Rabbi Mayer Apfelbaum’s Boro Park basement housed reels of Torah treasures
iftieth Street near 18th Avenue is one of Boro Park’s busiest corners, and Erev Rosh Hashanah is one of the Jewish year’s busiest days. Yet just hours before the year 5779 turned into 5780, the intersection came to a standstill.
The reason? A levayah was taking place outside the modest Apfelbaum home, where the monumental Torah Tapes enterprise was located for decades. Its founder, Mayer Apfelbaum, had expressed the wish that after his passing his aron be brought to his house, so that the Torah that had flowed forth like an endless river from its portals to multitudes of Jews could accompany him on his last journey. And so, for a half-hour, the frenetic Erev Yom Tov activity ground to a halt as Boro Park paid a tearful tribute to one of its noblest citizens.
Mayer Dovid Apfelbaum was born in the pre-war Galician-Polish town of Hermanova, not far from Lizhensk. With his father barely eking out a living as a peddler of wares, Mayer and his five siblings often made due with a soup his mother would make from nothing more than potato peels. Once, the family procured a treasure — an orange! — which their mother promptly divided up for her children to feast on.
Mayer and his brother would travel to an uncle of theirs in another town who was well-off enough to hire a melamed for his children, spending days or weeks at a time with their cousins there. In the fall of 1939, the Apfelbaum brothers were on their way to their uncle’s town when war broke out, making it impossible to reach their destination, or to return home. Never again would they see their parents and siblings, all of whom, together with virtually every other Jew in their hometown, perished at the hands of the Nazis.
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