Every Child’s Heart

Rav Scheiner, who passed away last year at age 98, would often mention how one day in 1937, Rabbi Avraham Bender — a menahel of the Slonimer yeshivah in Poland turned emissary of New York’s Yeshivas Rabbeinu Yitzchok Elchanan — came to Pittsburgh and stayed with the Scheiners, Polish immigrants whose kashrus he trusted. There he met their teenaged son Isadore, who has just graduated from Peabody High School and was planning on going to college to study mathematics.

Born in 1922, Isadore was a regular American kid — an avowed baseball fan with an aptitude for math. His religious parents sent him by trolley car to an after-school Talmud Torah, but by the time he graduated high school, he was well on the way to vanishing into the great American melting pot.

But that didn’t deter Rabbi Bender, who, turning to his host, asked, “Why don’t you send your son to yeshivah?”

Mr. Scheiner, who didn’t know that there even were yeshivos in America, agreed to let his only son accompany Rabbi Bender to the yeshivah in New York.