Yerachmiel Tilles was born in 1945, in the Jewish month of Adar, which corresponds to the constellation and astrological sign of Pisces. In 1965, he graduated from Harpur College (SUNY Binghamton) with a Degree in Philosophy, accompanied by the dual distinctions of being president of the senior class and co-captain of Harper’s basketball team.

For over two years, Tilles served as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in Thailand. In 1969, he was an overnight guest of the renowned author J.D. Salinger, and later owned and managed a macrobiotic restaurant, but his life reach a turning point in 1971 when Tilles went to a synagogue for the first time in 13 years, almost exactly from the day of his bar mitzvah. Within two years, Tilles had transformed into a Chasidic Jew and married. In early 1978, the author and his family moved to Israel, where they settled in Tzefat (Safed) a few months after their arrival and have lived there since.

In Tzefat, Tilles co-founded the now legendary and very popular Ascent-of-Safed in 1983. In 1984, he translated A Mother in Israel (Kehot Publications). Meanwhile, he and his wife were blessed with their first son in 1983, followed by a second son in 1988. These human blessings multiplied with the arrival of the first of their grandchildren in 2007.

In 1997, Tilles launched his weekly email distribution list for Chasidic stories, a weekly email that hundreds of people eagerly await from week to week to this day. His next project was creating KabbalaOnline.org in 2001; and he became an ‘answering scholar’ on AskMoses.com the following year.

From year to year, Tilles’ repertoire of Chasidic stories has continued to grow and now numbers in the hundreds. Some stories found their way into small books of stories he wrote for his sons’ weddings in 2006 and 2009. Saturday Night, Full Moon, the first of a three-volume series of Chasidic stories, was compiled in 2013. Volume 2, Festivals of the Full Moon, is slated for publication in 2014