“I’m named after my father, Yosef Leib, who was killed on D-Day while my mother was pregnant with me. He was from Eastern Europe & my mother was from India. They met in England during the war. My father’s dream was for me to be brought up in America, so my mother moved to Boston. I went to public school & Hebrew school through 7th grade. I probably had ADHD, but when my mother took me for an evaluation, the psychiatrist said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with him, he’s just bored.’ I went back to England to attend an upper-class Jewish boarding school. After returning to America, I got a chemical engineering degree at @northeastern & then went to work as a computer engineer. I helped invent & patent a part used in every car battery & got my MBA. But I didn’t feel fulfilled. I investigated many alternatives, & finally, much to my surprise, I chose to become a physician.
Once I got married, my wife and I decided to take on more Jewish practices. I made kiddush on Shabbos & we had a kosher home, but we didn’t keep Shabbos fully. Against what seemed like all odds, I got into medical school when I was 30 at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. I learned Dutch in a panic because that’s what my professors spoke. But there was nothing in Leuven for a Jewish family, so we moved to Antwerp. Two years later I transferred to the University of Antwerp.
We became best friends with our next-door neighbors who were religious, many of whom were Ger & Belz chassidim. They guided us along as we became more observant. As it turns out, we weren’t in Antwerp, of all places, for medical school; we were there to find our Judaism! And when Hashem knew we were on the road, He rewarded us. I transferred to @yale where I received my MD. Yale, of course, opened doors for residency. I matched at @emorydeptofmed & joined the Atlanta Beth Jacob community in 1980.
