A side of Rav Yitzchok Scheiner ztz”l that many never knew

Rav Yitzchok Scheiner, the rosh yeshivah who went from a public high school senior in the 1930s to become the torchbearer of the great Kamenitz tradition, never kept his personal story a secret.

Rav Scheiner, who passed away last year at age 98, would often mention how one day in 1937, Rabbi Avraham Bender — a menahel of the Slonimer yeshivah in Poland turned emissary of New York’s Yeshivas Rabbeinu Yitzchok Elchanan — came to Pittsburgh and stayed with the Scheiners, Polish immigrants whose kashrus he trusted. There he met their teenaged son Isadore, who has just graduated from Peabody High School and was planning on going to college to study mathematics.

Born in 1922, Isadore was a regular American kid — an avowed baseball fan with an aptitude for math. His religious parents sent him by trolley car to an after-school Talmud Torah, but by the time he graduated high school, he was well on the way to vanishing into the great American melting pot.

But that didn’t deter Rabbi Bender, who, turning to his host, asked, “Why don’t you send your son to yeshivah?”

Mr. Scheiner, who didn’t know that there even were yeshivos in America, agreed to let his only son accompany Rabbi Bender to the yeshivah in New York.

Sixteen-year-old Yitzchok, as he became known then, joined Rav Moshe Aharon Poleyeff’s shiur in RIETS, and took to his learning with gusto. Two years later, he transferred to Torah Vodaath, where his rebbi was Rav Dovid Bender, Reb Avraham’s son. Yitzchok was an ardent Pittsburgh Pirates fan, but he once told how “In Rav Dovid Bender’s class something strange happened to all the American baseball fans. Our love of Torah eclipsed that of baseball. Rav Dovid taught his talmidim that the Torah is more important than anything else.”

A transformed young man, Yitzchok Scheiner became close to Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz and began attending the shiur of Rav Shlomo Heiman, Rav Boruch Ber Leibovitz’s prime disciple. And he also became a talmid of Rav Reuven Grozovsky, Rav Boruch Ber’s son-in-law.

When Rav Yitzchok made the long journey to Eretz Yisrael by boat in 1949, he carried with him a letter from Rav Reuven Grozovsky to Rav Reuven’s brother-in-law, Rav Moshe Bernstein, another son-in-law of Rav Boruch Ber. Rav Bernstein had just founded Yeshivas Kamenitz in Jerusalem, and his daughter Esther Leah was of marriageable age. The letter contained a simple message, the highest accolade a rebbi could give: take this bochur as your son-in-law.

Rav Scheiner eventually moved to Switzerland to serve as the rosh yeshivah in Montreux, but returned to Jerusalem following the passing of his father-in-law in 1956. He was just 34 at the time, but took the reins of the yeshivah, together with his brother-in-law Rav Asher Lichtstein.

Running a yeshivah in a poor city in a cash-strapped country was never going to be easy. Yet even in those early days, before Rav Yitzchok Scheiner was a household name, the special mixture of gadlus and caring made him a unique rosh yeshivah.