Dr. Henry Nogid, DDS, graduated from the New York University College of Dentistry in 1962, and has been practicing in Brooklyn ever since. He was interviewed in July 2013.

I was brought up in a traditional Jewish home in Brooklyn, but not a fully-observant one; my mother changed the dishes for Passover, and I went to synagogue on the holidays, when my father wanted me to. Actually, he didn’t go that often himself, and after my Bar Mitzvah, I would just stand outside and talk to the girls.

Despite not being a very good student, as a teenager in the 1950s I did read voraciously. I read a lot of philosophy, and when I was about seventeen, I decided that there wasn’t enough there for me, so I would look into religion instead. Why not try my own? I thought.

It was 1955, and I was a student in Brooklyn College, so I went to the Hillel House there, where there were a couple of Orthodox rabbis. I liked what I heard at Hillel, so the rabbis sent me to a religious summer camp. After that, I wanted to learn more. For a few days, I went to one yeshivah in Brooklyn after school, but nobody even looked at me there.

“Try Lubavitch,” a friend from college told me, and when I did, the yeshivah students there practically pounced on me. In the evenings, after college, I began studying Torah with them in 770, sometimes for five hours a night. That was my introduction to learning about Judaism.

Shortly after, I had my first audience with the Rebbe, and from then on, he would always remember me whenever I would come back. I had a feeling of awe, standing in front of this great leader and brilliant man. He was very encouraging when I told him I would come to 770 to study Torah after school, and he was very positive about my plans to become a dentist.

In 1958, I met the Rebbe again, together with the lady who would eventually become my wife. We had been going out for some time, and had gotten engaged by then, but there were some problems. She had come from a religious family, and attended Bais Yaakov, the well-known religious girls’ school. I had been rejected by religious girls before, because although I was observant, I wasn’t very learned. “I can’t take you home to my father,” they would say, “you don’t know how to learn Torah.”

We had met in college, so the circumstances were different, but I was extremely nervous, and so was she. Being quite smart, she had prepared a list of about twenty questions to ask the Rebbe about marrying me.

“I have some questions here,” she ventured. “Can I ask the Rebbe about them?”

We were with the Rebbe for about forty minutes, which was unheard of; no one spent that amount of time in the Rebbe’s room. Actually, for a great deal of it, I was out of the room as well. Since a number of these questions were about me, the Rebbe asked me to leave so that he could speak with my fiancée privately.

She wanted to be reassured that I would stay observant, that I would be able to lead a religious home, and that she wasn’t getting into something she should avoid.

My fiancée never told me exactly what the Rebbe had said, only that everything would be good. Apparently, she felt satisfied that I was a good person and that I was sincere in my beliefs, because she did marry me in the end.

As a matter of fact, I was always very strong in my beliefs, because I became religious through philosophy, out of intellectual conviction, and without anyone else convincing me. I came to it on my own. I was never shaky in my beliefs, and I still believe that Judaism is a beautiful way of life.

The Rebbe knew how I felt, and I think he tried to give this over to my future wife.

When I came back into the room, the Rebbe reassured us both that we should go ahead with the marriage. “It will be fine, it will be fine,” he kept saying. “Don’t worry.”

Then my fiancée had another question: “He’s still going to school, and doesn’t have income yet,” she said, referring to me. “Should we wait to have children?”

“Well,” replied the Rebbe, “if G-d can find enough sustenance for two billion people”, this was still in the fifties, “He’ll find for your children too.”

Thank G-d, we ended up having two children while I was still in dental school. Even though I wasn’t making a proper living, I managed to work nights and weekends as a caterer, as well as in the post office, so they didn’t starve, as the Rebbe had told us.

When our first son was born, in 1961, he was severely jaundiced, with a very high bilirubin count in his blood. Today, doctors put babies with jaundice under ultraviolet light or give them medication, but in those days, they didn’t have much to offer. Things got so bad that our doctor at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital began to lose hope for our son’s recovery. They wanted to conduct more tests, like spinal tap, and they even wanted to perform an exceedingly dangerous blood transfusion.

“The best you can hope for,” said the head of the Columbia Children’s Hospital, when I called for a second opinion, “is that he’ll survive with brain damage.” Another pediatrician who was also the head of Maimonides Hospital, told me that there wasn’t even hope for that.

This was our first child, and I was falling apart. He was born on a Tuesday, and I went to the Rebbe for a blessing that very day.

“Stop all the tests,” the Rebbe said when I told him the story. The only thing the doctors should do was take blood and urine samples, but no spinal taps, and no transfusions.

I had another question for the Rebbe, about my grandmother: This was her first great-grandchild, and she was expecting the brit, the circumcision ceremony, to take place next Tuesday, the eighth day after his birth, but with the baby sick, I didn’t know what to tell her.

“Don’t worry,” said the Rebbe, “you’ll be able to have the brit on Tuesday. Just don’t let them do the tests.”

The doctor at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, a Reform Jew, was angry that I consulted with someone else.

“You told me my child is going to die,” I retorted, “and you didn’t give me a plan. What was I supposed to do?” He didn’t like that response, and he didn’t want to stop doing tests either.

“What do you mean, ‘the Rebbe said not to do any more tests’?”

My mother knew the head of the pediatric department in the hospital, and she spoke to him. Reluctantly, our doctor agreed not to do any more tests.

The next day, on Wednesday night, my son’s fever hit 106 degrees, and we figured that we had reached the end. But, by morning, the fever broke, and the bilirubin levels began going down.

On Friday morning, our doctor was no longer angry with us. “Well,” he said with a smile, “you’ll be able to have the brit on Tuesday.” I hadn’t even told him that the Rebbe had said anything about a brit.