12 Jan REMEMBERING RABBI YEHUDA KELEMER ZT”L

I had the zechus of spending significant time with the Rabbi for the last 19 years as one of the community Rabbis in West Hempstead. He welcomed me and our family with open and embracing arms. The impact he had on my life is something I did not expect because when one joins a community as a Rabbi, you do not expect to become a student once again, but that is precisely what happened to me for the last two decades. It is impossible to describe the greatness of Rabbi Kelemer, but one aspect of his gadlus was that he possessed the most unique and extraordinary COMBINATION of leadership traits that I have experienced in my life. I will focus on three of those traits, but in truth there are many more. First, he was a spectacular and gifted speaker. He would effortlessly develop beautiful ideas and speak eloquently about others with the most precise psychological insights. The first bris that we celebrated together, the family chose an unusual first name that I had never heard of before. Fifteen minutes after hearing the name for the first time, Rabbi Kelemer was asked to speak and delivered a spectacular derasha quoting verbatim midrashim discussing that precise name and weaving the medrash into a poetic description of the baalei simcha and the relative for whom the new child was named, topped off by a gematria of the name that tied everything together. At the time, I was sitting next to Rav Binyamin Kaminetsky, who whispered in my ear “Efrem, he is simply amazing, in the future, try to speak before he does, no one can follow him.” As a general rule, when he spoke, there was basically nothing left to say. (Listen, for example, to his 1983 installation derasha, which I am confident, he prepared while listening to the other Rabbis speak about him). Second, he was a huge talmid chacham. There was never a topic I asked him about that he was not a master of — gemara, rishonim, achronim, poskim, contemporary topics, hashkafa, chumash, navi, chassidus. When my children returned from yeshiva, and he would ask them about the detailed shiurim they heard from their roshei yeshiva, there was not a sugya that was not on the tip of his fingers — it was as if he had just learned it up moments earlier. Third, his chesed for the families in our community and beyond is legendary, not of this world. I will not begin to describe how far he would go, how thoughtful he was, how devoted, the thousands and thousands of hours he spent with people in need, at any and all times of the day and night, how he always knew the right thing to say to lift someone’s spirits, whatever the age from the youngest child to people long retired, and people of all backgrounds. As one of the children mentioned during the levaya, “everyone has a Rabbi Kelemer story.” That is true and many people have several that center on his extraordinary sensitivity and mesiras nefesh that saved or uplifted or profoundly impacted them or their families. There are Rabbis who are great speakers. There are Rabbis who are great scholars. There are Rabbis who are great baalei chesed. I am personally aware of no Rabbi who possessed these attributes in combination like Rabbi Kelemer, and to top it all off, his humility matched his gadlus. What a loss for our community, for the Jewish people, for the world. The thousands of Rabbi Kelemer stories must be told.