The Ballad of the Living Jew

Putting Tefillin on a Yid from Bialystok for the first time in his life. Taken in Warsaw, winter 5766 -from the lost Warsaw Archives I first noticed him about a week after I came to Poland. He would come Shabbos afternoon for the mincha prayers; sitting in the back of synagogue, he would pray silently, then leave. His dark almond eyes narrowed in concentration bespoke of an age far beyond his near thirty years of life. He sported a thin goatee and wore a hat that fell in somewhere between a

Read this article...