True Tales from the Corners of Our World
MYgrandfather often spoke about his old friend, Nechemia Kroizer, from back in Radin, who — like my father — survived the war, married, and moved to New York. He did very well for himself, but he and his wife, Ida, never had any children. I had grown up hearing my grandfather talking about his friend Nechemia, and I thought about naming a child after him one day.
That day came when my wife and I moved to Los Angeles. She was expecting a baby, and Nechemia Kroizer had passed away. When our son was born, we named him Yosef after another relative, and Nechemia after my grandfather’s friend. Ida Kroizer was so moved by our gift of continuity to her husband that she sent us a $1,000 bond for the baby.
My wife and I had always pined for the life we had lived in Eretz Yisrael, and we’d desperately wanted to return. But our family was growing, and we both worked in chinuch, so this was a real sh’eilah. Whenever I visited my rosh yeshivah in Philadelphia, Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky, I always posed this question to him.
“You are teaching Torah here,” Rav Shmuel would reply, “and you need to remain in the States.”
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