Zei A Mentsch

In 1947, a 22-year-old survivor of multiple Nazi slave labor camps named Shlomo Carlebach stepped off a boat in New York Harbor. Waiting to greet him at dockside was his uncle Rabbi Naftali Carlebach (whose own son Shlomo — born, like his first cousin, in Germany in 1925 — would gain renown as the Jewish world’s foremost composer of soulful songs). Although he could not have known it then, this young man, orphaned of both parents and penniless, was destined to become a marbitz Torah whose spoken and written word has touched thousands of bnei Torah and bnos Yisrael for well over a half-century.

Rabbi Naftali Carlebach’s son-in-law, Rabbi Simcha Zissel Levovitz, son of the legendary Mirrer mashgiach Rav Yerucham, took responsibility for helping Shlomo resume his Torah education, interrupted for years by slave labor camps and death marches. It was no small matter to find an appropriate yeshivah for a young man in his twenties who hadn’t held a Gemara in his hands since age 16, and after dismissing several other options, Reb Simcha Zissel said, “Maybe Rav Yitzchok Hutner will give you a chance.”

And so, off Shlomo went to Mesivta Rabbi Chaim Berlin, where the rosh yeshivah’s farher consisted of asking him to recite a Mishnah of his choosing. He selected the Mishnah in Sanhedrin stating that once a beis din has reached a guilty verdict in a capital case, it must wait until the next day to issue its ruling. When he had finished explaining the Mishnah, Shlomo asked Rav Hutner whether he was accepted to the yeshivah. The Rosh Yeshivah replied with characteristic wit, “You just read the applicable halachah, no? Check back with me tomorrow…”

Shlomo was in, and Rav Hutner paired him as a chavrusa with a fellow Yekke, Yosef Loebenstein, to help him make up for lost time and propel him ahead in his learning. Fast-forward two decades, to 1967, when the yeshivah moved into its new Flatbush quarters on Coney Island Avenue, with a new mashgiach ruchani, too: Rav Shlomo Carlebach. Following a dozen years as a very successful mesivta rebbi, he would be a mentor to talmidim in the very yeshivah whose portals he’d tentatively entered so many years earlier.