“You’re the Reason I’m Here”: A Prison Encounter That Stunned a Rabbi

Sometimes a single conversation reveals an uncomfortable truth about education, responsibility, and missed moments.

Rabbi Yerachmiel Kram, of blessed memory, once shared the following encounter.

“Rabbi, Do You Remember Me?”

When Rabbi Kram was invited to Ramla Prison to speak with inmates, a large, intimidating man approached him and asked, “Rabbi, do you remember me?”

“No,” Rabbi Kram answered honestly.

“I’ll give you a hint,” the man said. “Moshiko from Be’er Sheva.”

Rabbi Kram shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

“Another hint,” the man continued. “Sanhedrin Street.”

Still nothing. Rabbi Kram thought to himself that Be’er Sheva’s streets seemed to have multiplied since he was last there.

Finally, the man gave up.

“Rabbi,” he said, “I’m twenty-eight years old today. Fourteen years ago, I studied at a Chinuch Atzmai school in Neighborhood D. I remember you very well. You came with outreach activists and took us to visit yeshivot. I personally rode with you in your white Subaru to Jerusalem and Bnei Brak.”

Rabbi Kram listened.

“It didn’t work,” the man continued. “And today, I’m sitting here in prison. Do you know who’s to blame?”

“My father?” Rabbi Kram guessed.

“No.”

“The television?”

“No.”

“Then who?”

“You, Rabbi.”

Rabbi Kram was stunned. “Me? Aren’t you ashamed? I spent an entire day with you, drove you around, paid for the gas. You never even said thank you. And now you’re blaming me?”

The man looked at him steadily.

“Rabbi,” he said, “I was in your hands like clay. You could have done whatever you wanted with me. But instead of demanding, instead of insisting, instead of pushing me firmly into a yeshiva, you spoke to me gently. You used what I call ‘pharmacy words,’ explaining how nice and worthwhile it would be to learn.”

He paused, then added quietly, “Today’s youth know at six what the previous generation didn’t know at fifty. If we had been spoken to properly, many of us wouldn’t be sitting here today.”

A Responsibility That Goes Further

Rabbi Kram would often turn this story into a message for educators and outreach workers.

“Anyone involved in education,” he said, “has a responsibility not only to put children on the right path while they are young, but to secure their future. It’s not enough to ask, ‘Who may ascend the mountain of Hashem?’ We must also ask, ‘Who will remain standing in His holy place?’”

He explained that students who stay in the same neighborhoods, surrounded by the same influences, are often pulled back into destructive environments. Real success sometimes requires separation and a new framework that allows growth to take hold.

Answering Parents’ Concerns

Rabbi Kram also addressed parents who hesitated to send their children to yeshivot because they did not offer matriculation diplomas.

“When the Children of Israel were in Egypt,” he explained, “the Torah says they cried out from the labor only after they lost their children. As long as they had righteous sons, they could endure suffering. When they lost their children, life itself lost meaning.”

“As long as the children are intact,” he said, “people can survive hardship. When they are lost, everything collapses.”

The Final Message

“Parents and educators must do everything in their power to prevent children from entering battles that could destroy them,” Rabbi Kram concluded, as cited in Doresh Tov on the Passover Haggadah.

Because sometimes, the cost of being gentle when firmness is needed is far greater than we imagine.