Abie, the brilliantly creative musical composer who became a mechanech in disguise, marvels at how Reb Shaya is still at it 40 years later, helping young Jews find their own individual melodies of meaning in Yiddishkeit.
The external indicators of how a person looks and what he does don’t necessarily tell you very much about who and what he truly is. The trick is to look for the inner story threading itself through the outer layers of another person’s life.
The topic is on my mind after a conversation with Reb Avrohom Yom Tov Rotenberg — sometimes known as Abie — who was in town recently for a “Musical Evening of Connection,” to benefit the chinuch and kiruv work of Rabbi Shaya Cohen, rosh yeshivah of Yeshiva Zichron Aryeh in Bayswater, New York. But it was also an evening of reconnection between Abie and Reb Shaya, his friend and long-ago mentor.
Their paths first crossed in 1974, when Abie, a local Queens boy, was a bochur in Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim in Forest Hills, New York. Reb Shaya was a dynamic force in the yeshivah’s kollel. He learned with many bochurim and invited them to his house for meals, and Abie was one of them. A year later, their connection deepened when Reb Shaya headed west, to LA’s San Fernando Valley suburbs, to start a yeshivah high school, and Abie came along. He became Rabbi Rotenberg, teaching ninth grade.
Back then, the Valley was a Jewish desert, and Rabbi Cohen’s high school was a big mix of kids from shomer Shabbos and non-observant homes.
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