Rabbi Feiner has been making trips to Biegeleisen’s for three decades, at times lugging three or four boxes of seforim back with him. By now, more than a quarter of his library, which between home and office contains upward of 325 shelves of seforim, were bought in this store.

As a talmid of Baltimore’s Ner Israel, he’s just following the lead of its legendary rosh yeshivah, Rav Yaakov Yitzchok Ruderman, who upon returning home from trips to New York for weddings would try to whisk his newly purchased Biegeleisen seforim past the Rebbetzin under his kapoteh. Other times, he’d wait until she was asleep to bring the stash in from the car.

Rabbi Feiner can identify: “I do that all the time. My wife asks, ‘Why are you going to Brooklyn now?’ And I answer, ‘I have an appointment.’ The next thing you know, three boxes… So next time, I try buying her a sefer, and she says, ‘Oh, you bought me a sefer! How many did you buy for yourself?’ ”

Another connoisseur in the ranks of the “afflicted” is Rabbi Baruch Simon, who, growing up in Brooklyn, dropped into Biegeleisen’s each week for decades to stock his growing Torah library. Now a rosh yeshivah at Yeshivas Rabbeinu Yitzchok Elchanan (RIETS), he’s a fixture in the Gottesman Library on YU’s Washington Heights campus, and it’s that same long-ago haunt of his youth that was responsible for building the library’s massive, world-class seforim collection.

“I practically live in Gottesman,” says Rabbi Simon, “and so did my friend Rav Yosef Wanefsky a”h, who was a chaver in the RIETS Kollel Elyon. Despite being sightless, he was a big talmid chacham, and his biggest pleasure in this world was when a new box from Biegeleisen arrived — we called them the ‘Biegel Boxes.’ He’d get really excited to hear what was in them, and he’d begin caressing those seforim that really interested him.”

Due to his encyclopedic command of seforim, Reb Shloime Beigeleisen was close with Berish Mandelbaum and Zalman Alpert, two of Gottesman’s renowned past librarians. A current librarian there, Zvi Erenyi, told me that during a time many years ago when they couldn’t pay for new seforim, Reb Shloime said he’d continue supplying them and would go through the stacks and take back all the duplicates in lieu of payment.

The offer was quintessential Reb Shloime, whose peerless knowledge and surpassing love of seforim fueled a lifelong mission to do whatever it took to put sifrei kodesh into the hands of the Jews who treasure them. Rabbi Simon says that “Biegeleisen isn’t simply number one, it’s unique, and after Reb Shloime’s petirah, I didn’t just call his brother but also his nephew Aharon, who helps run the business, because it wasn’t just tanchumin for the person, but for the store too.”

All in the Family

The zeide, Reb Yosef Chaim Biegeleisen, started as a mocher seforim while still in Galicia, where he had the privilege of procuring all the seforim needed by the Belzer Rebbe, Reb Yissachar Dov Rokeach. When the Rebbe asked Reb Yosef Chaim to provide him with a deluxe edition of the Vilna Shas, it made waves, signaling a parting of ways with the then-common preference among chassidim for the Slavita Shas over the Vilna one.

He arrived on these shores in the early 1920s, settling in Boro Park, and together with his son Reb Yaker, began buying and selling seforim out of his home. Many of their early customers were learned European-born rabbanim serving in far-flung posts throughout America. Isolated from contact with others of their stature, the seforim they would order from a catalog Biegeleisen’s made especially for them became a lifeline amid their loneliness.

Rav Michoel Forshlager was a brilliant talmid of the Avnei Nezer of Sochatchov who immigrated to Baltimore in the early 20th century, where he amassed a huge seforim library and authored tens of his own Torah works. He once described Reb Yaker, one of the founders of the Belzer shtibel in Boro Park, as someone who “communicates with all the rabbanim in America… and everyone is pleased with him. He conducts his business honestly, and knows and appreciates his merchandise.”

Reb Yaker married his cousin, Chaya Leah, in 1926, and a year later, Shloime was born. He attended Torah Vodaath through high school and then moved over to Mesivta Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin for beis medrash, eventually receiving semichah from Rav Yitzchok Hutner.

Years earlier, his father, Reb Yaker, had been the shadchan for that yeshivah’s acquisition of a major library of seforim, including many rare volumes of sh’eilos u’teshuvos. Reb Yaker had helped assemble these volumes for a Harvard academic named Nathan Isaacs, and upon the latter’s passing in 1941, Reb Yaker, knowing the professor’s family had little interest in seforim, offered to purchase the entire trove for Chaim Berlin. After Reb Shloime traveled to Cambridge together with Rav Hutner and Rav Shlomo Freifeld to inspect the collection firsthand, they sealed the deal to bring the collection to the yeshivah, where it remains to this day.

