Rav Ephraim Greenblatt was a world-class posek and author of the monumental Rivevos Ephraim, but that didn’t stop him from teaching third-graders in his beloved Memphis

Memphis, Tennessee, circa 1950. Population 400,000. Jewish population, under 10,000. This is a city where segregation still plays a part in people’s daily lives and the word yeshivah is associated with far-off New York and Israel. Most of the Jews here have shed their Yiddishkeit in their trek across the globe from their Eastern European points of origin. Others are valiantly struggling to attend minyanim and maintain the local mikveh while they support their families by running mom-and-pop grocery stores and old-time rag businesses.

Into this sleepy southern town steps young Ephraim Greenblatt, a Yerushalmi-born bochur raised with ten other siblings in a one-bedroom apartment in Jerusalem’s Mekor Baruch neighborhood. He’s arrived to serve as the city’s shochet, but his influence is immediate and far-reaching. Over the course of the next 56 years, Rav Ephraim Greenblatt never loses his connection to the yeshivos that molded him in his youth, nor his thick yet soft Israeli accent. Simultaneously, he succeeds in touching the hearts of a community that recalls him with love and adoration — and following his petirah this month, with a feeling of loss over its personal gadol.

Ephraim Greenblatt’s parents, Rav Avraham Baruch and Aliza, raised 11 children in a Torah-rich environment in Yerushalayim, sustained by Ephraim’s grandfather Rav Yitzchak Greenblatt, a darshan from Brisk who had moved to the United States in the 1920s. In 1951, Rav Yitzchak fell ill and asked his son and daughter-in-law to send their oldest son, 19-year-old Ephraim, to America to assist him in his duties as a shul rav.

A brilliant bochur with an adventurous streak, Ephraim was then learning in Rechovot’s Kletsk Yeshivah under Rav Shach. He approached several gedolim to consult with them about the proposition, and was instructed by Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer (from whom he received semichah), that he should go — and that he would be successful.

Ephraim arrived in America with virtually no knowledge of English. After his grandfather’s passing, he assumed Rav Yitzchak’s position in his Boro Park shul, which meant serving as baal tefillah and giving a derashah on Shabbos. During the daytime, he was free to learn — which he did, in the nearby Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem, headed by Rav Moshe Feinstein. Thus began a lifelong connection that shaped Rav Ephraim’s entire future.

“We Were Like Mishpachah”

Upon his arrival in Memphis in 1952, Rav Ephraim encountered a generation of Jews raised by parents who kept their small businesses open on Shabbos, yet still felt Jewish-ly committed. The local day school had actually been launched three years prior by Rav Ephraim’s uncle, Rav Nota (Nathan) Greenblatt — also a talmid of Rav Moshe — together with two prominent leaders of the community, Rabbi Sy (Yehoshua) Kutner and Mr. Louis Epstein. Rav Ephraim was hired to be a shochet, but when his health gave out several years later, he began teaching in the day school, in addition to giving shiurim and teaching balabatim privately.

In August 1954, not long after his move down South, Rav Ephraim married his Brooklyn-born kallah, Miriam, who accompanied him back to Memphis the day after their sheva brachos. The Greenblatts’ home became a magnet for the young people in the city, many of whom became Shabbos observant under their influence.