Father and son team Phil and Uri Schneider help stutterers find a voice 

Photos: Yosef Itzkowitz, Chayim Tzvi Schneider

Phil Schneider’s passion to help others find their voice has taken him from the inner-city classrooms of the 1970s all the way to Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn. Determined to help stutterers conquer their shame instead of remaining locked in their silent world, Phil, with his son Uri at his side, have made a family business of helping others find their strengths and move forward from there

Phil Schneider was just beginning to take an interest in Yiddishkeit when he decided to poke his head inside a local shul, the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, one evening. Confronted by the sight of men speaking in Hebrew, bent over huge, impenetrable tomes, he began softly backing out.

Rabbi Murray Schaum, who was in the beis medrash, was having none of it. “Come in!” he sang out across the room. Too embarrassed to turn tail and run, Phil came closer. “What’s your name?” the rabbi asked.

“Phil,” he answered.

“No,” Rabbi Schaum persisted. “What’s your real name?”

Phil thought back to his bar mitzvah and dredged up an old memory. “Pesach,” he replied.

The rabbi was delighted. “Do you know what it means?” he said.

“Um — it’s a holiday?” Phil said.

“More than that,” the rabbi said. “It means peh-sach, the mouth speaks. The holiday of Pesach is about transmission, about connecting through the mouth.”

Little did Rabbi Schaum know whom he was addressing, or that he had stumbled upon a perfect illustration of the principle that the choice of a child’s name involves ruach hakodesh. His new recruit, Dr. Pesach-Phil Schneider, has devoted his entire professional life to helping people with speech difficulties. He’s become a legend in his time, serving as the speech therapist for scores of people, from inner city children to the Lubavitcher Rebbe ztz”l.

Today, together with his son Uri, he directs Schneider Speech, a practice with offices in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Englewood, Lakewood, and Beit Shemesh. The lion’s share of their practice involves people who stutter, but they address other speech issues as well. But what most distinguishes their practice is their humanistic, holistic outlook. Both father and son share a warm, compassionate, non-judgmental personality that invites clients to open up and feel at ease.

“We treat people, not problems,” Uri maintains. For the Schneiders, treating a speech impediment is simply one piece of helping individuals become their most authentic selves and achieve their personal goals and dreams.