Tradition is indelible for master sofer Rabbi Shmuel Schneid

Photos: Mordechai Hahn

When Rabbi Shmuel Schneid’s grandsons complete shnayim mikra v’echad targum for an entire Chumash, he’d give them a cash prize of $50. Then, when his granddaughters asked for an incentivized challenge of their own, he made them an offer: Learn how to kasher a chicken and be tested on it for a payoff double that of their brothers. Whether it’s writing a pair of tefillin or preparing a Shabbos meal, for Rabbi Schneid, a longtime sofer in Monsey, New York, tradition — how Jews actually lived and practiced their Yiddishkeit — is paramount.

Reb Shmuel is an expert practitioner of the Jewish scribal arts, but when it comes to defending the importance of minhag Yisrael, he’s “not stam.” He’s devoted decades to reclaiming age-old traditions regarding all things stam (the acronym used in halachah for “sifrei Torah, tefillin, and mezuzos) from historical obscurity, and has gained an international reputation as an impassioned advocate for their continuing relevance in our time.

Along his journey back into history, Reb Shmuel has inspired a whole new generation of safrus researchers. Rabbi Yehoshua Yankelewitz, a kollel yungerman from Bayit Vegan profiled in these pages last year for his avocation as a collector and student of sifrei Torah from across continents and historical eras, says it was Reb Shmuel Schneid’s tutelage that started him off.

“I’m part of a whole network of people who are experts in sifrei Torah, from directors at Sotheby’s to a rabbi in New Zealand to a rebbi in Beit Shemesh and a shochet in Munich, and nearly all of them, are talmidim of Rabbi Schneid,” says Rabbi Yankelewitz. “Some of them became his students even before I was born. They’re all world-class experts, and they all view him as their main rebbi in this area.”

The common thread that binds these geographically and culturally diverse talmidim of Reb Shmuel together is, according to Rabbi Yankelewitz, the “fascination, even obsession, with safrus that he sparked within us. The first thing a talmid of his does when he visits a community is to try to get a look at the sifrei Torah.”

Reb Shmuel’s home on a quiet Monsey street is a magnet for local yeshivah bochurim who, like Yehoshua so many years ago, go there just to hang out, so to speak, soaking in its atmosphere of halachic discovery and excitement. These inquisitive young men thrill to his descriptions of historical mysteries and halachic controversies and gain priceless knowledge about topics that are nearly entirely absent from the standard yeshivah curriculum.

“The geshmak with which he talks about these things makes the topic of stam infectious,” Reb Yehoshua says. “You can watch him talk about the most arcane halachic question — say, the exact form of the tagin, crowns, on the letter lamed — and he’s so obviously enjoying himself, repeating experiences and things he’s learned as if it were the most geshmak piece of news.”