Photos Jeff Zorabedian

The 2018 graduation ceremony for New York’s Hunter College began with the usual pomp and circumstance: a processional of students in purple caps and gowns filing into the auditorium, some caps festooned with flowers or funny slogans. A student soprano sweetly intoned the national anthem, and then…

From the back of the hall came the plaintive, melancholy strains of a bagpipe, and suddenly a tall man in a forest green plaid kilt began a dignified march down the aisle, toting his instrument as if he had just emerged from the mists of the Highlands. He mounted the stage, finished the air, and stood erect as the audience applauded, entertained if a bit bemused.

The piper, whose reddish beard is rather longer and fuller than that of the average Scot, wasn’t just there to furnish an exotic musical interlude. Ian Sherman, 32, was one of the graduates, there to receive his nurse practitioner diploma as well as a doctorate in nursing. Twelve years prior to that, he’d gone through another rite of passage: He immersed in a mikveh, and became a Jew named Ephraim Eliyahu.

Fallen Far from the Tree

After nine years of marriage, Ephraim and Menuchah Sherman’s apartment in Crown Heights still has a funky student character: a comfy old couch, shelves of books, framed retro maps of New York, an oil painting of a stormy coastline executed by Tara. A plaque in the entry reads “Cead mile failte,” meaning “A thousand welcomes” in Gaelic. One corner is colonized by their three-year-old’s toys. Their latest addition lies wide awake in a baby swing, until he gets a little fussy. Ephraim rises to his full six-foot-five and scoops up the infant expertly, with great gentleness, then sits back down, cradling the precious bundle in one arm, resuming the conversation in Papa Bear mode.

The apartment’s decor reflects Ephraim’s eclectic DNA. He grew up in Goshen, New York, the son of a mother of Scottish descent and a father of mostly Jewish descent (although probably not halachically a member of the Tribe). Ephraim was always told that his father’s side came from Slutzk and that his grandmother’s father, who wasn’t Jewish, was adopted by a Jewish family in Czechoslovakia and married a Jewish woman. (“That’s a story unto itself,” Ephraim says. “That great-grandfather was a metalworker who made bicycles, but was ordered by the Nazis to make artillery. He didn’t want to do it, but to refuse would have drawn attention to his Jewish wife and children. So he went along, but sabotaged the work. When they found him out, they drafted him. Next he sabotaged himself: he went skiing and broke his leg, went into a swamp to contract malaria, and finally defected at the end of the war.”)

(Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 738)