There were plenty of men to do it during the day and the evening,
and at least ten men (a sacred number) to keep the holy word
echoing throughout the night. The majority of them were simply
scholarly business men who would drop in to read the sacred
books for an hour or two, but there was a considerable number of
such as made it the occupation of their life. These were supported
either by the congregation or by their own wives, who kept shops,
stalls, inns, or peddled, while their husbands spent sixteen hours a
day studying Talmud

One of these was a man named Reb (Rabbi) Sender, an
insignificant, ungainly little figure of a man, with a sad, child-like
little face flanked by a pair of thick, heavy, dark-brown side-locks
that seemed to weigh him down

His wife kept a trimming-store or something of the sort, and their
only child, a girl older than I, helped her attend to business as well
as to keep house in the single-room apartment which the family
occupied in the rear of the little shop. As he invariably came to
the synagogue for the morning prayer, and never left it until after
the evening service, his breakfasts and dinners were brought to the
house of worship. His wife usually came with the meal herself.
Waiting on one's husband and "giving him strength to learn the
law" was a "good deed."

She was a large woman with an interesting dark face, and poor
Reb Sender cut a sorry figure by her side

Men of his class are described as having "no acquaintance with the
face of a coin." All the money he usually handled was the penny