He sent hundreds of refugees to yeshivah and created a generation of Torah scholars but no one even knew his name. Who was Shlomo Friedmann?

Photos: Family archives

The refugees who staggered off the ships in New York after finally leaving blood-drenched Europe had made it through the war with their bodies intact, but their spiritual lives were in danger.

Shlomo Friedmann was an immigrant himself, with no financial or organizational backing, but dozens of men owe their yeshivah education to a man who cared enough to show up when they were at the crossroads

Rabbi Avraham Kleinkaufman of Far Rockaway, a maggid shiur in Mesivta Rabbi Chaim Berlin and in Yeshiva of Far Rockaway, was just nine years old when he encountered the man who changed the trajectory of his entire life.

Orphaned of his father, he and his mother, Shaindel Kleinkaufman, stepped off the General Langfitt onto Pier 54 in New York. After fleeing with her young child to Uzbekistan during the war and years in a DP camp, Mrs. Kleinkaufman was hoping to finally find stability for herself and her son in the goldeneh medineh.

As they joined the crowd of disembarking passengers, a 24-year-old young man in a light brown suit and hat noticed young Avremel’s peyos and strode up to them.

“Excuse me,” he approached them, clipboard in hand. “Vos tracht ihr tzu tun mit ayer zohn [What are you planning to do with your son]?” he asked in a pronounced German accent.

“I’m sending him to public school,” Shaindel replied. “I will hire a rebbi to learn with him a bit in the afternoon.”

“I have an idea for you,” the young man countered. “The Bobover Ruv just opened a cheder on West 86th Street on the Upper West Side. Until you get settled and find a job and apartment, why don’t you send him there? The Bobover Ruv will take care of him.”

And that is how young Avremel Kleinkaufman, along with dozens of other young refugees, was placed in yeshivos in the chaotic aftermath of the Holocaust.