Gather Me In
an excerpt

The Head of Admissions at Ohr Torah flipped through the applications of incoming freshmen. Without even looking at them, he could tell that most of the boys would be accepted. They typically received sixty or seventy applicants and had to weed the freshman class down to fifty every year. But these boys…it would be hard turning any of them away.
Dov Silverberg … Eli Stein … Nathan Stevens …
Something about Nathan Steven’s picture made Mr. T. pause his flipping. He quickly scanned the boy’s essay: Why I belong in Ohr Torah. But the scanning gave way to more curiosity and he soon found himself reading the entire, three-page essay.
Barely sparing a glance at the rest of the application, Mr. T. put the boy’s name under the “Accept” column of his notebook.
This boy would do fine.