“Rav Ephraim could hardly speak English when he got here, but I could speak a decent Yiddish, so I could converse with him,” recalls Mr. Larry Brown, a member of the Memphis kehillah whose children today are marbitzei Torah in communities around the world. “I didn’t grow up shomer Shabbos, but I went to Talmud Torah and shul. While I I was in the army in the 1950s, I decided to become shomer Shabbos, and when I returned to Memphis, I began attending shul every Shabbos. I became very friendly with Rav Ephraim, who hosted me every week for Shabbos lunch. He’d be learning Gemara with some of the kids, and I’d learn Kitzur Shulchan Aruch by myself. We were like mishpachah to one another.”

In subtle ways, Rav Ephraim reached out to the kehillah, teaching by both example and through his trademark warmth. “In the beginning, we just called him Ephraim,” recalls a longtime Memphis resident. “Later, when we realized he was a talmid chacham, it became ‘Reb Ephraim.’

No Judgment Calls

Even in a community where most people were very far from Torah and mitzvos, Rav Ephraim always saw a person’s neshamah. “He didn’t make any judgment calls,” says a member of the Blockman family from Memphis. “Anyone who wanted to connect to Torah could come right in and talk to him. People who didn’t know any better would come to him dressed inappropriately, but it didn’t faze him. If they wanted to learn alef-beis, he’d sit there and teach them alef-beis.”

It wasn’t kiruv as we know it today; Rav Ephraim’s focus on Torah, and only Torah, remained primary in his life. In the early years in Memphis, he and his wife never took vacations; he sat in front of a sefer and learned every spare minute he had. And this was his power over the community who had little Jewish education. “He opened the door to Torah,” continues this former Memphis day school student, who lived a few blocks from the Greenblatts for years. “Torah was gushing out, there for everyone to get.”

While Rav Ephraim’s mornings and afternoons were spent teaching, his evenings were his own. His oldest son, Rav Menachem Greenblatt, today a rav in St. Louis, recalls how Rav Ephraim would return home from school at four o’clock and begin to learn; he spent the rest of the day immersed in his seforim and corresponding with the greatest gedolim of the generation.

Yet Rav Ephraim’s influence stemmed not from his vast knowledge of halachah but from his approachability, relates Rav Yehudah Silver, former rav and high school rebbi in Memphis and lecturer at Arachim, today of Ramat Beit Shemesh. “Memphis had a kollel, a yeshivah — all of these things combined to build the city up. But there would have been less of a Torah presence in Memphis had it not been for Rav Ephraim.”

Rather than giving large community-wide shiurim, Rav Ephraim became close to people through one-on-one relationships. “During a bar mitzvah lesson, a Gemara shiur for balabatim, a Kitzur Shulchan Aruch shiur, he took the time to connect with people in a deep way,” says Rabbi Joel Finkelstein, rabbi of Anshei Sphard Beth El Emeth Congregation, where Rav Ephraim served as baal korei and baal tefillah on the Yamim Noraim. “There was no such thing as someone who had bar mitzvah lessons or went to one of his shiurim who didn’t feel deeply connected to him.”

Though Memphis has remained a small community, today it boasts several shuls and many shomer Shabbos families, as well as separate boys’ and girls’ high schools, in addition to the day school. Still, most Memphians leave town once they graduate high school, attending the prerequisite year in Israel and then settling in big cities in other parts of the country, including New York, Baltimore, and Chicago. A fair number of them relocate to Eretz Yisrael.

“Third Grade Was the Best”

Rav Ephraim’s influence on Memphis was felt equally by adults and children. Even though he spent his afternoons and evenings corresponding with Rav Moshe, Rav Shach, Rav Ovadiah Yosef, and the entire spectrum of gedolim of the last generation (the basis for his eight-volume Sh’eilos U’Tshuvos Rivevos Ephraim, an encyclopedic work with thousands of teshuvos addressing virtually every topic in contemporary halachah), he somehow never found it beneath his dignity to teach third grade in the day school, a position he held for decades. Taking off his jacket, putting on a huge smile, he left the boys and girls in his tutelage with lasting memories of the joy of Torah.

The incongruity of a rabbi with a long beard teaching in the day school was not entirely lost on his students, many of whom had been raised in only moderately observant homes or even completely unobservant ones. “Third grade was the most fun year I ever had,” declares Mrs. Miriam Kahane, today a teacher in a prominent Jerusalem seminary. “As a child, I’d heard so many negative stereotypes about Torah Jews, and once I was in Rabbi Greenblatt’s class, I could no longer believe any of them. I learned that Torah Jews are normal, they love humanity, and they love life. They’re not antiquated people from Europe, they’re Rabbi Greenblatt.”

