Collector’s Edition

Nestled quietly at the far end of Boro Park’s bustling Sixteenth Avenue shopping strip is a smallish, non-descript seforim store known simply as “Biegeleisen’s.” To enter its plain-looking portals, is, in the words of Rabbi Moshe Weinberger, rav of Woodmere’s Aish Kodesh kehillah and a self-described seforim addict, “to step into a time warp. It’s walking into a world of 50–60 years ago, back when seforim stores weren’t about computer inventory lists, but a place where the staff has an infectious love of everything seforim-related, living and breathing the seforim.”

At the center of this cauldron of passion for sifrei kodesh and the Jews who write and publish and buy and learn them, stood its eponymous proprietor, Reb Shloime Biegeleisen. His passing in March of this year at age 92 meant the loss of someone who, over many decades, played a pivotal role in the American Torah world’s coming of age, not just as a leading seller of Jewish books but as a champion of them.

In an age of neatly designed, brightly lit seforim superstores, Biegeleisen’s has resolutely remained what it always was: One not-very-large room, lined floor-to-ceiling with bookcases that long ago saw better days, crammed with tomes ancient and contemporary, of every size and color. The highest shelves are accessible only with a rolling ladder that intrepid souls clamber up in pursuit of every aficionado’s dream: to discover that impossible-to-find sefer that will enrich his carefully nurtured personal collection or complete a priceless set.

In the room’s center stands the seforim-lover’s idea of a smorgasbord: A table spanning the store’s length, laden with a seemingly random assortment of the most delectable of intellectual and spiritual delicacies, hundreds of newly published volumes in every imaginable area of interest — from lomdus to history and biography, Kabbalah to halachah and mussar, philosophy to Tanach, and far, far more. Several smaller tables off to the side cater to new Chumash titles and offset copies of out-of-print works from centuries past.