cookies I posted on Instagram.”

Rabbi Amir, who began rabbinical duties in his early twenties, launched his page in 2017. A whisky buff who likes the taste “but never gets sloshed”, he decided it would be a place for his hobby, first, and began charting family visits to distilleries or photographing new bottles against nature landscapes where he’d go to take a moment’s pause from the business of running and caring for a community. He quickly found that not only were his own congregants happily surprised to find him on Instagram, enthusing the leathery notes of a new dram paired with occasional rabbinical reflections, he built an online community too, of Jewish and non-Jewish whisky fans, adding to his bio: “Bringing world peace 1 bottle at a time.”

Tova, meanwhile – a chemical engineering graduate who at first baked simply as a hobby – launched her page in 2018, alongside more typical rebetzen duties such as hosting 25 for Shabbat dinner. It was her niece who spotted that she was collating baking ideas on Pinterest and might want to post them on Instagram.

She started out in competition for followers with her husband but with 2,700 now, compared to his 7,400, she says: “I gave up on the competitive part when he overtook me!

“I set up @sprinklesonmyfloor as a baking account and, in the early days, I’d upload pictures of colourful breakfast bowls I made too.”

She was asked to bake cookies for her grand nephew’s upsherin, then for a wedding anniversary.

When she uploaded images, messages came in for more orders and, after the pandemic “when everyone went back to school and I had more time”, she gave it a try having never previously contemplated turning it into a business.

“I like creating,” says Tova, who does Chanukah, Rosh Hashanah and Purim boxes, and themed orders for bar and bat mitzvahs with cookies from £4 each.

“I try to keep that work to the first half of the week so I have Thursday and Friday to get ready for Shabbat.”

Her page jumps on social media music trends and hashtags; the majority of her followers are Jewish with “a few non-Jewish biscuit makers”. While their shul community was closer than ever after October 7, both felt a shift in their online communities, not least because Rabbi Amir posted pictures praying for their eldest son, who has been serving as a lone soldier with the IDF.

For the hundreds of greetings his emotional posts received, there were hateful ones too and a circle of whisky fans he had been part of and drawn a lot of joy from online stopped supporting his posts, instead meeting them with silence.

Rabbi Amir says: “Post October 7, my account has had a different purpose, in Israel advocacy too. As parents of a lone soldier, this was the hardest year of our lives and I hardly drank whisky; if I’m stressed I don’t touch a drop. But I did post about my prayers for my son.” The 20-year-old was among the first rescuers into kibbutzes after the October 7 attacks. Rabbi Amir now puts a yellow ribbon on each whisky post, which, he says, had consequences: “I lost a lot of non-Jewish followers and gained a lot of Jewish ones.”

Tova adds: “I left one baking group because it felt hostile; a couple of members reached out but if I posted anything they stopped liking or commenting.”

Baking, meanwhile, became a welcome escape. “I have learned to curate what I see on Instagram; if you’re very careful, you can make sure you see only nice things.”

In real life, among their extended Jewish community, it is a different story.

“Now, after quite a few years of @whiskyrabbi, I’m sometimes treated like a mini celebrity in our world. I have people coming up to me raving about the account,” says Amir. Perhaps the impact of having an insta-rabbi on a congregration is best left to the bar mitzvah boy who arrives for his lesson after my son’s. ”What do you think of my Instagram page?” asks Rabbi Amir.

“It’s pretty cool, isn’t it?” he replies.