Rav Ephraim’s lessons went far beyond the text; he taught his third-graders to pick up little pieces of paper from the floor, not to lean back in their chairs, and even how to cross the street. “At dismissal time, Rabbi Greenblatt would come out to the parking lot and be the traffic guard,” says Mrs. Kahane. “At the time, I wondered if it was his job, but later I realized that it was just another expression of his love for Jewish children.”

Although they adored Rabbi Greenblatt, the children in his classes had no inkling of his greatness. “I knew he was special, I knew he was very religious, but it didn’t strike me how different he was because he was so one with the people,” comments Mrs. Kahane. “It was only when I left for Israel at 18 that I started to grasp it. We had this amazing talmid chacham in Memphis, and we didn’t even know it. That was his greatness.”

In fact, recalls Rebbetzin Deena (Fink) Tagger, another former Memphian, “when I was dating my husband, Rabbi Nissim Tagger, and mentioned Rav Ephraim, his reaction was, ‘The Rivevos Ephraim was your third grade teacher? Are you kidding me?’

It was no joke; but Rav Ephraim’s classes were great fun for the kids. “He always had a smile, a great sense of fun about him,” says Rebbetzin Tagger. “He used to tell us ‘Benny stories,’ about a mischievous kid who was always getting into trouble. He would use them as a reward in class — if we were good we’d get a Benny story.”

Rebbetzin Tagger’s sister, Sarah Wachtel, recalls spending Shabbos in the Greenblatt home as a third grader, when her parents traveled to Eretz Yisrael. “He used to have all the kids over for Shabbos,” she says matter-of-factly, “especially the ones who didn’t live in the area. He just exuded fun and connectability — he was like another zeide.”

In between the fun and jokes, real lessons slipped in. “Every time we’d give him shalach manos, he’d explain how we were being a shaliach for a mitzvah,” says Mrs. Wachtel, who currently lives in Ramat Beit Shemesh. “Later, when my children delivered our shalach manos to him, he taught them the same concept.”

In addition to teaching in the day school, Rav Ephraim gave bar mitzvah lessons to all the boys in town, assisted by his wife (who used to sit in the shul’s ezras nashim correcting the boys when they made a mistake). At various times he also taught Gemara to the seventh- and eighth-graders, and a halachah shiur in the girls’ high school, a class that is remembered fondly by Mrs. Wachtel, who admits, “but we didn’t appreciate his genius.”

A Winning Combination

No discussion of Rav Ephraim could be complete without mention of his rebbetzin, who was his equal partner in everything he did. From the time of her arrival in Memphis as a young kallah just after sheva brachos, Rebbetzin Miriam made the community her own, learning with the women and lovingly educating the children in the day school as their first grade teacher. “Even when you misbehaved, she and Rav Ephraim made it pleasant to be disciplined,” recalls Rebbetzin Tagger. “They educated in darchei noam. I remember her peanut butter balls — whenever you went to her house, she’d give you a treat.”

Their home was open to one and all, yet the Greenblatts maintained their strict halachic standards and personal principles. “They invited you into their world,” says Rebbetzin Tagger. “All you had to do was want to learn, to find your way to closeness to HaKadosh Baruch Hu, and they would be His emissaries, opening the door to their home, to their wisdom, to their simple, unshakable emunah. There was no pretense, no politics, no agenda to their belief system. It was Torah in its purest, sweetest form.”

It was Rebbetzin Miriam who helped make Rav Ephraim who he was, points out Rabbi Silver. “Left to his own devices, Rav Ephraim would have sat and learned in a back room all day. She made him accessible to everyone. Her outgoing personality together with his warmth created a winning combination. ”

Like Rav Ephraim, Rebbetzin Miriam was known for her warmth and happiness, as well as for her sense of humor. “Both of them were always smiling,” says Rebbetzin Tagger. Morah Greenblatt’s impact on generations of day school children is immeasurable; one prominent educator in Jerusalem recalls how he decided to become Torah observant as a six-year-old in her class, even though his parents weren’t shomer Shabbos.

Rebbetzin Greenblatt’s fingerprints could be felt both in her home and out of it. Mrs. Kahane remembers seeing “Mrs. Greenblatt and the ladies” preparing the most lavish Seudah Shlishis in the Anshei Sphard shul on Shabbos afternoon — complete with Duncan Hines cakes, crackers, and herring. When you walked into their home, “you felt like this has to be what Israel is like. This is holiness. Even if you didn’t exactly know what holiness was, you smelled the challahs, you saw the sefarim. Their home just exuded it.”

As a teenager, Mrs. Kahane often saw the Greenblatts in Memphis’s one and only kosher restaurant. “Every single person who walked into that restaurant — even people completely distant from Torah — would flock over to their table. They’d talk and talk and wouldn’t let the poor rabbi and rebbetzin eat. And afterward they’d say [here Mrs. Kahane assumes a drawling Southern accent] ‘religious people aren’t my speed, but those Greenblatts, they’re different.

