He Was Simply ‘The Rosh Yeshivah’ ”,On a recent Motzaei Shabbos, Mishpacha’s Eytan Kobre, a talmid of Rav Moshe Feinstein’s Yeshiva of Staten Island, joined some longtime friends for a Melaveh Malkah. It was a rare opportunity for chaverim to share precious memories of Reb Moshe, and the years they spent accompanying a true melech through the byways of his Torah kingdom. Invited for a meal, by evening’s end they had experienced something truly magical.
Walking up the steps to the Lakewood home of our hosts Rabbi and Mrs. Pinchus Gershon Waxman I realized that this wasn’t going to be just another get-together with old friends — I was about to enter a veritable time capsule that would transport us to what was perhaps the most special time in our lives.
It was a simpler halcyon time to be sure before the onset of the pressures and complications that adult life invariably brings. But those years — beclouded now by the mists of time yet at the same time as palpable and immediate as yesterday’s events — were special for another reason: the zchus we’d had to bask in the warm brilliant glow of a man — a human malach really — whom the world called “Reb Moshe ” but whom we from the moment we set foot in yeshivah and forever after knew only as “the Rosh Yeshivah.”
Each participant in this Melaveh Malkah had spent at least two to three years in the Rosh Yeshivah’s weekly shiur some of us far longer. But Chazal tell us that gedolah shimushah shel Torah yoser milimudah observing and serving a rebbi is greater than studying under him and beyond the shiur we had all experienced the presence of the gadol hador in Staten Island for a full day each week for many years.
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As I walk through the door and into Memory Lane my mind wanders to that far-off world.
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