Idealistic Insider

The founding board of AARTS was composed of three leading roshei yeshivah as well as several esteemed Orthodox Jewish academics. It was only natural for Dr. Lachman, who in his position carried responsibility for the nation’s largest school system, to be chosen as one of the latter group.

Upon joining the AARTS board, Dr. Lachman became acquainted with the renowned askan Rabbi Naftoli Neuberger, executive director of Ner Yisroel Rabbinical College, who had been deeply involved in the formation of AARTS from the outset. When it came time for Dr. Lachman to decide where to send his own son Eliezer, then a twelfth-grader in Boro Park’s Yeshiva Toras Emes Kaminetz, he shared his uncertainty with Rabbi Neuberger.

“Send him to me for a year,” Rabbi Neuberger replied. Dr. Lachman did — and that year has yet to end. Rabbi Eliezer Lachman has been in Baltimore ever since, becoming a leading talmid of the great Ner Yisroel rosh yeshivah Rav Yaakov Weinberg, who was also on the AARTS board. To date, Reb Eliezer has published two well-received seforim containing his rebbi’s shiurim on Rambam, and is now is a rosh kollel and a recognized figure on Baltimore’s Torah scene.

Not long after Dr. Lachman decided to send his son to Ner Yisroel, he received a phone call from a professor who wanted to share his worries about his own son. The young man, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, was in the process of becoming a baal teshuvah and had been sending his non-frum father newspaper clippings describing Seymour Lachman’s career highlights in an effort to demonstrate that one can be religiously observant and still achieve success in the world at large.