With zero charisma and total sincerity, Rabbi Meir Schuster brought thousands of Jews back to their heritage

Photos: Mishpacha archives

Rabbi Meir Schuster ztz”l was always a mystery to me. Not long after my wife and I arrived at Ohr Somayach in the summer of 1979, Rabbi Schuster ztz”l began asking us to host guests on Leil Shabbos. On Thursday night, the phone would ring, but when either I or my wife picked it up, there would be silence on the other end. Eventually, I learned to respond, “Is that you, Rabbi Schuster?” as a prelude to the inevitable question, “How many can you take for Shabbos night?”

But what I could never figure out is his how someone so shy that he could not initiate a phone conversation with someone he knew could force himself to approach dozens of complete strangers every single day. Yet I knew that he did. My friends and I in the Ohr Somayach beis medrash nicknamed him the Pied Piper. Every day, and often more than once a day, we would gaze out the window and there would be Rabbi Schuster getting out of a cab with a group of hirsute, confused-looking young men in tow, who clearly had no idea where they were or what a yeshivah was, and whom we surmised were asking themselves, “How did I let this fellow bring me here?”

Despite not being the type of person you’d expect to go into sales, Rabbi Meir Schuster, who passed away in February of 2014 at age 71,  brought more students to Israel’s baal teshuvah yeshivos than anyone else. For years, the “Man at the Wall” would be at the Kosel every day, connecting to young people, offering to bring them to Torah classes — no strings attached — and setting them up with frum families for Shabbos meals. One of his great innovations was Heritage House, two hostels for men and women that became a popular alternative to the cheap hostels that had been favorites of budget travelers until then.

Granted, most of those whom he brought to Ohr Somayach probably did not stay. But enough did that the dorm was always packed. The late rosh yeshivah Rav Mendel Weinbach summarized Rabbi Schuster’s impact succinctly: “If not for Meir Schuster, the baal teshuvah institutions as we know them today would not exist.” According to Rabbi Dovid Refson, who founded Neve Yerushalayim in 1970, at least one-third of the nearly 40,000 women who have attended Neve Yerushalayim over the decades were first brought in by Rabbi Schuster.

Rabbi Noah Weinberg relentlessly drove his talmidim at Aish HaTorah to achieve more, and spoke constantly of the “power of one” to change the world. When he did, he would invariably point to Rabbi Schuster as proof that it is not one’s natural abilities that are the primary determinant of one’s impact on the world, and that such deficiencies as we possess are not nearly so great limitations as we imagine them to be.

Rabbi Yehudah Silver was a high school classmate of Rabbi Schuster’s and remembers him as a “very shy and withdrawn teenager, who found it almost painfully difficult to communicate or to make connections with people.” Yet a quarter century later, when Rabbi Silver moved to Israel to join the hanhalah of Aish HaTorah, he witnessed “the most amazing transformation he had ever seen in his life.” That same shy teenager was now approaching dozens of strangers a day.

But that is not exactly correct. There had been no “transformation.” Reb Meir was still shy, frequently tongue-tied, and awkward. But he had not let those qualities define him.

“He was, in my opinion, the most successful person who ever lived,” says Rabbi Dovid Refson of Rabbi Meir Schuster, meaning that he did more with the particular kochos hanefesh, the personal strengths with which he was blessed, than anyone else. And that’s why, even seven years after his passing, it’s so important to “solve” the riddle of Rabbi Meir Schuster, or, at the very least, flesh it out as clearly as possible. For Rabbi Schuster’s life carries a message of hope for each of us and can serve as a spur to greater confidence in what we can achieve.