Some months ago, I received a cryptic message in my office that a Mr. Sanford Seidman was looking for me. He had something of great importance that belonged to our mutual great-grandfather, Rabbi Yitzchok Chanoch Schuman, whose name I bear.
When Mr. Seidman called, I had no knowledge of any Seidman relatives. When I called him back, he explained that our great-grandfather had seven children—four daughters and three sons. His grandmother, Hannah (Chana), was the eldest; my grandfather, Morris (Moshe), the second. I had never heard of him or most of my other cousins, Mr. Seidman told me, because my grandfather had distanced himself from his siblings. He—alone—had remained true to Torah observance.
Morris would boast that even during his service in the US Navy in World War I, he never missed a day of laying tefillin and never ate treif. He adhered to a strict vegetarian diet, maintaining his discipline even aboard the USS Pennsylvania while escorting President Woodrow Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference. Of all the siblings, only Morris would go on to raise generations of shomer Shabbos children, now living across America and Eretz Yisrael.
Then, Mr. Seidman revealed something remarkable. When he became a bar mitzvah, his grandmother took out a small box from her closet. Inside were the tefillin of our great-grandfather. She told him, “Guard them with your life.” Dutifully, he wore them once—on the day of his bar mitzvah—then tucked them away, where they remained, untouched for sixty years.
A recent medical diagnosis prompted him to reflect on his life and those who came before him. He remembered his pledge to his grandmother to “guard the tefillin with his life.” His own children, he admitted, had drifted far from Yiddishkeit. He needed to find an appropriate custodian—a shomer—for the tefillin.
After researching the family tree, he discovered that, of all the descendants of Rabbi Yitzchok and Etta Gitta Schuman, only three could be considered true guardians of such an heirloom. He chose me. (Fittingly, decades earlier, my grandfather Morris had entrusted me with his late father’s spare tallis and Litvishe koppel [kippah].)
He remembered his pledge to his grandmother to “guard the tefillin with his life.”
Shortly after, a box arrived for me in the mail from Mr. Seidman with the tefillin. I opened the box with a mix of awe and anticipation. Realizing where these tefillin had traversed all these years until they made it to my home in St. Louis filled me with emotion. Surely these tefillin had seen the Ponevezh and Slabodka yeshivos filled with bachurim! The worn retzuos (tefillin straps) reflected a lifetime of devoted use.
I brought them to my rav, Rav Avi Bloch, z”l, St. Louis’s senior shochet and sofer, and asked him to examine them. As soon as he saw them, he nodded. “These were high quality, made in Germany—very old.”
“How old?” I asked.
“One hundred and fifty years, I’d guess.”
He was exactly right. My great-grandfather had worn them at his bar mitzvah in 1871.
Rav Bloch carefully opened the shel yad (the arm tefillin), examined the parashah and pronounced: “They’re kosher.”
The ink, unlike so many parshiyot of that era, had not been compromised by koopervasser—copper sulfate ink, which oxidizes and fades to a shade of brown, invalidating the tefillin.
The next morning, I donned them and recited Shehecheyanu with great emotion.
On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I visited the Young Israel of Century City, where I met the dynamic Rav Elazar Muskin and showed him my tefillin. He examined them, intrigued by their unusual and historic character, and suggested a protective case for the shel yad to keep the corners crisp. Of course, no such case existed for tefillin of this size—so I had one 3D printed.
I marveled at the timelessness of our mesorah. Here I was, employing twenty-first-century technology to preserve nineteenth-century tefillin—the same ones my great-grandfather had wrapped around his arm each morning. I’m sure Rabbi Yitzchok Chanoch Schuman would be deeply moved to know that his cherished tefillin are still in use, the mesorah faithfully transmitted, binding generations together.
Dr. Ethan Schuman is a dentist living in St. Louis, Missouri, as well as a shochet and mohel. He is passionate about researching old Jewish communities and customs.