As a frequent-flyer shochet to far-flung places, Rabbi Yechiel Shmuel Fried learned to never underestimate the capacity of a Jewish heart

As told to Rivka Streicher by her grandfather Rabbi Yechiel Shmuel Fried

There are two things that make me the writer and storyteller I am. That I traveled maybe ten times as much as the average person. And that my eyes were open.

I inherited a curiosity of spirit from my father. He gave it to me, and he honed it. Open eyes, open ears — he was an opportunist and an idealist if there ever was one. When I was five years old, he’d take me two hours on the bus so we could hear a Selichos by a certain chassidic court, a Maariv one night of Chanukah there. He’d hold my hand in the great split-second stillness after the Rebbe’s brachah, before the rumbling “amen” of the crowd. “Do you hear? Do you get it?” he asked me. Sixty-five years later, I remember the way my heart beat faster, how my voice joined and carried with a thousand others.

We were seekers, looking and learning. Extroverts, connecting easily with people, with places. We knew family networks, this one’s grandfather from der heim, that one’s cousin. Mishpachology was a language I learned at the knee. But I didn’t know how far it would go, the places I’d get to, the people I’d meet…

In the early ‘70s, I learned to become a shochet. I had a young family, and I stayed close to home. For eight years I worked in beef and poultry plants around New York and New Jersey.

At the time, a gargantuan food company dominated the market. They had hundreds of supermarkets across America and sourced most of the products they sold. They owned miles of farmland and a host of factories, including 60 slaughterhouses. We worked in one in New Jersey that produced kosher meat, though obviously not exclusively kosher, as the hind quarters and those animals that hadn’t been shechted right were sold as nonkosher.

When we turned up to work on Tzom Gedalyah of 1980, the police were swarming  around the place. The colossus had gone bankrupt in a chain of debt that had claimed supermarkets and factories one by one. Now this huge slaughterhouse had fallen. The police were guarding the place so that the building and its machinery could be taken as collateral. We’d come to shecht but the gig was up — as had been decreed the day before, on Rosh Hashanah.

There was a meat crisis that Yom Tov. For a few weeks there was no kosher meat in New York. Then the kashrus authorities went further afield and I started getting other contracts. I started to travel. First Rochester, NY, then Pittsburgh, PA. For a while I was in Ohio, and then I started covering other states — Wisconsin, Chicago, Iowa, Los Angeles, Nebraska.

As always, I kept my eyes open. I met people, Jews, brothers, stories,“Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions,” says Peter Hoeg. When the exchanges are fleeting, when you’re 50,000 feet closer to heaven, hurtling through the clouds in a small metal beast, things take on significance.

I traveled only intermittently while my children were growing up, but when they were older and some of them married, I was often on the plane twice a week.

I collected experiences, collected stories, came home and regaled my family. I used them in the shiurim I give, and in the columns I wrote for a chassidish paper. “Stories out of heaven,” my daughter would say.