Full Harvest

Reb Shia Markowitz might just be the most famous askan you never heard of.

Although he’s managed to stay well below the radar, the Monsey resident’s fingerprints are on some of the frum community’s most important initiatives, from decades ago through the present.  Reb Shia’s first claim to fame came early on, as a celebrated summertime hoopster, a magician on the courts who helped bring many a victory to Camp Torah Vodaath (CTV) in the frum sleepaway camp basketball leagues of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

A Boro Park native and Yeshiva Torah Vodaath alumnus, Shia was a learning rebbi in CTV for several years, and the summer after what he thought would be his final year there, the camp asked him to return in the middle of camp season to take over for the mashgiach of Torah Vodaath, Rav Moshe Wolfson. Rav Wolfson gave shiur to the oldest campers but had developed laryngitis.

“I was all of 21 at the time,” he recalls, “and I said, ‘Take over for the Mashgiach? Are you kidding me?’ They said, ‘Shia, due to your basketball fame there’s no one the campers respect more than you. No matter who else we give them, these kids are not going to learn. You can get them into it.’ So I spent a few weeks giving the shiur, and when it was over the kids got together and bought me a watch.”