Quiet Kindnesses

Those who knew Rav Schorr recall many small acts of care, nearly all of them done in secret. His compassion, they say, grew from what the Torah asked of him as a Jew, a teacher, a leader, a husband, a father and a member of Klal Yisroel.

He accompanied poor students to buy their Pesach clothes, and he was honestly puzzled by the notion that a Rebbe owes his students nothing beyond teaching.

Twenty-eight years before his passing, he learned of a gifted senior at Torah Vodaath whose parents ran a store and wanted him to go to college instead, though the boy longed to stay in yeshiva. Rav Schorr judged that a layman would sway the parents more than a rosh yeshiva would, so he quietly arranged for a successful professional to stop by the store as if by chance. The plan succeeded. The visitor had promised silence and kept his word until Rav Schorr was niftar. Only after that did the former student, by then a respected Torah educator, find out what had been done for him.

On another occasion he was on a trip with a professor who knew nothing of yeshiva life, yet went to a Daf Yomi class every morning. That day the man had missed it and was struggling through the page alone on the train. Rav Schorr asked if he might join him, since he too had not yet studied that day’s page. Looking back, the professor said that the rosh yeshiva obviously had no need of a partner, but sensed his difficulty, set aside his own time to teach him a page of Gemara, and left him feeling that he had done the favor.

Students turned to him for help with shidduchim, with jobs, and with every other kind of problem, whether professional, personal, emotional or financial. He answered with advice, a phone call, or a personal visit. Numerous former students, now at the top of their fields, spoke in his eulogies. Again and again they, and hundreds of others speaking privately, said he had been a father to them. One respected rav, whose own mother passed away soon after Rav Schorr did, compared the two losses.

When Rav Leib Apfeldorfer, the beloved cook of Bais Medrash Elyon, passed away, Rav Schorr was among those who accompanied the niftar to Kennedy Airport for the flight to Eretz Yisroel, where he was to be buried. He was shocked to learn that the coffin would be left on a cargo truck with no one watching until non-Jewish workers loaded it onto the plane. He asked to be allowed to stay on the truck. He was told that El Al security guards shine flashlights over the truck bed at the plane and may shoot anyone there without clearance. For a fee, though, the driver would park out of sight, as long as those accompanying the coffin lay down flat. And so the aged rosh yeshiva climbed up with three students, putting his dignity aside for the nobler task of giving a last honor to the man who had loyally served the yeshiva.

These episodes, it is said, show the man’s mind and heart, and so does the fact that none of them was publicized.