My childhood neighbor, Rav Shloime Mandel, rosh yeshivah of Yeshiva of Brooklyn, told me an amazing story
Last year, when I reconnected with my childhood neighbor, Rav Shloime Mandel, rosh yeshivah of Yeshiva of Brooklyn, told me an amazing story.
Iwrote a book titled Class Acts: True Stories about the Power of Caring (2013, ArtScroll) to showcase stories about educators who changed their students’ lives. I dedicated it to some of my own rebbeim, and to one other person who played a small but crucial role in my life: “Rabbi Shloime Mandel of Yeshivah of Brooklyn, an old neighbor of ours back in Flatbush, who reassured my father that ‘the wild ones always turn out the best.’ ”
I had not been in touch with Rabbi Mandel in many years, but we reconnected last year in an unlikely turn of events. On a visit to Eretz Yisrael in Elul 2024, he was waiting for a Kosel bus at 4:30 a.m. He needed help understanding how to pay his fare, and a woman nearby was able to explain it to him. That woman was my mother, and when they discovered they had been neighbors in Flatbush years earlier, he asked my mother to have me give him a call.
We met up a few days later in an Ezras Torah apartment, and the years fell away. We reminisced about East 7th between O and P and davening at Milstein’s shul, and caught up on life events. In the course of our conversation, Rabbi Mandel told me a story that proved yet again what a master of chinuch he is. Here’s the story in his words.
Create a free account to keep reading.
