Who he actually is
Rabbi Tzvi Yoel — Harry Rozenberg
People ask what a rabbi is doing leading a party about plant medicine. The answer is a chain of teachers, and it is worth setting out in full, because in this world a man is not his opinions — he is who he learned from.
Before any of it
Born and raised in Jamaica, Queens, New York, and educated at the local public school, PS 178. He did not grow up in this. He came to observance later in life, by choice rather than by inheritance, which is a different kind of knowing and he has never pretended otherwise. He made aliyah in 2013 and lives in Jerusalem with his wife and their four children.
The chain
He is a talmid of Rav Dovid Ostroff, himself a talmid muvhak of Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach — which places his halachic grounding in the house of the posek who shaped more of contemporary Jewish law than almost anyone of his century. His rebbe is the Turka Rav, the Admor Rav Dovid Weinberger. His beis din is headed by a son of the Pshevorsk Rebbe of Antwerp, sitting with Rabbi David Wolkinson, a descendant of the Baal Shem Tov, and Rabbi Shlomo Yaakov Leifer, a direct male descendant of the Rebbe of Premishlan. He learns under Rav Kessin of Brooklyn, a talmid muvhak of the Ribnitzer Rebbe, which puts his kabbalah squarely in the school of the Ramchal rather than in anything invented recently.
The chassidic lines run through Breslov as well, through Rebbe Nachman. And through his father, who was a healer, he had a close relationship with the late Sanz-Zhviller Rebbe, Rabbi Shlomo Goldman of Union City, at the Klausenberg bungalow colony. That is not a name-drop. A boy who spends summers near a rebbe learns something that no yeshiva schedule produces.
Family tradition traces his own line to the Vilna Gaon. We put that on the page as a claim of tradition, which is what it is, and not as a credential.
The letter that was never delivered
The students of the Vilna Gaon wrote to the ten lost tribes. The letter was never delivered. Two centuries later a descendant of the Gaon carried it — which sounds like a story until you look at what he built afterwards: iTribe, and a mapping of some thirty thousand villages across Afghanistan that he identifies with the House of Israel.
To be straight with you: the thesis that the Pashtun peoples descend from the ten tribes is argued by some and rejected by many researchers, who say the linguistic and genetic evidence is not there. We are not going to tell you it is settled. We will tell you that he did the work, that the mapping exists, and that a question nobody is willing to ask stays unanswered forever.
The work, before the politics
He has spent close to two decades on psychedelic medicine and on the legal frameworks that decide whether a suffering person can actually reach it. He is a co-founder of Trippy.vc, a psychedelic-medicine DAO governed on-chain by its members rather than by a general partner, whose holdings include PsyRx — the Israeli company developing an ibogaine-based treatment for treatment-resistant depression, chaired by a former Deputy Director-General of the Ministry of Health and traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
Before and alongside that, he built ventures in Jewish education, in addiction and rehabilitation, and in sustainable agriculture, and founded iTribe — the distributed civic layer the diaspora plan runs on. The pattern is consistent enough to be a method: find the thing that is blocked, and build the structure that unblocks it.
Nothing on this website offers or solicits any security, token, NFT, share or investment. If you want to know about Trippy.vc, go to Trippy.vc.
Why a rabbi is running on this
Because the medicine question is a Torah question before it is a policy question. Because קְנֵה בֹשֶׂם sits in the middle of the holiest recipe in the book and nobody in authority wants to discuss it. Because he has spent close to two decades on the legal frameworks that let a suffering person actually reach treatment, and watched those frameworks fail people he knew. In his own words: Judaism is not afraid of knowledge, of science, or of healing.
He has never served in the IDF. He says so himself, on his own website, before anyone else can say it for him.