[1] Waldoks was born on July 17, 1949, in Toledo, Ohio to Holocaust survivors who arrived from displaced person’s camps surrounding Munich two weeks earlier.

His father Yidel, a native of the Vohlynia, Western Ukraine city of Lutzk and its environs, was a sole survivor of a large nuclear and extended family.

In 1985, Waldoks visited the former Soviet Union to connect with Jewish “refusniks" who were held back from leaving the country for a variety of reasons, security and otherwise.

This trip, sponsored by the ADL, was a groundbreaking opportunity to assess the situation of Jewish-Catholic relations in Poland that had hardly been influenced by the Vatican II encyclicals Nostra Aetate of 1965, when Pope John XXIII provided the most inclusive statement of the Church and the Jews.

In 1989 and 1990 Waldoks was instrumental in helping to convene the first Jewish-Tibetan Dialogue with the Dalai Lama, first in the New York area and in the following year at the seat of the Tibetan government in Exile in Dharamsala, India.

[4] In 1998, he took on the transformation of a moribund synagogue, Temple Beth Zion, in Brookline, Massachusetts and was successful over the next 21 years in creating a community rebranded as TBZ, of which he became founding rabbi, serving on a part-time basis.