HERE’S my STORY
RABBI KALMAN SHOR
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.”
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ערב שבת פרשת תרומה, ג׳ אדר, תשפ״ו
Erev Shabbat Parshat Terumah, February 20, 2026
ISSUE
Kalman Shor at the yeshivah in Morristown, circa 1972.
