"At first I called it the Shoel Umeishiv hotline, but a lot of boys don’t know what a shoel umeishiv is, so we changed it to Dial-a-Rebbi"
Kids come home from school with homework or chazarah, and if they have a question or need some help, ideally they turn to their father or older brother. But what about the boy whose father isn’t home — he’s working late, or the parents are divorced — or whose father doesn’t know the material? That’s where the Dial-a-Rebbi hotline comes in, it’s like a beis horaah line for students with schoolwork. We have rebbeim ready to answer any schoolwork-related questions: helping with a Rashi, teitshing a mishnah, reading a few lines of Gemara, answering a stirah between two gemaras. New York City has Dial-a-Teacher, a program that helps public school kids with homework. Dial-a-Rebbi is for questions in limudei kodesh — a free hotline for schoolwork questions.
I learn with bochurim and younger boys once a week or so; I’ve been doing it for years. So many parents wanted to find a good chavrusa for their kid, so I made these lists of who’s available to be a chavrusa and I went into chavrusashaft shadchanus. When a kid needs a chavrusa, I look at my list to see who’s available, who’d be the perfect match, and I arrange it. I’ve made 100 shidduchim so far. Last Pesach, I noticed there were a lot of boys who didn’t need a chavrusa, but who could use someone to talk to in learning when a question came up. That’s how I got the idea.
At first it was just local, for the boys here in Cleveland, and I asked some rebbeim to be meishivim. We did a test run — I set up a hotline that was open for half an hour a night, and I told local menahalim about it, because that was the easiest way to spread the word.
The feedback was phenomenal! Boys were calling in, meishivim were helping, and menahalim loved it. We decided to spread to Chicago and Detroit, and a few months later, in September, we started telling even more cities in the Midwest. I brought my friend Shmuel Dimarsky on board, he helps a lot with growing the hotline and fundraising to keep it going. After a few months, we went up to an hour and a half for the hotline, and I sent bookmarks with the phone number, and these special pens with lights and clips — I had ordered thousands of them with the phone number — to schools in the US and Canada. When the boys went home with the pens and pulled them out at homework time, they knew what to do!
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