For nearly three decades, people travelled from all over Northern New Jersey (and some even from New York) to attend his Shabbat and holiday services. His virtual services, begun during the coronavirus lockdown, not only have attracted participants from the tri-state area, but also from Florida, California, and Texas, as well as from Canada, Mexico and, at times, even Israel. These services continue even now because those participants don’t want them to end. Shammai is also among Northern New Jersey’s most popular adult Jewish education instructors. People relate to Shammai because Shammai relates to them. One reason is the ruach (spirit) he facilitates during services and the openness he shows during the classes he conducts. He is down-to- earth, accessible, and believes other people know more about certain subjects than he does. He’s happy to share his knowledge in a way that makes things understandable. He also is not afraid to admit it when he doesn’t know the answer to a question—but he does research it and gets back to the questioner with an answer. Shammai wears several hats—literally and figuratively. First and foremost, he is a rabbi. A former executive editor of the New York Jewish Week, he writes an award-winning column for Bergen County’s The Jewish Standard newspaper, and has been doing so since the early 1990s (so far, he has won six American Jewish Press Association awards). His articles also appear in the MetroWest Jewish News, the Long Island Jewish World, the Manhattan Jewish Sentinel, and on the Times of Israel Blogs. Shammai also has a bi-weekly podcast, “Keep the Faith with Shammai Engelmayer,” which is available on most podcast providers. Both his columns and his podcasts deal with contemporary issues through the prism of Jewish law and tradition. For several years, he was also the editor of Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought (it was published by the American Jewish Congress). A product of the yeshivah world, Shammai was ordained in 1967, but chose to pursue a career in journalism before assuming the pulpit, winning several prestigious journalism awards in the general media world (including the Washington Journalism Center’s Thomas L. Stokes Award for National Reporting, and the National Association for Justice’s Media Humanitarian Award). Shammai is the author of eight books, most on secular topics written while he worked as a journalist, and is at work on several more. His first book, Martha: The Mouth That Roared, was optioned by Sir Ridley Scott’s Scott Free production company for a miniseries (it’s about Martha Mitchell and Watergate). His two latest books, one tentatively titled Judaism for the Disinterested and the other tentatively titled Finding Moses: Rethinking who wrote the Bible’s first books. There is no publishing date set, as yet, for either book. An e- novel, Fate, is available on Amazon.