How a factory worker from the Bronx became a beloved patron of the Torah world

Photos: Personal archives, Yeshiva of Telshe Alumni Riverdale photo library

You may have met him on occasion — maybe it was in shul, or Minchah at work, or in the dining room of the yeshivah where you had gone to visit your son. A hunched man with a bushy gray beard, wearing an old and very faded black suit. In recent years, he walked slowly, leaning on a cane and clearly in a great deal of pain. If you did in fact have the privilege of making his acquaintance, he probably asked you for a donation — “a dollar or two was just fine” — to support a certain kollel in Israel or a yeshivah he’d been donating to for years.

If you had not learned in an east coast yeshivah, there was no way to know it, but you had just crossed paths with simple greatness seen only among our people. I don’t profess to know these things, but one might even say it was a missed opportunity to ask for a brachah.

His name was Reb Avraham Moskowitz. He was a dear and cherished friend to the bnei Torah and the roshei yeshivah of Am Yisrael. They knew him as Al and considered him one of their own.

For reasons known only to our Father in Heaven, Al wasn’t blessed with the gift of building generations, not in the conventional sense. Yet he found a unique way to leave an everlasting legacy. Al was a chiddush, a wholly original concept, and generations of yeshivah bochurim bear testimony to the depth of its truth and its beauty.

He discovered the world of the beis medrash at an age where for most it would have been too late to earn the title he valued above all others. But with singular focus, devotion, and love, he earned that title and was crowned by its glory for over 40 years: Al Moskowitz. Ben yeshivah.

Al Moskowitz was a child of the late 1940’s Bronx, a place teeming with Jews starting over and shuls on every corner. Max and Minnie Moskowitz lived on Hull Avenue in the Mosholu Parkway/Gun Hill Road neighborhood, and one of the places they davened was the Mosholu Jewish Center. The leader of the synagogue was Rabbi Hershel Shachter, the famed Jewish chaplain present at the liberation of Buchenwald who remained there for months helping the freed prisoners (and was the one to rescue a little boy named Lulek, later to become known the world over as Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, chief rabbi of Israel).

Al would listen intently to every word of Rabbi Shachter’s dynamic speeches. Blessed with a phenomenal memory, he would repeat those talks years later, verbatim. Legend has it that one busy week, the rabbi had no time to prepare, and before ascending the pulpit, whispered to Al that this derashah would be a recycled one. He knew Al would remember and wanted to make sure his secret was safe.

The other shul they frequented was Rabbi Zevulun Charlop’s Young Israel. The rav held an annual appeal for a kollel in Israel, and when Al got a bit older and became financially independent, he was invariably the most generous donor. His love for the study of Torah and talmidei chachamim, later to blossom into a full-blown obsession, was evident long before he entered the portals of the yeshivah world.

Even back then, Al stood out for his soft soul. His mother always referred to him as the one with the heart of gold, and his sister Vicky Feldman still remembers the day that, at age eight, she lost her brand new pretty red pocketbook. She had gone for an outing with a friend and her grandmother and had left it behind. Eleven-year-old Al couldn’t bear his little sister’s pain, and without a word, he slipped out, trekked more than three miles by foot, and returned with the pocketbook.

Al attended Heichal HaTorah, Rabbi Yechiel London’s catch-all yeshivah high school in upper Manhattan (what’s now known as Spanish Harlem) geared for boys of all backgrounds. His formal schooling ended after high school, when he took a job at the Manischewitz Company. He never left. The roles varied from schlepping 50-pound bags of flour to managing employee break schedules, but he remained on the factory floor all his life. Some might have scoffed at a seemingly stagnant career, but Al was ascending a different ladder.