The People Come First  

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Photos: Naftoli Goldgrab

Before every Yom Tov, a group of talmidim in my hometown of Montreal join to hear a chaburah from Rav Moshe Mendel Glustein, rosh yeshivah of Yeshiva Gedolah of Montreal.

Covid brought change to our chaburah as it did to everything else, and now it’s become a Zoom chaburah — disjointed faces on a screen, others calling in — as the Rosh Yeshivah tries to summon up the spirit of the beis medrash through the lens of a camera.

But the digital format does have an advantage. It’s brought us some new faces, talmidim who don’t live in Montreal but now have the chance to hear the rebbi speak in real-time and wouldn’t miss it.

Shortly before this past Pesach, the Rosh Yeshivah mused to me about having seen the face of Rabbi Moshe Hauer on the bottom right of the screen during his most recent chaburah. “I don’t know,” Rav Glustein remarked, “how he can find half an hour a few days before Pesach, when he’s paskening and helping families and guiding people, to sit and listen. It makes no sense.”