Yehudah Steingot (name changed) is my father’s cousin. Like my father, he was born in Yerushalayim in 1929, and recently, at the age of 91, he made his first trip to chutz l’Aretz to attend the chasunah of his great-grandson.
My cousin had accepted my invitation to stay over at my home and regale me with tales of Eretz Yisrael of long ago, and he was pleasantly surprised to see that in a formerly unbeknown-to-him Jewish outpost called Passaic, there was a shul with around-the-clock minyanim.
One day he announced that now that he is in New York, he would like to visit 770, as he had heard so much about it. He asked me how much the bus and subway would cost, as he began to check how many dollars he had.
It was then I noticed that all he had was a five-dollar bill. The 200 shekalim he had exchanged for dollars had disappeared faster than he imagined they would.
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