The chavrusas:Dean Henry Abramson and Rabbi Natan Gamedze, Ohr Sameach
It was the unlikeliest of pairings: a Swazi prince and a Toronto PhD candidate. But as they squared off over their open gemaras at Yeshiva Ohr Somayach in Yerushalayim, each found depth, meaning, and connection.
The year was 1992. Henry Abramson remembers his younger self as an overly confident intellectual enjoying a year-long sabbatical in Israel. He used that opportunity to immerse himself in his first yeshivah experience as a baal teshuvah, but faced a significant obstacle finding a chavrusa whose learning style dovetailed with his own. He shared his frustrations with his maggid shiur, who turned to the rosh yeshivah, Rav Mendel Weinbach, for help.
“They unleashed a secret weapon on me — Nati Gamedze,” recalls Abramson, now an academic dean at Touro College and a highly respected lecturer who has authored six books and numerous scholarly articles.
Like Abramson, Gamedze was anything but typical. A relatively recent convert to Judaism who hailed from Swaziland’s royal family, Gamedze had graduated Oxford University with honors and was fluent in 14 languages. His journey to Judaism was equally unconventional — after getting closed out of a course in Russian at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand, Gamedze noticed someone reading a book in an unfamiliar script that ran from right to left. Looking to add another language to his already impressive repertoire, he decided to register for a class in Hebrew and the rest, as they say, was history. Gamedze found himself inexplicably drawn to Judaism.
Create a free account to keep reading.