He Never Really Left

In 2002, tragedy rocked the Memphis kehillah when Rebbetzin Greenblatt was hit by a car while walking with a friend and fell into a coma. The stunned community rallied with Tehillim gatherings and extra learning in her zechus, setting up rotations so that she wouldn’t be alone in the hospital during the months that followed. When Rebbetzin Miriam ultimately passed away, several women in the community stepped in to fill her place in Rav Ephraim’s home, preparing his meals, doing his laundry, and attending to his medical needs.

“It was as much of a reflection on her as it was on him that people realized they had to step in,” comments a community member. “People saw her sacrifice on his behalf, and they wanted to fill that role too.”

Despite Rav Ephraim’s grief and devastation, he remained involved in the community, giving shiurim and teaching privately as before. “My two older boys had the zechus of learning with him,” relates Mrs. Wachtel. “Even in his 70s, he was still the same — funny, relatable, with it.”

In 2009, Rav Ephraim announced that he was moving to Eretz Yisrael, where two of his married daughters lived. The community tried to talk him out of it, but to no avail. “Even when he left, he didn’t really leave,” says one of his devoted followers. “He kept his Memphis phone number, and he’d answer it just like he was a few blocks away.”

Memphians visiting the Holy Land would make Rav Ephraim’s Har Nof apartment one of their first stops. Surrounded by his sefarim, Rav Ephraim continued to learn one-on-one with people, old and young alike, even as his health waned. His memories of Memphis kept him smiling, and everyone who spoke to him felt he was a friend.

He had returned to Eretz Yisrael, and he’d been successful, just as Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer had assured him years before. Memphis, Tennessee, touched by Rav Ephraim, would never again be the sleepy town far from Torah that it was when he arrived.

Like Iron

Perhaps Rav Ephraim’s external persona, of a smiling, genial zeide, was intended to hide his genius, for his greatness in Torah is undeniable. As the author of eight volumes of Shu”t Rivevos Ephraim, and several more volumes on Chumash, Rav Ephraim was a prolific writer and a brilliant posek. When it came to halachah, however, he was “like iron,” says one of his former talmidos. “His soft personality changed, and he was Rav Moshe’s talmid all the way.”

Anyone who visited Rav Ephraim’s house was immediately struck by the sheer volume of sefarim in it. Rav Menachem Greenblatt recalls, as a child, boxes of sefarim being delivered from Beigeleisen’s bookstore in New York. There were sefarim in every room in the house, including the attic and the storerooms in the backyard. “Rav Ephraim could put his hands on whatever he was looking for,” recalls Mr. Larry Brown. By the time Rav Ephraim moved back to Eretz Yisrael in 2009, this collection numbered an impressive 10,000 volumes.

When people sent Rav Ephraim a sh’eilah, its level of complexity made no difference to him. “It could have been the easiest thing — which shoe should I tie first — but he would address it with absolute seriousness,” says Rabbi Yehudah Silver. “I used to watch him go through the mekoros, trying to find the best way to answer each particular individual.”

The notion that someone sitting in Memphis could be so deeply involved in Torah is mind-boggling, especially since he had other responsibilities as well, notes Rabbi Joel Finkelstein of Anshei Sphard. “When I first came to the shul as a young rav, it was a bit intimidating to know that there was a well-known posek sitting there, listening to my divrei Torah. Yet he didn’t make too many comments, didn’t interfere. He sat in the back seat, but he was in the front.”

“We Don’t Realize How Much We Owe Him”

Rav Ephraim’s students never relinquished their connection with him, calling him to daven for them or to answer their sh’eilos even decades later. One young mother recalls how she visited Rav Ephraim with her family every Erev Rosh Hashanah to receive a brachah.

“When I was expecting my sixth child,” she relates, “the doctors told me that I had all the soft markers for a Down syndrome child. Distraught, my husband and I shared the prediction with Rav Ephraim. He looked at us with a twinkle in his eye and said, ‘It’s nothing that Yom Kippur can’t fix.’

“Baruch Hashem, I had a beautiful, healthy baby.”

Once Rav Ephraim had connected with you, he never let go. “When my husband wrote his sefer [on Maseches Shabbos], Rav Ephraim was thrilled to write him a haskamah,” says Rebbetzin Deena Tagger, whose husband is rosh yeshivah of Yeshivas Bircas HaTorah in Jerusalem. “‘You’re married to a Memphian, we’re landsleit,’ he’d say. Whatever you needed, he was your teacher for the rest of your life.”

Another former student now living in Jerusalem says, “For me, the Greenblatts are an example of what people can do when they are totally committed to Torah. If you want to build a Torah life in the middle of a desert, you can do it. There doesn’t have to be any compromise.

“Rav Ephraim built people without them even realizing it,” she adds. “We don’t even realize how much we owe him.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 496)