Open House

Khal Adas Yereim of Kew Gardens, Queens, was always a special place.

It started out in Rav Yaakov Teitelbaum’s home, and we all felt like family. I davened there with my father, and today I daven there alongside my children and grandchildren. I was fortunate to perform the bris of my first great-grandson in “Teitelbaum’s Shul.” It’s still hard to believe that it’s almost 50 years since Rav Yaakov Teitelbaum passed away. But his legacy lives on, as the shul is still going strong.

If you look down the block at the neat row of neighboring houses, lined up in all their suburban glory, you would never guess that the plain little brown stucco right next door was once a makom Torah u’tefillah. It held so many voices and so many lives. The echoes of those voices still resound, both in my heart and next door in the shul’s new home.

Years ago, my father was a young mohel living in Brooklyn, facing a lot of competition for parnassah. My parents were considering moving to a new, younger community, and our cousin Reb Elimelech Tress told them that a prominent tzaddik had opened a shul in Kew Gardens. He suggested that the neighborhood would be appropriate. My family moved to Kew Gardens in 1952, when I was a young boy, and though the community was mostly older, our cousin was right. Kew Gardens eventually drew new and younger families, and today it’s a thriving community — as pleasant and warm as it was when I was a boy.