B

ut the next year, one of the rabbis in charge of the building tried again. At the teachers’ orientation at the beginning of the semester, he came in and demanded to know, in so many words, if any of the teachers were committed to teaching Torah miSinai.

A beat.

Abba stood up. “Yeah, that’s what I’m teaching,” he announced.

Immediately, the other frum teachers followed suit. “Right. We’re with him. We’ll be doing that, too.”

The rabbi was outraged. He decided to form a committee of parents who were similarly outraged, and they resolved to monitor Abba’s classes. After a few weeks, he expected, they would formally announce that Abba couldn’t teach at the Talmud Torah anymore, lest he corrupt more innocent children with Orthodox values.

Abba’s Sunday morning class that year was Introduction to Talmud. He taught in a lecture hall, and the class maxed out at about 70 kids. But this time, there were a number of hostile adults in the back of the room.

Abba didn’t hesitate. “See those adults?” he said. “They’re here to monitor all of you.” The kids were on their best behavior from then on. Abba began his class, unfazed by the glaring eyes at the back of the room.

As time passed, invariably, the committee started to pay attention. The parents got into the material and started asking Abba questions during class. After three weeks, they finally issued their report, with a firm conclusion: The Talmud Torah should also offer classes to adults.

O

nce, Abba took the kids on a field trip to the city. There was a Rav Singer there, an older rav who had a shul on the Lower East Side. Rav Singer was so determined to help the needy that he would give them his business card, complete with a signature. It was considered legal tender in the local supermarkets, and he would come and pay the bills that the poor racked up. His shul had a pantry that was open to the poor, no questions asked. Anyone could come in a back door and take what they wanted.

Abba brought his kids to stock the pantry with kosher shelf-stable food, cans and other things with a hashgachah, that the poor would be able to take. They piled into a few vans, with two goals: to bring as much food as possible for the pantry, and to clean the shul.

But Abba also took five of the boys out of the group. They were some of the most engaged; boys who had come for Shabbos and were fascinated with frumkeit. He wanted to show these boys a gadol, and he took them to MTJ (Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem), where Rav Dovid Feinstein zt”l was the newly appointed rosh yeshiva after his father had passed away.

He took the boys inside, and their jaws dropped. “I thought this was going to be like a library,” one of them blurted out.

Rav Dovid saw Abba with these boys who definitely didn’t belong, even if they were all wearing yarmulkes. One of them, Jeff, sported a long ponytail that couldn’t quite hide.

Immediately, Rav Dovid came over to explain to them what learning was and why everyone was so passionate and noisy. Abba tried to impress on the boys that this was a literal gadol hador, taking time out of his day to talk to them, but Rav Dovid stopped him. When Rav Dovid was finished, he gave them all a brachah that they should find the path to Torah and celebrate their chasunahs in a Torahdig way.

Then, he turned to Jeff and said, “And by your upsheren.”

They didn’t know what an upsheren was, and Abba didn’t have the heart to tell them. But the brachah was fulfilled. Every one of those boys learned in Eretz Yisrael for a time or became shomer Shabbos.

A

bba used to invite many of the kids over to our house for Shabbos. They had never experienced a Shabbos before in their lives. They’d never even seen a frum house. After the Friday night meal, we would take them for a tour of the house. They would stare, wide-eyed, at the shelves of seforim and the Zecher l’Churban on the wall. We would show them Ema’s sheitels, and the girls would try them on.

Then they’d go to the kitchen and look at the blech, the becher, all the things that they had learned about in school but never seen. To them, these items were theoretical, a concept of Judaism without use in the real world. Abba’s goal was always to bring in the vibrance of day-to-day Judaism, to let the kids see, in action, what it was like to live in a home brimming with Yiddishkeit.

In the morning, Abba would bring them to the local shul. He would daven neitz so he could explain to them what was going on throughout the davening. Abba’s usual seat at the shul was in the front row, right next to the elderly rav. So naturally, he brought the boys to sit there, too.

The first time he brought the boys, when the rav walked in, everyone stood up, and the boys just stared at him like he was a mythic figure. They couldn’t speak. They gaped at him as he put on his tallis and opened his siddur.

On the walk home after davening, they were still in awe. “That was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” one said. Where they were from, at that age, rabbis had already retired and moved to Florida.

Abba’s rav lived two houses down from us, and on Shabbos afternoon, he made time for Abba’s boys. They would sit and talk together for nearly an hour. They were usually too intimidated to ask questions, so the rav would tell them stories instead.

Years later, those boys (now far more religious) told Abba that just the experience of watching the rav put on his tallis had made a dramatic lasting impact on them.

E

very Purim, our seudah was packed with Talmud Torah kids. They filled our little house, overflowing from the dining room into the living room, the tables set up anywhere where they might fit.

One year, Ema taught at a different Talmud Torah. It was tricky, because many of the children were from a local Reform temple, and a number of them weren’t halachically Jewish. My parents would invite them all to the Purim seudah, but they turned their focus on the kids whose mothers were Jewish. That meant that the Greenbaums and Cohens didn’t get the same level of attention as the Lees and Wangs and Jacksons, whose fathers were ostensibly non-Jewish and the mothers were the Jewish connection.

ON

Wednesday nights, the Talmud Torah was housed in the educational building of a nonreligious synagogue complex. Once, Abba was in the synagogue building to pick up a form from the office, when he noticed a sefer Torah in the lobby. It was rolled open and on display in a case.

He went into the rabbi’s office. This was a hostile rabbi, one not very interested in accommodating the frum teachers.

“What’s going on out there?” Abba asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What’s with that sefer Torah?”

The rabbi’s eyes cleared up. “Oh! We rescued it from Europe. The congregation paid for it — we got a good price — so we’re keeping it on display—”

Abba cut him off. “Is it kosher or not kosher?”

The rabbi shrugged. “I don’t know. We don’t need it for our services. We have plenty of others.”

Abba was very perturbed. “Look, a sefer Torah needs to be kept open like that for a reason — because it’s being used. And if it’s passul, then it needs to be treated with dignity, not left on display.”

The rabbi didn’t care. When Abba returned to his class, he mentioned this frustration to his students.

The next day, Abba got a phone call. The kids were disturbed by the treatment of the sefer Torah, and they had hatched a plan. They were going to break open the display case and steal the sefer Torah. We still have no idea what they were planning to do next, but Abba called one of them and managed to talk him out this scheme.

But they were still so upset. How could Abba let this go?

By the next Wednesday, when Abba returned, they informed him that they had a new plan. “Oh, we already swiped the key to the display case from the janitor and made a copy.”

“Wow,” Abba said. “You guys are quite the felons, aren’t you?”

“We should do something,” they protested.

“Look, it’s not our property,” Abba pointed out. “We can’t do anything.” He considered it again. “Well, maybe we can do one thing.”

They went to the lobby together. They unlocked the case and Abba opened it and rolled the Sefer Torah to the tochachah.

“That was my protest,” he says. “And I don’t think they ever noticed that it had been moved.”

That’s my father. He never tries to change the world, to effect the big, dramatic, sweeping changes that some can do. But it’s his small moments of connection that keep. There are people that I meet even today who were changed by his lessons or their visits to our house.

Over the years, many of the Talmud Torah kids became shomer Shabbos. Abba still keeps in touch with some of them, even though it’s been 25 years since he taught there. The school no longer exists, but Abba talks about his time there with pride.

“I taught there for fifteen years,” he tells me. “I got fired seven times. And throughout all of that, I never missed a day of work.”

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 958)