Reb Meir would leave his post at the Western Wall Plaza and go to the Kosel for Mincha or Maariv. A man of deep yir’as Shamayim, his davening was awesome. He immersed himself in it, davening with total kavana, as if in a personal dialogue with Hashem and oblivious to his surroundings. To witness Reb Meir davening Shmoneh Esrai or saying Birkat Hamazon was to participate in an awesome encounter with a higher dimension of prayer. He learned Torah every day. We had a daily chavrusa, and he learned with others as well. Often, after dropping off a young man at Aish Hatorah or Ohr Someyach he would sit down in the Beis Medrash and open a Gemara to learn.
To enhance kiruv possibilities, Reb Meir rented apartments in the Old City that he converted into free student hostels, Heritage House.Unable to find either fund-raisers or an administrator who could raise serious money to fund his operations, the task devolved upon Reb Meir. Fortunately, he was a great fund-raiser, financing his operations virtually single-handedly, mostly from small contributors. How did he succeed when so-called professionals could not? The same relentless determination that enabled him to get total strangers on the street to yeshiva enabled him to raise the funds to make the kiruv possible.
On several occasions, I traveled with Reb Meir to help raise funds. In Los Angeles, he stubbornly returned to people’s homes time and again when owners were out – until he found them in. He would not take no for an answer; he insisted in getting “partners” for his work in bringing Jewish youngsters back to their heritage. Almost always he walked out with a donation. When I joined him in Toronto, I was upset when we could not gain entry into the homes of several eminent philanthropists. Reb Meir shrugged off these rejections, taking them in his stride. He was never discouraged, he continued relentlessly forward, hour after hour. At the end of the day, by dint of sheer will and determination, he had collected a respectable sum, mostly in the form of small donations.
When young backpackers stopped coming to Israel in large numbers in the year 2000, he turned to Israelis. He founded Shorashim, a program for secular Israelis including soldiers, with drop-in centers that featured music and Torah classes, workshops and study groups. The success of its first branch, in Jerusalem, prompted the opening of branches in Herzliyah, Haifa, Modiin and Pardes Chana. Hundreds of couples have met and married through Shorashim and have established observant Jewish families.
Rav Aryeh Kaplan comments on the teaching of Chazal that he who rescues one Jewish soul is as if he has rescued an entire world. How can it be, he wonders, that the rescue of one individual is equated with that of so many? He responds: One Jew marries another and they have two children, who in turn marry, and each of the two couples has two children. The four grow up and marry, etc. After 24 generations of 2 times 2, the total comes to 16,777,216. How many Jews are there in the world today? After the Holocaust, and due to the spiritual holocaust of assimilation and intermarriage, 13,000,000? Olam malei – an entire Jewish world! Now, what if it is not just 2 times 2, but 2 x 4, x 4? Or even more – many, many more? And what if some of them do kiruv, and those whom they are mekarev do kiruv? The numbers explode exponentially! Reb Meir was mekarev more than just two Jews, many thousands of times more.
Thanks to Reb Meir Tzvi Schuster, many tens of thousands of their descendants are flourishing as religiously observant Jews – and they will produce many times their number in the years to come.
