Regular, long-time leiners have a special relationship with every sedra of the year. Some trade secrets from veterans of the klaf
Every baal korei has his own path to the bimah — the mentors, encouragement, and opportunities that led him from tentative leining to confident mastery.
My father arrived in America as a seven-year-old in the early 1920s. I don’t know how he learned to lein, but by age 20, he was a skilled baal korei, and he taught me and my three younger brothers to lein for our bar mitzvahs.
Leining was actually the catalyst for our family’s close connection to Rav Yitzchak Hutner and the Yeshivas Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin family. When Rav Hutner arrived in America, he looked for a place to daven. When he heard my father lein in a small shul in East New York, he went over to him and said, “I have found a place to daven.”
When I was young, we lived in East New York, and my family davened in the local Young Israel of New Lots. Rav Avraham Pam davened there and said shiur once a week. The shul’s first official rav was Rav Shlomo Freifeld. Later, Rav Yisrael Perkowski, rosh yeshivah of Beis Hatalmud, was the rav. I don’t think the younger generation appreciates how instrumental the Young Israel movement was in keeping Yiddishkeit going in America in the 1930s and 1940s.
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