Rabbi Glickman was born Yonah Moshe Glickman in Brooklyn, New York the fourth and last son (and first one born in the United States) in a family of six children in a strict Orthodox Jewish family.Glic ...Show More
Rabbi Glickman was born Yonah Moshe Glickman in Brooklyn, New York the fourth and last son (and first one born in the United States) in a family of six children in a strict Orthodox Jewish family.Glickman came from a long line of rabbis, which included his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and his great-great grandfather. His father Eli and his mother had both been born in Budapest, and had emigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s with the rest of Glickman's family from Budapest; his father died in 1959 A Jewish refugee organization helped his father find a position in Brooklyn, as it needed a rabbi. When Glickman was five years old his family moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City, largely so that he and his siblings could pursue a yeshiva education, where he grew up on Henry Street, Rutgers Street, and Norfolk Street. There, his parents and their friends all spoke Yiddish. As a teenager, Glickman worked as a busboy at resorts in the Borscht Belt in New York's Catskill Mountains. He recalled: "Twenty minutes, at the Pearl Lake Hotel. I broke all the dishes. They made me a lifeguard. 'But I can't swim,' I told the owner. 'Don't tell the guests,' he says."In 1962 Glickman graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in his double major of English and Sociology from the City College of New York. At age 18 he became a cantor, and at age 25 he received semikhah from Rabbi Moshe Feinstein and was ordained a rabbi (as his three brothers, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been), in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.He led congregations as their rabbi in Weldon, North Carolina and Beth Israel Congregation in Latrobe. He said that in synagogue, "I started telling more and more jokes, and after a while, a lot of gentiles would come to the congregation just to hear the sermons." Three years later, after his father died, he resigned from his job as a rabbi in a synagogue to become a comedian because, he says, "Somebody in the family had to make a living." Hide
