The chavrusas:Rav Dov Freund and Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak Zupnik, Kiryat Sefer
When the phone rings late at night in Yaakov Yitzchak Zupnik’s Kiryat Sefer home, he knows the likely reason: his chavrusa has finally found a teirutz to a knotty issue they discussed a few hours earlier. Within seconds, the grogginess will fade and he’ll be fully immersed in a spirited back-and-forth with his chavrusa.
In this case, however, the chavrusa is not another young father from a similar background. Yaakov Yitzchak is American-born (his family made aliyah when he was a baby), and he learned in Tifrach. Yet he spends hours of his day learning with the rosh kollel of Kiryat Sefer’s trailblazing Kollel Beis Abba, Rav Dov Freund — a man decades his senior.
“I’ve been learning with the Rosh Kollel for five years now,” he says. “Our backgrounds are completely different. But as soon as we began learning together, it just clicked — I felt like he really spoke my language. The Torah connects us.”
Yaakov Yitzchak describes their learning sessions as sometimes stretching until 3 a.m. They can also traverse immense geographic distances; when Rav Freund is overseas raising money for his kollel, he picks up the phone to share new insights into the sugya with his faithful chavrusa back home.
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