The first thing I thought was, This guy is a treasure. The second thing I thought was, I don’t know a single girl who will date him
Shani Leiman with Zivia Reischer
G
avriel came to see me when he was 26. He’d been learning in a small yeshivah and was ready to start dating. As we talked, I learned he’d grown up in Hicksville, a small town in Vermont.
“I didn’t realize there was a frum community there!” I commented.
“There wasn’t,” he replied. “We were borderline religious-traditional. I knew how to read Hebrew, and we sort of celebrated some Yamim Tovim. I didn’t become seriously frum until I was in college.”
When he finished his degree, Gavriel (then Gabe) had done something courageous — instead of jumping headfirst into the race to build his résumé, he took off a couple of years to learn in yeshivah full-time.
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