In the Soviet Union of the 1970s, engineering graduate Chanoch Lerner was branded a refusenik for petitioning to emigrate while supposedly harboring “state secrets.” Today his “secrets” are the intricacies of his exclusive craft, which he shares with other immigrant yungeleit, as a manufacturer of top-quality tefillin.
Rabbi Lerner had learned from his own painful experience in Russia how vital it is to have expertise and reliability all down the line when it comes to tefillin.
“It was extremely difficult to put on tefillin every day in Russia” he recalls of the years as a baal teshuvah in the Soviet Union before being allowed to emigrate. “On one occasion I had to travel several days by train to a distant city and it was dangerous to be spotted putting them on. Every day I broke my head figuring out how to do so without anyone noticing. In the end I went into the gap between coaches locked the doors on each side and straddling the crossbars rapidly put on my tefillin recited Shema and davened.”
Yet when the tefillin that he had donned daily with such mesirus nefesh were checked in Israel he was told that they were probably invalid perhaps minimally kosher by some halachic leniency.
“I have noticed that many tefillin distributed to baalei teshuvah are of inferior standard because the distributors try to buy in bulk for cheaper” he notes. “In Israel too where over twenty thousand pairs are sold a month most are made in giant factories where five to ten people produce up to a thousand pairs a month. What are the quality and kashrus of these tefillin?”
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