Traveling through rural Tennessee while doing shlichus for the Alef Institute, bochurim Yossi Weinstein and Binyomin Karpelevitch wrapped tefillin with an 85-year-old man for the first time and celebrated his bar mitzvah – in front of the state’s oldest shul.

By Anash.org reporter

While on Shlichus for the Alef Institute, two bochurim traveling through rural Tennessee wrapped tefillin with an 85-year-old man for the first time and celebrated his bar mitzvah – in front of the state’s oldest shul.

Yossi Weinstein and Binyomin Karpelevitch, were on the road from Farmington, Missouri, to Memphis, Tennessee, when they passed the small town of Brownsville.

“About ten minutes outside the town, I suddenly thought to Google if there was any Jewish life there,” Yossi told Anash.org. “Google said there’s a shul called Adas Yisroel – the oldest Shul in Tennessee. We kept driving, but then I had another thought to make a U-turn on the highway and go explore.”

When they arrived, the shul was locked and empty. A quick search online led them to a years-old Facebook post by a member named Mr. Rothchild. Attempts to contact him instead brought up an address for a friend. Outside that home, they met a man who told them that Mr. Rothchild had passed away years earlier – but he mentioned another local Jew, Fred Silverstein.

They went straight to Fred’s house, who welcomed them in, told them all about growing up in Brownsville, and then offered to show them the historic Shul.

Standing outside Adas Yisroel, Yossi asked Fred if he had ever put on tefillin. To their surprise, Fred replied that he had never had a bar mitzvah or worn tefillin in his life.

“Right there on the sidewalk, we put tefillin on him for the very first time,” Yossi said. “Boruch Hashem, we were able to put tefillin on him at 85 years old.”

Fred then took them to the town’s Jewish cemetery, where many gravestones date back to the 1800s. As they walked among the weathered stones, they discovered it was the yahrzeit of one of the community’s rabbis from the early 1900s.

“It was a day full of hashgacha pratis,” Yossi reflected. “From a random U-turn on the highway to helping a fellow Jew wrap tefillin for the first time in his life – it felt like we were exactly where we needed to be, at exactly the right time.”