The central main floor bais midrash holds more than 200 with an airy open balcony on three sides above for a women’s section for davening that doubles during the week as classroom space. Other rooms include a basement dining room, a rebbe’s dining room, kitchen and student lounge. Upstairs, classrooms, a small bais midrash, library, mussar room and offices.

The Bais Midrash has its roots in the original Yeshiva Toras Chaim South Shore in Hewlett. That school morphed into three separate and independent Torah institutions, Yeshiva South Shore, an elementary school for boys in Hewlett; Mesivta Ateres Yaakov, a high school for boys in Lawrence, and the Yeshiva Gedolah of the Five Towns in Woodmere, a center of adult Torah learning for students post high school, a kollel (for full time Torah and Talmud study for married men), and for community members throughout the Five Towns.

The yeshiva began on Serena Road before moving to the storefront. That space was renovated to “make it more viable” said Rabbi Moshe Zev Katzenstein, but it became “too tight.” They also bought a building earlier, but that, too, was too small and is used as a dormitory.

The yeshiva at first drew “a younger crowd,” he said, students from Ohr Yerushalayim, Ner Yaakov and Ateres Yerushalyaim, after two or three years in post high school yeshivot in Israel. Later, they drew students who had learned five or six years in Israel. They have no semicha program, offering “straight learning in Germara and mussar (ethics), serving Hashem and learning.” Some students attend Touro College, Queens College or Farleigh Dickenson University for secular studies and do their Torah learning at the yeshiva.

“The goal is to create confident Bnei Torah able to function in any capacity in the world around us, as rabbaim, teachers or doctors, lawyers, accountants,” he said.

The program begins with shacharit, followed by breakfast, morning seder, shiur, lunch and mincha, mussar, a second seder and nite seder with maariv. They also have a late maariv at 10:30 pm.