The store remained in the Biegeleisen’s Boro Park home until 1951, when Reb Yaker, doubting whether the neighborhood had a vibrant frum future, moved it to a storefront on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, first on East Broadway and later on Division Street. Nearly three decades later, with Boro Park booming, the business returned to its Brooklyn roots. To this day, however, the sign that had graced its East Side premises — reading “J. Biegeleisen Hebrew Books” — remains proudly visible in its front window.

By the time Reb Yaker was niftar in 1981, the third-generation of Reb Shloime and Reb Moishe, yibadel l’chaim, had taken over the business operation, joined later by Reb Moishe’s son Reb Aharon, and assisted over the years by other grandchildren of Reb Yaker. In Shloime’s high school graduation autograph book, alongside an inscription from Rav Avrohom Pam, is one from Reb Yaker and his wife, Chaya Leah, conveying their parental hope that Shloime would take care of Moishe, who was seven years his junior, and Moishe would in turn respect and look up to his older brother.

And that, Reb Shloime’s daughter reflects, “is truly how they lived their lives. Harmony reigned between these brothers, who spent more of their waking hours together than with anyone else. My grandfather had a saying, ‘the furthest cousin is closer than the closest friend,’ and that’s how it’s always been in the family.” Reb Shloime was honored with reciting a brachah under the chuppah of every one of his brother’s children and grandchildren. (At what turned out to be the last family wedding Reb Shloime would attend, he was running late, so Reb Moishe and his children delayed the proceedings by singing an additional niggun under the chuppah until his older brother could arrive for the kibud.)

The Book You Want

Shalom Jacob, a big-firm New York attorney who both collects and publishes seforim, says that if there’s “one store in the world that has kedushas beis hamedrash, it’s Biegeleisen. You go in and there are talmidei chachamim there, people are talking in learning. A few months ago, I walked in and found Rav Aharon Schiff, the rav of Antwerp, sitting with Reb Shloime, talking in learning. In a sense, it’s the only remaining seforim store where the people really understand seforim , have a perspective on seforim — even in Eretz Yisrael those places are gone. When I’m working on a sugya and see an obscure sefer brought down that I don’t have, that’s where I head, because anywhere else, they don’t even know what you’re talking about. I know many people who have large specialty collections in specific Torah realms, and Biegeleisen is their go-to supplier.”

Even when it comes to the standard seforim all bookstores carry, the Biegeleisens’ publishing-industry connections means they get them ahead of everyone else. Rabbi Eliezer Katzman, whose encyclopedic knowledge of seforim has made him a sought-after Judaica consultant to auction houses like Sotheby, frequents the store almost daily (although he denies he bought his nearby house for its proximity to the store). Once, he found Ateres Yisrael rosh yeshivah Rav Baruch Mordechai Ezrachi browsing in the store and asked him, “You’re from Eretz Yisrael — you need to come here for seforim?” To which the Rosh Yeshivah replied, “They’re here first.”

Indeed, one aspect of the Biegeleisen mystique is the list of notable regulars who would frequent the “smorgasbord” over the past decades. Rav Shlomo Freifeld would be there every week, as would Chaim Lieberman, the devoted librarian of the previous Rebbe Rayatz of Chabad, perusing the sechorah for the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Shlomo Carlebach was another “frequent buyer,” of both chassidishe and lomdishe seforim. Rabbi Katzman’s father, Rav Osher, a Torah Vodaath rosh yeshivah, was also a major collector, and when he was nowhere to be found, his mother’s first attempt to ascertain his whereabouts would be a call to Biegeleisen.

All day long, customers would file in and out, having spent ten minutes or two hours scouring the shelves and tables. But, says Rabbi Katzman, “even people who weren’t interested in buying anything at all would congregate there, discussing the topics of the day in what was a veritable beis vaad l’chachamim.”

Forever presiding over the store’s scene of controlled chaos would be the Biegeleisen brothers, seated at a plain table in the back. They had their own form of non-verbal communication, intuiting each other’s feelings and views and conveying them with no more than a raised eyebrow or faint smile. And the operation they ran in 2020 was not a whit different from how it was done back in the 1950s, save perhaps for the more recent addition of a cash register in place of the metal box that served that function for decades.

The price of each sefer is signified by a number code that even US Army cryptanalysts would have difficulty cracking. Purchases are marked down in a notebook, and then transferred to a voluminous card catalogue, which Reb Shloime would consult to answer queries about a sefer’s worth. Shalom Jacob says that “if you had paid a high price elsewhere for something, he’d go to the cards and tell you, ‘You overpaid… I sold that 40 years ago for this-and-this much.’ ”

Reb Shloime was no mere dispassionate purveyor of books, content to make a sale and leave patrons to fend for themselves, as Rabbi Feiner can attest. “I’ve been in seforim stores all over the world,” he observes, “and in all those years and all those places I don’t think I’ve ever met a bigger baki in seforim than Reb Shloime Biegeleisen. Some seforim dealers are holding in all the Rishonim and Acharonim, others in all the sh’eilos and teshuvos. He knew the whole gamut — he was a walking Beis Ekked Seforim [the name of a comprehensive bibliographical index of seforim].”

