Since he resigned from the rabbinate in 1991, Haim Horowitz has been a psychotherapist specializing in caring for family members of Holocaust victims and survivors.

"Hmmm," he mused as I told him my story, "It's very intriguing."

He usually read The Philadelphia Inquirer, he said, but had not seen my story about the rabbi who gave me, on a train ride from New York to Philly in 1969, a book about the Holocaust. So I sent him my story, and we spoke again.

"I'm still trying to clear up a certain amount of unclarity in whether I'm really your guy," he said with a gentle laugh. He then began to inventory the connections he could find with the details in my story.

"The age factor fits," he said. He was 37 in 1969, and I estimated the rabbi was about 40.

"The dark suit fits in, the trim beard fits in, which I don't have anymore, the dark hair fits in, reading the book fits in, and giving away the book fits in."

Two key points in the story bothered him: "The key part is that I can't remember the guy who's sitting next to me. And the giving of the pen -- that puzzles me, because that doesn't fit in. I have used Cross brand pens for the past 25 years. That's the sticky point: I don't remember giving it away."

"Were you even riding the trains back then?" I wondered.

"Although I had a pulpit in the Philadelphia area, I was teaching Hebrew at a college in the New York area, and so I was commuting back and forth twice a week. It was a long train ride, but I enjoyed the teaching very much. So that fits in."

"I must have taken an afternoon train to Philly," I said, because I got to my friend's house in time for dinner.

He routinely took the afternoon train out of Penn Station.

The time frame was perfect: "I was in Havertown for two years, from 1968 to 1970."

I asked him an awkward question: What kind of rabbi was he in terms of his religious beliefs and practices?

"For a frame of reference, I am Conservative. From my standpoint, it means firmly rooted in the authority of the tradition of Bible, Talmud, Jewish law and practices, but firmly facing and welcoming the modern world in all its confusing configurations. And ready to enter into a dialogue with that world."

He asked me to call him Haim (pronounced HIGH-um), rather than Herman.

He gave me a brief overview of his career: born in Newark, N.J.; graduated from Rutgers; attended the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City; ordained a rabbi in 1956; had pulpits in upstate New York; wound up in Philadelphia. He was a rabbi for 35 years. Then, in 1991, his career took a dramatic turn. He resigned from the rabbinate and began private practice as a psychotherapist. His specialty: caring for the family members of Holocaust victims and survivors.

It struck me then that on that train back in 1969, he was already practicing psychotherapy -- on me -- without a license.

He laughed when I said that. "It turned out that for many years before coming to Philadelphia, I was looking for some sort of structured kind of mental health wisdom, a school, or schools, of thought that could be helpful to me as a rabbi, and I went shopping, and I found that there were many doors." Most of these doors, he said, led down blind alleys: approaches that required the therapist to quantify and make a science of complex human behaviors and mysterious emotions. He could never do that.

He found the door he was looking for in, of all things, a church magazine. There, he read an article by someone who practiced "contextual therapy." Haim describes this school of thought as a form of family therapy. It helps people make connections across generations. "It takes into account the issue of received and given legacies," he said.

And those legacies -- what one doctor calls "the give and take" -- are rarely more crucial than for Holocaust victims and survivors. "There are all sorts of issues that still linger on," he said, "the issue of denial, silencing, the kind of thing that says: Why dwell on the past? Get on with your life. Survivor guilt, that's a particular issue."

His interest in these issues derived not only from a rabbinical or mental health perspective. His wife, Simone, is a Holocaust survivor.

"She was at Auschwitz. Thank God, it was toward the end of the war. Because she was a kid and she was in an orphanage." Simone's mother died at Auschwitz in 1942. Her father was executed by Nazis in France.

It was Simone who persuaded her husband that he, Haim Horowitz of Havertown, was, most likely, the rabbi on the train. Haim had shared my story with her. She recalled that Haim had once come home from a trip and told her he had given away a book by Elie Wiesel. She attributed his charity to God's work. "She felt, 'Well, maybe there's somebody who needs to know more about the Holocaust.' "

That was all the evidence I needed. "It's got to be you, brother," I said.

"You think so? The vibes tell you? Even without the Cross pen?"

He would send me a photograph. Maybe that would nail it.

One way or another, to close the circle, we would meet.

But before that reunion could take place, I set off on a side journey to find the author of the book the rabbi had given me: Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.