Shlomo’s father suffered a heart attack in 1948. Shlomo stopped learning full-time in the Lakewood Yeshiva to spend more time at home in Manhattan. He also began to frequent the chasidic courts more often, especially Chabad, Modzitz, and Bobov. Sometime around 1950, when his father wasn’t feeling well, Shlomo filled in to teach his weeky Torah portion class. The students enjoyed it so much that they requested that he continue giving the class. Soon Shlomo set up a learning group called T.S.G.G. (pronounced TASGIG), an acronym for Taste And See God Is Good, based on the verse in Psalms 34:9. He explained this verse using a teaching of R. Nahman of Breslov to say that “you cannot begin to talk to people about God unless you have first given them a taste of how God is Good.” T.S.G.G. operated for a number of years as a co-ed program, the first such chasidic outreach program in America. Chaim Waxman, who participated in this group when he was 15 years old, described how TSGG included “small groups of maybe ten to fifteen teenagers and young adults” who joined together “for singing and inspiration.”
Marilyn Schwadron (Hittner) was one of the participants in TSGG. One day in 1951 or 1952, Shlomo took his class to 770 Eastern Parkway for a yechidus with the Rebbe. Marilyn began corresponding with the Rebbe. When the question arose of finding suitable employment that would not hurt her Shabbat observance, the Rebbe advised her to have Shlomo contact Rabbi Chaskel Besser. This was the beginning of a unique friendship between the two men which, forty years later, led to Shlomo’s pioneering concert tour of Poland in January 1989.
In 1950, Shlomo and his father attended a Hebrew language ulpan taught by Prof. Isaac Barzilay. The class was held at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), just four subway stops from their Manhattan residence. Shlomo would practice playing the piano at JTS (only later in 1955 did he take up the guitar). At JTS Shlomo made some lifelong friends with future rabbis who later opened the doors to his performing at non-Orthodox congregations. Jack Riemer was a student at JTS when he first met Shlomo in the early 1950s. Riemer, who became one of the best-known and most-quoted writers in the rabbinate, invited Shlomo to perform several concerts over the years:
I arranged several visits for Shlomo at the synagogues where I served as rabbi in Boston, Massachusetts – at Temple Sinai of Swampscott and Marblehead (1957–1961), and Temple Beth Hillel in Mattapan (1961–1964); then in Dayton, Ohio at Congregation Beth Abraham (1964–1978), and finally in La Jolla, California at Congregation Beth El (1978–1986). Each time that Shlomo came he had a wonderful impact.
When Shlomo would play the piano at JTS, people would stop to listen. It was an unusual sight to see a Chabad fellow playing chasidic melodies at JTS. Sara Schafler-Kelman was one of those impressed. She invited Shlomo to a pre-Shabbat program at the Hillel Center on Convent Avenue. Shlomo was afraid that his English was not fluent and that his accent was Yiddish, but Sara answered that he could sing chasidic tunes and need not speak much. She prepared a poster entitled The Place of Music in the Hassidic Tradition. This was Shlomo’s first invited performance for college students.
Nine years later, in 1959, Sara attended a concert by Shlomo on motzaei Shabbat. When she walked in with her husband, Rabbi Shmuel Schafler, and three of their children, Shlomo immediately recognized her:
As soon as I entered the auditorium Reb Shlomo spotted me. He jumped off the stage, ran to meet and embrace me. I couldn’t believe that so many years later he still remembered me. He said, Sara – Do you know that you were the first person who invited me to perform before an audience? You were my very first sponsor. You gave me a title for my life’s work.
During his early years in New York, Shlomo had been learning and conversing mostly in Yiddish. He began learning English in a special Columbia University program in 1951. His teacher happened to be a vice president of the League for Arab Refugees, but Shlomo credits her not only in instructing him in “phonetic rudiments” of English, but also for encouraging him towards a singing career by pointing out that he had a “fine ear for sounds.” Becoming fluent in English at the age of 26, Shlomo developed an idiosyncratic grammar that became his hallmark. His mixture of Yiddish words such as “mamash,” “gevalt,” “heilige,” and “nebech” provided his listeners, some of whom were quite assimilated, with a nostalgic reminder of a chasidic Eastern European life and culture that had been lost in the Holocaust. These expressions eventually became part and parcel of the modern Carlebach followers’ mode of speech and a linguistic part of what one might call a neo-chasidic identity.