Rabbi Feiner says there’s nothing like walking into a seforim store and having the proprietor tell you which edition you want and which has the most comprehensive indices or the best footnotes. “On the left-hand side of the store is the Kabbalah section, and Reb Shloime knew them all,” Rabbi Feiner relates. “I once asked him for a Chesed L’Avraham, a 17th-century kabbalistic work by the Chida’s grandfather, and he said, ‘Well, there are seven different editions. Do you want the one with these he’aros, or with those, or maybe with this peirush in the back?”

Bringing a sefer together with its owner is often a shidduch of sorts, and Reb Shloime was the ultimate matchmaker, one who, in Rabbi Feiner’s words, “already knew when you walked in what seforim you were looking for and what to bring out for you. ‘What do you want that edition for? You don’t want that edition, Rabbi Feiner. This is what you want.’ And he’d be right! This was not a place where the salesperson politely inquires, ‘Can I help you?’ and you say, ‘No, I’m just looking around.’ With Reb Shloime it wasn’t just looking around, but ‘What are you looking for? No, this is what you need.’ It stemmed from caring about the client, but also a concern for kavod haTorah and kavod for seforim, the idea that you have to know, you can’t be an am ha’aretz in seforim.”

Rabbi Weinberger remembers how, when he was younger, he would always go in person, “because, you know, to see the sefer, to smell the sefer, it’s a whole different experience.” But in more recent years, as it became harder to get away, he’d make phone orders. And, he says, the Beigeleisens always seem to know what he’s looking for.

“When someone from Far Rockaway or the Five Towns is in the store,” says Rabbi Weinberger, “the Biegeleisens will ask, ‘Do you know Rabbi Weinberger?’ If the answer is yes, they’ll say, ‘Give us a few minutes.’ And they’ll put together a box for me, knowing my tastes and anticipating what I’d like, and send it with that fellow. And I would say they nail it 90 percent of the time.”

Not Just Business

Endowed with a therapist’s empathy and a social scientist’s insight, Reb Shloime took a personal interest in his customers’ lives, using his keen understanding to help them choose the most suitable material. Rabbi Yaakov Feitman, rav of Woodmere’s Red Shul, recalls Reb Shloime sending him seforim and telling him, “This is going to help you a lot with derashos, or with psak halachah.”

“When I would come in during the time I was a rav in Cleveland,” says Rabbi Feitman, “he would direct me to different seforim than those he showed me once I took a position in the Five Towns. He knew what the olam needed to hear. And he was very on target.”

But it wasn’t just prominent rabbanim who Reb Shloime had the time for. Reb Aharon Biegeleisen says his uncle had an empathetic ear for a variety of people for whom others had neither time nor patience. A whole cast of down-and-out characters used to come in, not to buy, but just to tell their tales of woe to the man they could count on to sit there and listen.

Rabbi Weinberger relates that “when you walked into the store, it wasn’t just about business. It was about, ‘How is your family? How are your students doing? How do you like it in yeshivah? How is it going in the shul?’ Or, ‘We see different chevreh from your shul coming in and we enjoy talking to them.’ When I became a mashpia in YU, it would be ‘the bochurim, they come in for seforim and they’re so serious about learning.’

“Being in the store was always an adventure,” Rabbi Weinberger continues. “Even if I came in for 15 minutes to check out what’s new, I’d always end up being there for at least an hour, between the personal conversation and Reb Shloime telling me, ‘Did you see this? Did you see that?’ And it wasn’t even a pitch for the sale — it was real excitement over a new manuscript that was published, or the tenth edition of the Brisker Haggadah. And I’d say, ‘Reb Shloime, I already have the first nine, I really can’t get the tenth.’ But he’d respond, ‘Nein, nein, but look at it, look at it. Enjoy it!’ ”

Although Reb Shloime’s public persona was that of a no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is Galitzianer, he harbored within him great depths of feeling and unswerving integrity. Rabbi Weinberger tells of one time when the Biegeleisens sent him a sefer, but then learned that some copies had been printed with blank pages. Next thing he knew, they were on the phone. “Rabbi Weinberger, a few of these came in imperfect. Is yours okay? Go and check to see that it has all the pages.”

