Rabbi Avraham Kelman z”l’s greatest achievement: the founding of a yeshivah back in the 1950s against all odds, and four generations of Prospect Park alumnae.
W hen Dina Feldman (née Kelman) was a little girl her grandmother would keep her spellbound with tales of the Old Country — a place of greedy landowners and righteous rebbes how the holy tzaddik would always vanquish the evil poritz. Dina was especially fascinated by the stories of the 36 hidden tzaddikim who hold up each generation with their righteousness. “I used to think my father was one of them” she says wistfully.
Whether her father Rabbi Avraham Kelman z”l was one of those 36 is of course G-d’s hidden secret. But he was best known as a chinuch visionary and maverick of girls’ education as founder of Prospect Park Yeshiva in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn back in 1952. Yet he was also an impressive talmid chacham authoring six volumes of Perspectives on the Parsha of the Week. During his 96-year journey through This World which came to an end on Shabbos 13 Av (August 5) he traversed several continents and even more historical shifts while remaining firmly anchored in Torah — the fuel that kept him pushing forward and building despite life’s crushing challenges. “Torah was what was vital to him and that’s the language he wanted me to absorb ” relates his only son Rabbi Leib Kelman current principal of the Prospect Park Yeshiva and longtime rabbi of Prospect Park Jewish Center/ Ohel Yitzhack Congregation. “When he spoke to me it was always about learning.”
Yet it was the combination of his impeccable middos and self-mastery and willpower that was his legacy to his family friends and close to four generations of Prospect Park Yeshiva alumnae. That’s how he was able to convince postwar parents to enroll their children in yeshivah saving them from a life of assimilation. He would knock on doors invite the family for Shabbos help every public-school student catch up to grade level.
When Prospect Park switched over to an all-girls’ school he was the guardian of their chinuch even in later years when he would traverse the corridors he built in a wheelchair. He was an imposing presence over six feet tall and lean in build yet his daughter Dina remembers him as “a big teddy bear.” He was unfailingly gentle to his talmidos and a rodef shalom in his dealings with congregants parents mechutanim neighbors. At the same time he possessed a steely self-discipline rarely seen in later generations and set immensely high standards for himself and often for others as well.
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