In 1933, he married Tzippora Chava, the daughter of Rav Yosef Yoselovitz, the renowned rav of Suvalk, a provincial capital city in northwest Poland/Russia that boasted a community of more than ten thousand Jews and some 27 batei medrash. But with his father-in-law’s petirah only two years later, the leadership of this major community was thrust squarely upon the tender shoulders of the young Reb Dovid.

Undaunted, he threw himself headlong into his rabbinic responsibilities, establishing a yeshivah and strengthening the local Tiferes Bochurim group, which provided young working men with a Torah environment. He tended to the needs of the many Jewish soldiers stationed in Suvalk’s environs, arranging for kosher food provisions and a weekly furlough that allowed them to daven and attend a shiur in the city’s central shul. From Purim onward, the entire city was caught up in preparing kosher l’Pesach food for these conscripts, and Reb Dovid himself would lead a Pesach seder for them before heading home to preside at that of his own family.

In all, Reb Dovid led his cherished flock of Suvalker Yidden for only five years. But as the storm clouds of tragedy formed and the Nazi vise tightened around Suvalk, Reb Dovid’s love and caring for every Jew in his kehillah became manifest like never before.

When the Germans entered Suvalk on Simchas Torah in 1939, Reb Dovid was summoned to Gestapo headquarters. Arriving there with a delegation of communal notables, he saw fit to offer some words recalling the good relations that had prevailed between the German soldiers and Suvalk’s Jews during World War I. For this, he received a slap across his noble countenance from the Gestapo commandant, which opened his eyes to the monstrous nature of what they were now facing.

Over the next year and a half, Reb Dovid worked relentlessly to help his townspeople escape across the Polish border into Lithuania, enlisting the help of the Jews of Lita on their behalf to secure safe haven there for some 3,000 Suvalkers. Tragically, however, they too later met a cruel fate, as did Reb Dovid’s own infant daughter, his parents, and his mother-in-law.

Eventually, Reb Dovid, his wife and their older daughter, Shulamis, embarked on a transcontinental flight to freedom that took them through Russia, Siberia, and Japan, and then on to Hawaii aboard the last Japanese ship to cross the Pacific before war erupted between Japan and the United States. Among their fellow seaborne travelers were such well-known Torah figures as Rav Avrohom Jofen, Rav Michel Feinstein, Rav Moshe Mordechai Shkop and Rav Moshe Shatzkes. On Erev Shavuos in 1941, the boat docked in San Francisco.

This is My Place

Initially, the Lifshitzes settled in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood, but it wasn’t long before an offer to serve as rosh yeshivah in Skokie’s Beis Medrash L’Torah brought them to Chicago. During his time there, Reb Dovid once organized a parade of his talmidim through the streets of Chicago to encourage Shabbos observance by local Jewish-owned businesses. When naysayers tried convincing him of the futility of the endeavor, he responded, “If even one store will be influenced as a result, all the effort will be worthwhile.” In the end, dozens of establishments agreed to close their doors on Shabbos.

Reb Dovid quickly became a beloved figure in the city, but two years later, two job offers arrived from New York, from Mesivta Torah Vodaath and RIETS, to join their respective staffs. Reb Dovid opted to accept the latter invitation — he felt his experience as a community rav made him better suited for RIETS’ mission to train rabbanim, whereas Torah Vodaath strove at the time to produce frum balabatim — but not before 11 of Skokie’s top talmidim beseeched him to take them along with him. And he did.

The family, which grew to include two more daughters, moved near Yeshiva University in Washington Heights so that Reb Dovid would be always accessible to his students. Thus did Reb Dovid begin a nearly five-decade era of harbatzas Torah to generations of all-American young men, natives of a culture so vastly different from his. It was here that Reb Dovid was able to fully implement the approach to nurturing talmidim he had learned in Grodno of long ago, to bestow on his own disciples the unwavering love and acceptance with which his own rebbi, Rav Shimon Shkop, had graced him.

So indelible was the imprint of Reb Shimon’s influence on Reb Dovid, says Rabbi Weinberger, that whenever he’d mention him in shiur, “he would stand and begin to tremble as he’d slowly enunciate, ‘Mori v’Rabi Reb Shimon says….’ It would take him a minute or two to come back to himself. Here we were, modern American boys, and all of a sudden we felt a connection to something much greater, older. Reb Shimon — that was his entire world.”

Rabbi Weinberger recalls once asking his rebbi, with what he concedes was a touch of chutzpah, “Do you feel that here, in YU, is your place?” Reb Dovid turned toward his talmid and started to cry, as he explained, “I wanted American boys to see a tzurah of what it was like by Reb Shimon.”

