Twenty-eight Middle School students of Great Neck’s North Shore Hebrew Academy (NSHA) – both Ashkenazic and Sephardic – joined together, on Purim Day, to chant the “Gantze Megillah,” at its Cherry Lane campus, in a program initiated in 2001 by Dermatologist Dr. Paul Brody – now called the “Dr. Paul Brody Megillah Readers Program,” upon his retirement two years ago. Cantor Yitzy Spinner instructed the Ashkenazic students and Judaic Studies Middle School Principal Rabbi Simon Basalely and teacher Shmuel Bitton, instructed the Sephardic students this year. Each student read from the beautiful Megillah that was purchased by the NSHA, named the “Dr. Paul Brody Megillah,” upon his retirement, to be used by all student readers on Purim Day festivities.
Max Weiss, son of Abby Weiss, NSHA Director of Institutional Advancement and Communications, was the first reader. Max and each of the Ashkenazic students donned Dr. Brody’s maternal grandfather’s century-old talis. It was Dr. Brody’s grandfather, Rabbi Jacob Brown z”l, who convinced him to read the “gantze [entire] Megillah,” after Brody learned the initial Megillah trope at the Cantorial Training Institute (CTI), now the Belz School of Jewish Music, of Yeshiva University.
Dr. Brody himself has chanted the “Gantze Megillah” for 52 years, including 30 years at the Great Neck Synagogue, first leining it in 1973 at Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld’s Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills. In 1985, while smuggling Judaica to Jewish “refuseniks,” he read the Megillah illegally at the Great Synagogue of Leningrad, at great peril. “Better Re(a)d than Dead,” he figured! The gabbaim (sextons) were rumored to be members of the KGB!
The Megillah Readers Program has served as a paradigm for other yeshivos and day schools. Several of Dr. Brody’s 400 NSHA students have leined (chanted) the whole Megillah by themselves or shared the reading with one or two other alumni, at various shuls, nursing homes, or private individuals’ homes, especially helpful during the Covid-19 pandemic. This year, on Purim night at the Great Neck Synagogue, Russell Mendelson, whom Dr. Brody instructed in 2007, leined the “Gantze Megillah,” in a parallel Megillah Reading service led by Dr. Brody, and again on Purim morning.
Among this year’s readers who had siblings taught by Dr. Brody in previous years, were Sam Herz (Riley ’22) and Justin Levian (’14).
