“ . . . alumni say Rabbi Wohlgemuth’s class was the one in which they paid the most attention, the one whose notes they have saved over the years.” pray today,” Blechner says, “I feel as if Rabbi Wohlgemuth is watching me.” When Rabbi Wohlgemuth died, the Globe obituary quoted Steven Bayme, director of the Contemporary Jewish Life Department at the American Jewish Committee, as saying, “The world of Jewish text is a difficult one to open up—some people take to it naturally, some people struggle with it, but he made the text accessible to everyone.” “By encouraging inquiry into these areas [of prayers’ origins], he imbued students with the capacity to consider what meaningful prayer actually constitutes, and to understand liturgical texts and procedures with the same tools we bring to the study of other subjects,” Bayme says. “That at least opens the door to meaningful tefillah experiences absent gimmickry or contrived expressions of piety.” “I not only remember the halachic, philosophical and aggadic teachings he left us with, but I have used them over the past decades nearly every day,” Rabbi Asher Lopatin, president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and a 1982 graduate of Maimonides, wrote on a memorial web site for Rabbi Wohlgemuth. “Certainly in my own tefillah, I can’t get through Yishtabach without thinking of why it is in the reflexive; I can’t think of the first bracha of the Amidah without thinking of whether we really have the merits of our forefathers or not, or geshem vs. gashem, or a million other parts of the tefillah where understanding and kavanah were built on Rabbi Wohlgemuth’s teachings.” Leah Lightman, who attended Maimonides in the The Creator of humanity 1970s, says she was shopping in allows us to say “atah,” a book store about twenty years “You.” If we would only ago in the Geula neighborhood take a moment to of Jerusalem when she came contemplate this . . . the upon a copy of Rabbi WohlgeCreator Who created us muth’s book. structured a context “I became very emotional,” where we can have a Lightman says. The store personal conversation owner, noticing, came over. with Him. It’s amazing. “You must be from Boston,” CHARLIE HARARY he said. Many customers who see Rabbi Wohlgemuth’s photograph on the cover “get very emotional,” the store owner explained. “I find out they’re from Boston,” also former students of Rabbi Wohlgemuth. Lightman, who now lives on Long Island, says Rabbi Wohlgemuth’s example of personal piety in the school minyan was as influential as his classroom teaching. He stood at his shtender, Lightman says, “as if there was nothing going on [in the world] beyond his conversation with the Almighty.” g
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