Rabbi Weinberger says that when his kids were little and his wife needed to get pre-Pesach cleaning done, instead of taking them to the park like other fathers, he’d take them on a trip to Boro Park, to Biegeleisen’s, promising them that if they would behave while he was looking for seforim, they’d go to the toy store and to get some ice cream. “So they grew up spending many, many hours in the store, sitting in their strollers or roaming around, asking me, ‘Daddy what about this one? Daddy, do you have that one?’ So one time, I was there with my daughter Chumie, and after buying some seforim, I headed down 16th Avenue to get her some ice cream. I was already three blocks away, when I saw Reb Shloime running after me, and I said ‘Is everything okay?’ I thought maybe I’d forgotten a sefer in the store. He had a little toy in his hand, and since I was the only one with a child in the store, he figured she must have dropped the toy. I said, ‘Really, it’s a kleinekeit.’ And with a twinkle in the eye, he said to me, ‘For you it’s a kleinekeit, but for her it’s not a kleinekeit.’ ”

When Superstorm Sandy hit Woodmere in 2012, Rabbi Feitman lost some 1,000 seforim lining his basement shelves, including a precious set of the Chernovitzer Shas, which Rav Dovid Cohen had advised him to buy for its textual variations. “Reb Shloime immediately told me that it’s irreplaceable, but he also gave me a sefer that contained a list of the variant girsaos from that Shas,” says Rabbi Feitman. “There were other seforim, too, that I’d lost, but using his phenomenal bekius, he counseled me on which other seforim could compensate for them, even giving me one such out-of-print volume as a gift.”

Most Important of All

For all that his mastery of seforim gave him celebrity status among the People of the Book, Reb Shloime’s own greatest sources of pride lay elsewhere. Grandson Mordechai Biegeleisen recalls once telling his grandfather that an adam gadol had called him the world’s biggest expert on seforim. “Not a muscle moved on his face, it didn’t mean a thing to him. He was someone who took pride in things — but not in that. Besides his standing within the Torah world, he also had this whole other world he was privy to, where his expertise was valued. He was regularly consulted by academics, rare book collectors and major institutional librarians across the world. But that, too, was of little consequence to him. What really meant the world to him was to be able to say, ‘Look at this family of ours. Look at what we went through, and yet we’re all here, with our emunah intact. Look how we’re still connected.’ ”

Along with family, mesorah was another pillar of strength holding up Reb Shloime’s world. The Biegeleisens are staunch Belzer chassidim going back generations (albeit in Reb Shloime’s case, without the levush), and family lore has it that Reb Yaker was the first chassid to give the current Rebbe a kvittel.

The only time the brothers ever locked the store in order to give one person exclusive access is when “the Ruv,” as they referred to the Belzer Rebbe, was in town. And in the early afternoon during the week of Chanukah, the store would come to a standstill, with everyone there listening raptly as the Ruv’s hadlakas neiros was broadcast from Jerusalem.

Mordechai relates that while learning in Eretz Yisrael, he once attended a bris of the Rebbe’s einikel, and afterward, called his zeide to tell him all about what he’d seen there. “He put me on the speaker phone in the store, glowing with pride that what was important to him was still important to the second and third generations.”

It was those same unshakeable pillars of family and faith that enabled Reb Shloime, together with Gina, his partner in life for 67 years, to make it through — and bring their family through with them — the dark days following September 11, 2001, when their beloved son Shimon Dovid perished in the attack on the World Trade Center.

Reliving her memories of those horrific first hours, Reb Shloime’s daughter says that upon hearing the news of the planes going into the Towers, the whole family ran over to the home of Shimmy and his wife Miriam. “Friends tried to shield us from learning that the second Tower had fallen, because once that would be known, there could be no more hope, since my brother had been on the 97th floor. Yet, my father needed to know, and he went outside and sat in his blue Camry, listening to the radio. I was always amazed at how although he knew before us, he kept himself composed in order to protect us, until we found out later that day.”

She praises her parents for the unbelievable efforts they invested into making sure Shimmy Biegeleisen’s family would not be crushed by grief, but instead have normal lives in a warm, positive environment. “They turned my brother’s home into the gathering place for family and friends, bringing pizza over for everyone every single Motzaei Shabbos. From the very first moment, and despite the pain, my parents and Shimmy’s wife never allowed him to become a taboo topic. There were pictures of him everywhere, and talk of our memories of him filled the house with both laughter and tears.

“My father never asked ‘Why?’ He just soldiered on, keeping himself and us together. Even Shimmy’s friends relied on him to get them through some very tough times.”

Under normal circumstances, the levayah and shivah of a man of Reb Shloime Biegeleisen’s prominence would have been attended by a great many of the countless Jews whose minds he had enriched and souls he had touched. But with the coronavirus running amok and sowing dread, these aren’t normal times — and so, it was only the closest family members who were present at the beis hachaim in Elmont, New York, to deliver the heartfelt hespedim and to give him the final kavod of kevurah, mere feet from the resting places of his grandparents, parents, and dear son.

But for a man for whom public accolades paled next to a grandchild’s smile, perhaps a final kavod tendered by those few people most precious to him was indeed the greatest honor of all.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 806)