"I had never heard the kol Torah before, and I didn’t really understand what it was. But I knew that it filled me up"

I grew up in Cleveland in the 1950s. My father, Rav Leizer Sorotzkin, was one of the roshei yeshivah in the Telshe Yeshivah, and he often traveled overseas to raise funds. In the 1950s, air travel was costly and flying frequently was unheard of. When my father left, he was gone for months at a time.

When I was seven years old, my father decided to travel to South America for the first time. This would be an even longer trip than usual. My mother made a remarkable decision: She would use this opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream. As a child, her Jewish education had been cut short by the Holocaust, and she still felt that loss. With my father planning to be away for so long, this was the perfect time for her to make up for it — by moving with us children to Israel for the year to study under the legendary Nechama Leibowitz. She was a brilliant woman who never married — some would say that she was married to learning. She gathered around her a select group of young ladies for an intense course of study.

In Israel, we rented a small apartment in the Geula neighborhood of Yerushalayim from a family called Grunbaum. The Grunbaums daughter Adina was having difficulty finding a shidduch. She was very frum, but she had grown up without being exposed to the primacy of Torah learning — her father was chronically ill and she had no brothers. She had never heard the singsong chant over a Gemara or witnessed the study of Torah for its own sake. Yeshivah bochurim weren’t interested in Adina because she lacked an appreciation of learning, but someone who had not gone to yeshivah wouldn’t be frum enough for her.

Years after we returned to Cleveland, Adina was still single. When she was 28, she decided to come to America in search of a shidduch. We were the closest thing to relatives she had in America, so she asked my parents if she could stay with us. Adina ended up living with us in Cleveland for almost a year before she met her bashert. Like her, he was very frum, but had never had the opportunity to learn in a yeshivah.