For decades, Rabbanit Dvora Zarbiv has clothed hundreds of Jerusalem’s poorest

“My mother loved Torah so much. When she was a young girl, her mother would send her on small errands, and it would take her a long time to come back. When her mother would ask her what had taken so long, she’d answer, ‘On the way to the makolet, I passed a beit medrash and heard the sounds of learning. I couldn’t resist, I had to stay and listen.’ ” I’m sitting with Rabbanit ­­­Dvora Zarbiv, daughter of the illustrious Rav Eliyahu Abba Shaul ztz”l and sister of Rav Ben Tzion Abba Shaul ztz”l.

We’re at her kitchen table. She offers me a hot drink, a cold drink, and everything in between. Then she shares her story, a story of the three pillars of the universe — homes built upon Torah, tefillah, and chesed.

“I’ll Learn Now”   

Rabbanit Zarbiv’s mother, Geveret Benaya Levy, came from a long line of great Torah personalities. When she met the Rabbanit’s father, Rav Eliyahu Abba Shaul, an immigrant from Persia, she asked him if he learned Torah. He told her he didn’t; he’d just been released from serving in the Turkish army. “But I promise you, I’ll begin to learn seriously now,” he said. At 15, Benaya married 22-year-old Eliyahu.

He worked by day as a shoemaker to support his family, and like he promised his young bride, sat and learned from the evening until midnight every single day. Geveret Benaya had no fridge, no washing machine, and 14 children, yet she did everything herself, not wanting to take a moment away from her husband’s learning.

“Torah was everything to my mother and worth every effort. She never sent my brothers to the makolet lest they waste a moment of their learning. My brother Chacham Yitzchak liked to drink his coffee cold. My mother woke up extra early to make his coffee for him and allow it time to cool off, so he wouldn’t miss any learning time waiting for it to cool down.”

Her mother brought many chumrot into the house. As the years passed, and Rav Eliyahu became a talmid chacham in his own right, he introduced more chumrot. “We had so many chumrot in our house, so many chumrot,” the Rabbanit says, but should you think it was an imposition, her smile makes it clear it wasn’t at all. It was an extension of the feeling in the house — Torah is so precious, we want to learn as much as we can, and we don’t want to come close to violating it.