Always Climbing

“It all started when, after serving as mashgiach ruchani in Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim for 25 years, my father decided to leave and was at a crossroads about what to do,” remembers Rav Simcha, who was a bochur at the time. “My uncle, his brother Rav Shmuel, and my brother-in-law, Rav Chaim Dov Altusky — my sister Fruma Rochel’s husband — thought it would be a good idea for him to open his own yeshivah.”

And so, Rav Scheinberg — who famously left the comforts of America with his bride, Rebbetzin Bessie, and joined the Mir yeshivah in Poland for five years in the 1930s, where there was no running water or electricity — opened Torah Ore in 1960 with six students in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, whose Jewish population at the time was predominantly Sephardic. It quickly grew and attracted many local Sephardi boys, whom the Scheinbergs treated as their own sons — raising money to marry them off and even paying their dentist bills.

“My parents were living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, so my father would travel every day,” says Rav Simcha, who had been learning in Lakewood. “I got married a short time later so we lived close by. When my father opened the yeshivah, he asked my mother, ‘Will you help me make this happen?’ And she readily agreed. On the first day of the zeman, after Succos, my parents walked into the yeshivah, my father with seforim and my mother with a basket of food for the bochurim’s lunch. My mother did everything for them. She worked in the office and dealt with the banks… Everything.” Life might have continued like that, but then something happened that would turn their lives around.

Rav Scheinberg’s father passed away, and Rav Scheinberg wanted him to be buried in Eretz Yisrael, which he arranged.