Doc Paskowitz in Surfwise. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

“Hello? Lindsey? Are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

Thirty seconds pass as I hold the phone to my ear.

“Lindsey, don’t go away now.”

“No rush, I’m here.”

This went on for about 10 minutes as Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz combed his home for Eddie Rothman’s phone number.

Why was I looking for Eddie Rothman’s phone number, and why was I dumb enough not to talk with Dorian himself while I had him on the line? I was blinded by an interview with Jewish pro surfer Makua Kai Rothman that I had in sight. And he sounded like a simple, sweet grandfather like yours or mine. Well, he is a sweet grandfather. But his story goes way further than that.

Once I took a sneak peek at an un-cut version of the documentary Surfwise, at select theaters now, about the legendary Paskowitz surfing family, I realized that Dorian is unlike any other Jewish grandfather. He’s unlike any other person—period.

So how did this crazy quest begin, and why did I end up on the phone with the man who brought surfing to Israel? Let’s back up. Dorian Paskowitz was in the news not too long ago for taking a group of surfers to donate surfboards to Palestinian surfers in Gaza. I thought the Paskowitz Family Surf School was a good place to start on my quest for a cool Jewish surfer to feature in JVibe (look for Makua on the cover of our July/August issue).

Dorian’s son Izzy, who runs the surf school, recommended I check out Makua Kai Rothman. Izzy passed me along to his dad to get the scoop. So when I called up Dorian that morning and politely stated my odd purpose, he was unsurprised and unmolested by my call, even though he was on his cell phone at the beach.

He can’t be surfing, I thought. He can’t be.

Sure enough, if you watch Surfwise, you’ll learn that Dorian, who is now 86, still surfs every single day. By the end of the documentary, I suppose that’s one of the least surprising facts you’ll learn.

Dorian couldn’t tell me enough about this young Jewish-Hawaiian surfer. He wanted me to understand just how impressive this fine young man was before I got his father, Eddie Rothman (a legend in his own right), to guilt-trip him into an interview. Turns out Makua didn’t need a guilt trip, but that’s another story you’ll have to subscribe to JVibe to hear!

Back to Dr. Paskowitz and this crazy documentary: Whether you agree with everything “Doc” does or not, you can’t help but be fascinated by a man who quit his life as a Stanford-educated doctor to travel to Israel and teach the locals to surf (and a few other unmentionable things), and then get married and raise his nine children in a 24-foot camper. As Dorian and his wife, Juliette, traveled from one random coastal place to another, they taught their eight sons and one daughter to become surfing champions, though not conventionally educated youth.

I will warn our younger readers that if you check out this film on the Paskowitz clan, you risk seeing unwanted nudity, hearing Doc talk way more about sex than your precious ears care to hear and probably a few other pieces of footage that will surprise or even shock you. So get the OK from your parents first.

When I spoke to Dorian again the other day to thank him for connecting me with Makua, he said, “I’m so proud to be his friend.” He also said he’d have to make me into some Yiddish word that went over my head. In short: “He needs to meet a Jewish girl.” I could hear his wife, Juliette, in the background, and momentarily forgot that I was not talking to my own matchmaker bubbe and zayde. Dorian is a deeply feeling individual who has many sides and some crystal-clear agendas.

Maybe his own children did jump off the roof of their camper with no attention given to their resulting injuries, ate whatever they could find—fish with the bones and all—and maybe they were never all fully clothed at one time. But who says having oodles of designer clothing or Tiffany jewelry is healthy either?

The Paskowitz children had nothing that resembled an ordinary life. Dorian had his own vision that involved replicating the breeding habits of zoo animals. Do they think their father’s methods were flawed? Yes. Would they trade their childhood for anything? Absolutely not. One of the many ways to describe Dorian Paskowitz is as a devout Jew who led his children in weekly Shabbat observance and who was forever trying to instill a sense of suffering into his family in an attempt to understand the atrocities our people endured.

When I asked Dorian if he had a message for JVibe readers, he hesitated, not wanting to seem self-serving, before telling me about his book, Surfing and Health, which readers can find on alohadoc.com. Then he said: “Always remember the real Jews today are in the Israeli army getting shot at, and they are part of a legacy of whole families that work so hard. We must, as Diaspora Jews, especially young Jews … spend part of our time in Israel.

“If I want to be really proud of my own teenage child or grandchild,” he went on, “the thing that would make me most proud is not that they put on t’fillin or fast on Yom Kippur, but every day of their lives remember the Holocaust. If they celebrate the life of one person that was murdered by Hitler: one boy, one girl, one child, one mother, one father, and say, ‘Today I celebrate the life of Moshe Goldberg and tomorrow, Levy Horowitz.’ Take just one person each day. It would take 10,000 years to celebrate the lives of all the people Hitler killed.”

That’s a pretty heavy message. “Maybe I didn’t do it all,” he says, but at least thinking about doing these things is what counts. Dorian is currently trying to form a group of young surfers, or young anybody, really, to visit the thousands of aging Holocaust survivors in Israel. If anyone is interested in his project, please contact me.

Is Dr. Paskowitz planning to watch Surfwise? “No.” Should you? I expect the streamlined 93-minute version will be easier to stomach, but what’s most important to learn from this man? “Be Jewish, be proud of being Jewish, be empowered, uplifted, inspired.”

Lindsey Silken is editor-in-chief of JVibe and has never surfed, but is a big fan of anyone who does.