Changing Lives 

Our father, Rabbi Hillel Belsky, was born in Brooklyn in 1946, to a rich mesorah.

Despite his litvishe roots, our father’s grandfather, Reb Yehuda Leib Tzireles, frequented the Slonimer Rebbe’s tishen in Mush, Russia. The Rebbe urged him to become a melamed, but the Zeide resisted; he didn’t want to support himself through Torah, preferring instead to try his hand at business. But following a narrow escape from an accident in his mill, he embraced his destiny as a melamed tinokos, paving the way for future doros.

His grandson, our zeide, Rabbi Meir Belsky, was an only son born to Russian immigrants. While his grandparents were talmidei chachamim and tzidkaniyos, our zeide would likely have gone the way of so many others had his determined mother not insisted on registering him in cheder. Despite the erosion of Yiddishkeit in America in the ’20s and ’30s, she wanted to ensure her son could converse with her revered father. This also carved a pathway for generations to come.

In our father’s words:

Years later, when my brother and I started yeshivah, we were the only ones in the entire extended family who could interact with Zeide. He was very old and lived in the Home of the Sages of Israel on the Lower East Side. On Sundays, the family would gather to visit him. He would come out of the beis medrash and greet everyone. Then he would say goodbye, explaining that he had to return to his learning. My brother and I could go into the beis medrash and recite Chumash and Rashi and receive candies from his shtender.

In what he would later describe as a miracle, our grandfather returned to New York from California, where his mother summered for her health, to find his yeshivah high school registration canceled due to insufficient enrollment for the ninth grade. A meshulach visiting his father’s furniture store encouraged Zeide to travel to Brooklyn to meet Rav Yitzchok Hutner, who was assembling a high-school group of five boys. Zeide would be the sixth. In my father’s words: