Here’s My Story: It Didn’t Take A Rocket Scientist

Rabbi Kalman Shor

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My mother came from a Lubavitcher family, that had lived in the chasidic village of Schedrin for generations, and arrived in America with her mother in the 1920s, when she was a little girl. They had intended to go to Brownsville, Brooklyn, but they took the wrong boat and wound up in Brownsville, Texas. Seeing that they didn’t belong there, the immigration authorities deported them across the border, and they had to hitchhike 1,000 kilometers to Mexico City. They spent the next few years there, until they straightened out their papers and made it to Brownsville — in New York.

Meanwhile, my father was a Gerrer chasid from Poland. He survived the war as a slave laborer, first in the local munitions factory and then in Germany, and was eventually liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp. After spending a couple of years in a Displaced Persons’ camp, he made it to the United States. They married in 1952, and I was born a year later.

When the time came, because of my parents’ different backgrounds, there was a discussion about which school I would go to. My grandmother immediately said that I should go to Lubavitch, and ultimately my father agreed. So I went to Lubavitcher Yeshiva for elementary school and high school.

There was no such thing as a “gap year” in those days, but after high school I spent a year studying Torah full-time at the Tomchei Tmimim yeshivah on Ocean Parkway, in Flatbush.

Now, both of my parents came from completely religious homes, and had no doubts about raising me to be observant on a day-to-day basis. However, even though the Rebbe would often discourage yeshivah students from attending college, they came to the conclusion that I needed to go to college after yeshivah.

My grandmother had been widowed back in Russia and remarried after coming to America. Her second husband was a Lubavitcher, and his son — my mother’s step-brother — was a Torah-observant professor of engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He also worked for NASA, on the Mercury and Gemini space programs.

“Sender Yona went to college, and he’s a religious Jew,” his father, my mother’s step-father, told me. “And you’re at least as bright as Sender Yona,” he added, which may or may not have been true.

I was a good boy, so I agreed to try and get into aeronautical engineering, but I wasn’t going to do anything until I received the Rebbe’s blessing.

Meanwhile, my father had fallen seriously sick. He had been hospitalized for a number of health issues, mostly connected to his heart and lungs, but his condition deteriorated to the point that the doctors said that there wasn’t a lot they could do for him. “Let him go home,” they basically said, “and whatever happens,
happens.”

In early 1971, in honor of my birthday, I was able to have an audience with the Rebbe. I prepared a note for the Rebbe beforehand in which I wrote about my father’s condition, of course, and about college. I didn’t even ask whether I should go to college; it was a given that I would go. I just wrote what my parents wanted for me and assumed that the Rebbe would give his blessing.

Preparing me for the audience, my friends told me that the Rebbe would look at me when I came into his room, and then read my note while marking it up with a pencil. Then he would answer me, and watch me as I walked out of the room.

But when I opened the door and walked in, at about 2:00 AM, I noticed that the Rebbe was looking down, his beard pressed against his jacket. Without picking up his head, the Rebbe took my note from me, made his marks, and asked me whether I was called up to the Torah that past Shabbat — as is the Chabad custom before a birthday. He then gave me a blessing for success and a blessing for my father as well.

Then, the volume of his voice picking up suddenly and dramatically, he added: “You should go to learn in a yeshivah next year, and that will help your father, too!” He said those words so forcefully, he was practically yelling. He was still looking down, but I understood that the meeting was over, and so I backed out of the room.

I took the Q train to Brighton Beach, where we lived at the time, and got home at about 3:00 AM. Everybody was asleep, so I went straight to bed.

By the time I woke up late the next morning, neither of my parents were home. My father owned a butcher’s shop, which my mother had taken over during his illness, so I went there and asked her about my father.

“Do you know what happened?” she asked. I didn’t.

“He’s better!”

I did a double take. “What?”

My father had woken up that morning feeling fine, and went straight to the doctor to get everything checked out. He was still at the doctor’s office when I went to the store.

The Rebbe had told me that I should go to yeshivah and that would help my father — and it was as though I received the reward before I even did anything. It wasn’t a complete recovery, but we did have a few more years with him, until his passing five years later.

For some reason, I decided not to tell my parents what the Rebbe had said; I only told them that I was going to yeshivah for another year — without putting it on the Rebbe. At that moment, keeping this information to myself seemed like the right thing to do. They weren’t thrilled that I wasn’t going to college, but I did what I had to do, and the next year I went to the Tomchei Temimim yeshivah in Morristown, New Jersey.

By the end of that year, I decided that I wanted to stay in yeshivah for longer, and when my next birthday rolled around, in 1972, I came for another audience with the Rebbe.

This time, when I knocked on the door and walked in, the Rebbe was looking at me with the warmest smile I ever saw. He watched me as I walked from the door to his desk, smiling all the while — except for when he looked down to read the note I handed to him. Even when he answered me, he smiled as he spoke.

The Rebbe actually talked to me for a while, and several times, I heard the door open and close, as the secretary checked in to make sure that I wasn’t just eating up everyone else’s time.

When it was finally time for me to leave, the Rebbe kept on smiling at me as I walked all the way to the door.

In the end, I didn’t go to college at all. Instead, after I got married, I took a few computer programming courses. I have been in that field since 1981, and things ended up working out just fine. Actually, around the time that I got married and was looking for work, there was a dip in government contracts for aeronautical engineers. So, had I become one — like Sender Yonah — it would not have helped much.

While working as a software engineer, Rabbi Kalman Shor has also been teaching Torah classes and providing other community services at Chabad of Henderson, Nevada, since 2003. He was interviewed in December 2025.