Several months ago, our daughter Shani called and suggested we visit my sister Elsie Blum. Shani had learned that my 93-year-old only surviving sibling had gone through a difficult medical situation and was now recovered. Elsie lives in a retirement community in Fort Worth, Texas. Shani made all the arrangements and insisted on covering all the costs. She drove up from her home in Richmond, Virginia, and we flew out of BWI on a Sunday and returned Monday. It was a wonderful opportunity to visit our Fort Worth family and to spend quality time with my sister. Shani got especially close to her family as she attended LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for a semester and visited the Blums. Elsie has always been close to us and came to all our family simchas.

Sadly, as time goes by and I think back to the people who played a role in my life, I don’t know if I really appreciated all of them. This article is a way to show hakaras hatov to someone who was significant in my early years.

In the 1960s, ehen I came up north from Montgomery, Alabama, for yeshiva, I learned, for the first time, that a large share of my fellow students were children of Holocaust survivors. Indeed, the renaissance of Orthodox Jewry is, to a very great extent, due to the impact of those survivors.

In the town where I grew up, there were hardly any Holocaust survivors. I recall Eric Knurr, who came from Germany. He was actually a relative of the Kranzlers of Baltimore. Mrs. Kranzler, a”h, told me he was a physician in Germany and came from a distinguished family. But aside from knowing his two children, Werner and Evelyn, I do not recall him being active in the shul, due to his owning a small grocery store. There may have been one or two other people who came because of the war, but I do not recall them.

For many Baltimoreans, winter includes motza’ei Shabbos with Rabbi Dr. Dovid Katz. Each Saturday night, starting around 8 p.m., Rabbi Katz continues an ongoing series on Jewish history in the modern era. I have been a faithful attendee for many years. The series started with the end of the Holocaust and the plight of postwar Jewry and continued with Israel’s war of independence. Each year, in about 16 lectures, Rabbi Katz covers several years. Many of these lectures are available online. This year, he is covering the years 2000 through 2004.

A benefit of writing articles for the Where What When is the opportunity to meet interesting people. Recently, Rabbi Dovid Katz asked me to interview one such person, Yair Halevy, who was in Baltimore garnering support for Yeshivat Shavei Chevron. When he is not abroad working for the yeshiva, he is doing post-doctoral work on “Chareidim in Israeli Culture.” Yair has a Ph.D. in Jewish history and thought from Hebrew University. This sounded like an unusual and intriguing combination, and I learned a lot from getting to know him.

Yair told me that he has been coming to Baltimore for 10 years, and he spent over a week here. Perhaps it shows how large and diverse Baltimore is that I had never heard of him before. I asked him his impression of our Jewish community. His response was the same as I have heard from others: “People in Baltimore ‘notnim et halev’; they give their heart.” He and others have told me that they are impressed with the kavod and derech eretz shown to them in Baltimore. “Maybe there are some cities where we raise more money, but Baltimore is tops when it comes to ahavat Yisrael,” he said.

Rabbi Avrohom Leventhal, a former Baltimorean and rebbe at Talmudical Academy, is now head of a major Israeli chesed organization, Lemaan Achai. He was in Baltimore recently, and we took the opportunity to speak with him.

Born in Annapolis, Rabbi Leventhal spent a number of his early years in Salisbury on the Eastern Shore, where his shomer Shabbos family used to host college students for Shabbos. Right after his bar mitzvah, he came to Talmudical Academy in Baltimore and, for the last two years of high school, learned in the Scranton yeshiva. Upon high school graduation, Rabbi Leventhal returned to Baltimore and spent the next six years at Ner Israel: three years in yeshiva and three years in kollel. His wife, Eshkie (neé Swerdloff), of New York, ran a popular daycare group for young children.

Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting a very special young man. Gabriel Yair Shabtai, 29, was married in Israel about six months ago. On December 7^th, he returned from two months of active reserve service in the IDF. Think about that; he had been married for only four months when he got a late night phone call on Simchat Torah informing him that he had been called up. In Hebrew this is called millu’im, the reserves. Israel needed him to get on a plane and come as soon as he could. I asked him if he hesitated. “I didn’t hesitate for a second. I have a responsibility to the Jewish nation. I am not just a son, a brother, and a husband; I am also a soldier, and Am Yisrael is my family.

“My wife, Sarah, was shocked and afraid but also very proud. She was having an Israeli experience in Baltimore. She deserves a medal for being so supportive.”