Iwill never forget that tap.
It was the fall of 1965 my first zeman at the Philadelphia yeshivah. Like everyone else I slept in the dormitory. Early one Wednesday morning I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was the rosh yeshivah Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky shlita. He never woke up the bochurim — there was a vekker for that. “Your father is sick ” he said. My father Rav Dovid Bender was a healthy 53-year-old who served as a menahel in Torah Vodaath back in Brooklyn. “You are going home ” Rav Shmuel continued “and Reb Elya [Svei] and I will accompany you.”
I had a sense of foreboding the entire train ride but it was only when we arrived at Manhattan’s West 4th Street station and I saw scores of my parents’ relatives and friends that I realized that my father was not sick. He had been niftar — and I had a new status: yasom.
Baruch Hashem I was never mistreated as a result of my newfound status. Returning home I was fortunate to be cared for by my mother Rebbetzin Basia Bender; my brother-in-law Rav Chaim Leib Epstein; and my paternal grandfather Rav Avrohom Bender zichronam livracha. But I was a yasom. So I can relate to a yasom’s pain.
That is why I feel compelled to draw the tzibbur’s attention to a widespread problem: a callousness bordering on cruelty with which many of Klal Yisrael’s orphan boys and girls are being inadvertently treated.
