Rabbi Sholom Ber Lipskar faces the Days of Awe in the shadow of the Surfside tragedy

Photos: Carlos Chattah

During the days and weeks of paralyzing tragedy and inconceivable loss, Rabbi Sholom Ber Lipskar of the Bal Harbour–Surfside community saw his kehillah rise to the challenge with overwhelming responses of selfless, unconditional, ceaseless kindness and giving. It was the only answer as they faced their personal Days of Awe

The shofar is meant to serve as a wake-up call to slumbering, complacent, and sometimes sinful Jews; it’s a message to arise and work to better themselves, thereby meriting inscription in the Book of Life for the coming year. This year though, Rabbi Sholom Lipskar received his wake-up call weeks before the shofar began to sound for the rest of us.

Rabbi Lipskar is best known as the rav who transformed the Miami-area Bal Harbour–Surfside community from a midbar into a thriving Jewish community and founded the Aleph Institute to help incarcerated Jews. But on the evening of the 14th of Tammuz, June 24, as he lay in bed, he was roused around 1:45 by a text from his granddaughter, who lives a few blocks from the Champlain Towers South condominium.

“Do you know what’s going on?” she asked. “There are police and sirens everywhere.”

Rabbi Lipskar called the police department, and after he heard that the 13-story building had collapsed, he was soon speeding over. What met his eyes as he approached was an apocalyptic scene reminiscent of 9/11. The cloud of smoke hanging over the area was so thick it was impossible to get closer than a couple of blocks from the scene. A woman had come running out earlier that night screaming that there must be a bomb or an earthquake, but no one took her seriously.

It took only four and a half inconceivable seconds for the building to fall. With it collapsed the lives, hopes, and dreams of 98 men, women and children.

“It’s just unfathomable,” Rabbi Lipskar says. “There are Third World countries where this doesn’t happen. There are illegal Arab buildings all over Israel that never collapse. We still don’t know what caused it. At first they said it was the basement, but the basement was intact.”

The victims had been home, in their beds, ironically the place most of us go to feel safe and secure.

“There was no apparent logic to this, no intellectual answer to give people,” Rabbi Lipskar says. “Many of the residents were educated people — doctors, lawyers, architects — yet the human mind has no bandwidth to understand a tragedy of this scale.”

The collapse came on the heels of a year and a half of Covid tragedies, as well as Jewish tragedies in Meron, Karlin, Gaza, and elsewhere. The fast of the 17th of Tammuz came three days afterward, and in Surfside, never before was the mourning of the Three Weeks felt as deeply.

In the beginning, the families and friends of the Champlain Tower residents still held onto shreds of hope for finding living survivors under the tons of cement and debris, as search and rescue teams hauled off rubble and sifted through what had just hours and days ago been people’s homes.

Rabbi Lipskar, who has spent the past 52 years as a shaliach of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, admits that he had never before navigated a situation like this: He was trying to give support to people suspended in a twilight zone, not knowing whether or not to mourn.

“When someone passes away, you can console them,” he says. “But here, I couldn’t console them. Yet neither could I take away their hope, however tenuous.”