Written by Elie Wiesel, it was filled with modern-day parables and allegories about Jews searching for meaning and identity in a post-Holocaust world. My rabbi, whose name I did not remember, had led me to this book, and it led me to another.

My mother tells a story about the time she brought me to the grocery store when I was about this age, four. As she shopped, I strayed from her, and to teach me a lesson, she kept her eye on me and I got "lost." The grocery clerk asked me where my mother was. I pointed to the lady with he dark eyes and dark hair. Now, my hair was so blond, they Italian men called me "Whitey." The clerk thought my mother and I looked so different, he had to be persuaded that I wasn't being kidnapped.

I later spent a memorable morning reading Night, Wiesel's best-known book, and part of the body of work that won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Night is a relentless and grueling short narrative of his family's terrible suffering at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

At age 14, this gentle soul suffered the loss of his mother and tiny sister and, after a humiliating ordeal, his father. A tooth with a gold crown was torn from Wiesel's mouth. He was whipped and tortured. He faced Josef Mengele himself, who stood arrogantly like the Angel of Death, choosing who would live and who would die. He watched a Jewish boy hanged on a gallows, and his precious faith in a merciful God was tested to its limits.

"Never shall I forget that night," Wiesel writes, "the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....

"Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."

I was struck by how often "the train" became the vehicle of suffering for the Jews. For Wiesel, the train is the symbol of the dehumanization of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis. They are crammed into cattle cars for the long terrible journey to the death camps. With no food, water, or sanitation, and barely enough air to breathe and room to stand, they are reduced to the barest elements of survival and, at the worst moments, embrace madness and death itself.

I thought of Wiesel's train of death, and then of my train, a train of life, where a kindly rabbi gave away his book and became my teacher.

I was determined to find him.

So I wrote a story about the encounter on the train and did my best to describe the nameless rabbi. It was published in the Sunday magazine of The Philadelphia Inquirer in July 1993, and republished in the St. Petersburg Times and Catholic Digest. The last words of the article asked readers, "Do you know him?"

In the weeks after publication, several messages reached me. Most were gentle expressions of thanks for writing about the rabbi, with tender hopes that I would find him.

I was sent a synagogue directory of the Philadelphia area with names and snapshots of 81 rabbis. "This will give him the address and phone number of every synagogue, and rabbi, in the area," wrote Jonathan Stein to a friend, who passed it along to me, "and he may even remember the face from the pictures, even though a few years have passed."

Well, 25 years had passed. I was grateful for the catalog, but where to begin? My best evidence, based on a tiny flicker of memory, was the letter "H." The rabbi had told me his congregation was in a suburb of Philadelphia, "H" something. I had guessed "Haverford."

My best lead came from a letter by a Carole Smith, not from Haverford, but from nearby Havertown. "The man you described in your article most likely was Rabbi Israel Botwinick of the Suburban Jewish Community Center in Havertown. He died quite young -- about the time of which you wrote."

My first reaction was disappointment. My rabbi might be dead.

But then she added, "It could have been Rabbi Morris Dembowitz, who was his replacement and now is retired and living in Cherry Hill, N.J. Good luck in your search!"

One evening, I found a phone number for Rabbi Dembowitz and called. It took me several awkward minutes to summarize my article and describe my search. He was polite, but nothing in his voice gave me much hope. "I wish it was me," he said, "but I'm not your guy."

Could it have been Rabbi Botwinick, I asked, the rabbi who had passed away.

"Did he chain smoke and weigh about 300 pounds?" he asked.

No, I would have remembered that. I must have sounded crestfallen: It was neither rabbi from Havertown.

"Maybe it was the man who preceded me," he said.

"But wasn't that Rabbi Botwinick?"

No, he said, it was Rabbi Horowitz. Herman Horowitz. And he still lives in Philadelphia.

He gave me a phone number.

My spirits rose. Herman Horowitz was a rabbi in Havertown from 1968 to 1970.

My meeting on the train had been in 1969. And all those H's stood out like giant goalposts.

I picked up the phone once again and punched the numbers, my heart pounding in my chest.