[Avodah] Reb Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz on RSRH's 19 Letters

[Moshe Y. Gluck]

R' YL:
The following is from page 66 of Rabbi Eliyahu Klugman's Biography of RSRH. 

More than a century after its publication, Reb Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, the
first great Torah educator in America, told his students, "I cannot
understand how it is possible for an American yeshiva student to be Jewish
without The Nineteen Letters."
-------------

R' SFM wasn't saying that every American Yeshiva student needs to read the
Nineteen Letters to be Jewish; he was saying that he didn't understand _how_
they remained Jewish even though they didn't read the Nineteen letters. That
they _did_ stay Jewish, even though they did not read that estimable work,
was not in question. In RSFM son's and son-in-law's Yeshiva, TTBOMK, the
Nineteen Letters were not studied (certainly not in my years there), nor
were any other of R' SRH's works.

KT,
MYG