The boys would go home for Pesach and Succos, and the place lost its energy; the town became a shadow of itself

“I think I’ll go shopping now,” I said to my mother.

I grabbed my handbag, made sure I had money, then checked the time.

“No, actually, I won’t go now. It’s boys’ time.”

That’s what it was like to grow up alongside the yeshivah. As a resident of Gateshead, I wasn’t bound by the boys’ or girls’ times for shopping (they were for the many students who filled the town), but I didn’t want to be the lone girl in a swarm of boys at the grocery.

Gateshead is a small place, and we grew up around the five yeshivos that call it home: the two main yeshivos and three smaller yeshivos. The great yeshivah ketanah was two blocks from my house. If I was going anywhere, I walked past the yeshivah.

Our school didn’t offer school lunches, and so we’d go home in the afternoon and then come back. That short walk coincided with the end of seder in the yeshivah. Many a time I’d see Reb Chaim Kaufman ztz’’l flanked by the bochurim. I remember the way they surrounded him, the kavod they had, the intensity on their faces. I was a young girl, but these things make an impact.

In a quiet town like Gateshead, if there was any noise, it was coming from the yeshivos. You could feel the energy, the chiyus, from the buildings, from the dormitories. I’d be walking home at night and suddenly there’d be a burst of activity, a crowd of bochurim doing Kiddush Levanah and then breaking out into a dance.

At the end of the zeman there was a day called “chavrusa politics,” when each person worked out whom he would learn with the following zeman. The streets were full of the boys, everyone talking to everyone else, trying to sort out three chavrusas for themselves. The noise, the vigor — you couldn’t walk past the yeshivah on those days.

And then, like a curtain drawn, silence. The boys would go home for Pesach and Succos, and the place lost its energy; the town became a shadow of itself.

Until they’d all come back…