The 102-Year-Old Agreed To Put Tefillin If Alex Beat Him At Chess- And Kept His Word

NEW YORK (VINnews) — 18-year-old Alex Kernish, a Chabad chasid, was supposed to be studying at the Mayanot Institute in Jerusalem this year. When the war in Israel broke out three weeks ago, he enrolled instead for a semester at Chovevei Torah, a yeshivah in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. A native of Issaquah, WA., Kernish was spending the afternoon of Oct. 27, a Friday, the way many young Chabad men and women do: reaching out to fellow Jews on the street or at their workplace, sharing a Torah thought, wrapping tefillin, or offering them Shabbat candles.

Kernish headed to Washington Square Park in Manhattan, which is often filled with seniors, many of them Jewish, and wrapped tefillin with one of them. That man, in turn, pointed Kernish to another fellow. While Kernish thought he looked around 80, he was told the elderly gentleman was in fact turning 102, and that he thought he may be Jewish.

The elderly fellow was seated at the chess tables, and Kernish walked over and asked him if he was Jewish. Instead of replying to the question, the man simply asked Kernish if he’d like to play a game of chess with him. “Sure,” said Kernish, a decent chess player, “but if I beat you, you’ll put on tefillin.”

As they played, Kernish struck up a conversation with the fellow—almost six times his age—asking him if he’d ever put on tefillin before. “I never have, in fact, I am not Jewish anymore,” he told Kernish, explaining that he “used to be Yiddish,” (using the Yiddish word for “Jewish”). “Do you speak Yiddish?” Kernish asked. The elderly man replied that he’d grown up speaking Yiddish and then abruptly burst into tears.

Over the next few minutes, the elderly man emotionally shared with Kernish a few spare details about his life: He never had a bar mitzvah. A survivor of Auschwitz, he had avoided anything connected to Judaism.

His last memory of his father was playing a game of chess. For the last 80 years, he had played a game every day to cherish that memory.

Kernish ended up winning the game. The centenarian, being a man of his word, rolled up his sleeve to put on tefillin and as Kernish recited the Shema prayer with him, he broke out sobbing. “He couldn’t stop crying; he was shaking. He could barely get the words out,” Kernish told the Chabad.org site.