The 5 Towns Jewish Times
December 10, 2020
Yeshiva Mesivta Chaim Berlin Kollel Gur Aryeh
Photo Credit: Charlie Smith FDTB
The other day I was talking about my early yeshiva days with my neighbor and friend Idel Kolodny. We tend to talk about specifically my early days in yeshiva because Idel’s grandfather, Rabbi Yitzchok Kolodny, was a substitute rebbe of mine when I was a fourth-grader at the Lubavitcher Yeshiva on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn.
No, it wasn’t on the Bedford Avenue dotted with multimillion dollar homes; it was Bedford Avenue and Dean Street, and the older boys in the yeshiva, and even sometimes the rebbeim, were sometimes involved in fights with local thugs in the quickly changing community in Bedford Stuyvesant. On some days, as I recall, many of the classes were on the street at recess, which is when the battles used to break out. Sometimes the yeshiva area looked like a war zone.