Indeed, the parallels with Rav Shimon Shkop were uncanny. Both embraced two roles that nowadays are often seen as disparate, even at odds: rav and rosh yeshivah. Reb Shimon spent 13 successful years as rav of Breinsk, only accepting the post of Grodno rosh yeshivah when Reb Chaim Ozer Grodzensky insisted he do so at a 1920 rabbinic conference in Vilna.

Reb Dovid, too — long after World War II had tragically wiped out any trace of Jewish Suvalk — continued to be known as the Suvalker Rav. And it was no mere moniker.

Rav Aharon Kahn, rav of Knesses Beis Avigdor in Flatbush and a rosh yeshivah in RIETS who taught alongside Reb Dovid there, observes that “Reb Dovid remained Suvalker Rav not only in title, but in essence. People would sometimes joke, ‘Why do we keep calling him the Suvalker Rav?’ But he really was still the Suvalker Rav, even if Suvalk no longer existed. He was the personification of a rav even without a kehillah. His bearing, the way he carried himself, his levush, the rabbinic yarmulke — a hoich–kappel like the one Rav Moshe Feinstein wore — the way he spoke.

“There was such an atzilus, a fundamental essence that coursed through every aspect of his being, which held true and never changed,” Rav Kahn continues. “He was the Suvalker Rav wherever he went. Of all the people I’ve known, I don’t think there’s anyone else I can describe in that way, as someone who was a center of gravity wherever he was, who conveyed a sense of self, but without a trace of gaavah. That’s a very rare combination. Reb Dovid didn’t have to do anything to draw the respect of those around him; it was the metzius of who he was. There’s a concept called ‘kulo omer kavod’ — and that’s not an easy thing to achieve. But that was Reb Dovid.”

Reb Dovid was not someone who was, as the phrase goes, “many things to many people.” Everyone seemed to have the same image — “the Suvalker Rav” — and it was an accurate one. “They all had the same respect for him and what his name conjured and what he meant in their lives, regardless of where they were on a spectrum of Torah and avodas Hashem. To be as sweet as he was personally and yet so strong in the consistency that threaded through every aspect of his life and in the respect he commanded, that was simply unique,” says Rav Kahn.

His rabbinic persona and affinity for chesed made it natural for Reb Dovid to take an active role in various communal endeavors. One of these was the presidency of the Agudas Harabbonim alongside Rabbis Eliezer Silver and Yisroel Rosenberg. In 1976, Ezras Torah’s menahel, venerated posek Rav Yosef Henkin, sought to have Reb Dovid assume its presidency as well.

Concerned Reb Dovid would turn down the position, Rav Henkin arranged for a message to reach Reb Dovid that Rav Moshe Feinstein had asked to see him at his home. When Reb Dovid arrived there, a bottle of schnapps sat on the dining room table, and the waiting group of rabbinic notables greeted him with a hearty “L’chayim!” upon becoming Ezras Torah’s new president, a post in which he would raise hundreds of thousands of dollars over 17 years.

Reb Dovid maintained warm personal ties with many of the gedolim of his time, and headed the group of talmidei Mir in America. With his daughters’ marriages, he also became a mechutan with three well-known personalities in the European yeshivah world: Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky, Rav Chaim Stein and Rav Nissan Waxman.

Although markedly different from each other in many ways, a relationship of deep mutual respect existed between Reb Dovid and RIETS’s Rav Yoshe Ber Soloveitchik. Rabbi Weinberger recalls the two arguing in learning in the yeshivah’s hallway, as a large group of boys stood watching them speak excitedly to each other in Yiddish. “While driving home one point, Reb Yoshe Ber exclaimed with a grin, ‘I never learned in the yeshivos, but you, Reb Dovid, learned in the yeshivos — so what did they teach you in the yeshivos?!’ But Reb Dovid held his ground. You saw that there was great love between them — very different temperaments, but good friends.”

Rabbi Weinberger notes that his rebbi resembled Reb Shimon not only in external appearance, but in other, deeper ways too. There was their shared appreciation of music, which in turn was an expression of deeply felt emotions. Reb Dovid once shared the memory of when Rav Meir Shapiro had come to town, spending Shabbos in the Grodno yeshivah, singing and crying alongside Reb Shimon. Tears came easily to Reb Dovid too, often while delivering a hesped, but even during a regular shiur.

In RIETS, students were periodically required to take comprehensive written bechinos, and once, Rabbi Weinberger recalls, “we were taking one of Reb Dovid’s bechinos in a big auditorium full of talmidim, when all of a sudden, he started to sing, ‘V’taher libeinu, l’avdecha, l’avdecha….’ But he wasn’t interested in singing solo, so he said, ‘Nu…?’ urging us to stop writing and join him. In a voice filled with great feeling, he explained himself to us: ‘During the daily shiur, some boys’ minds might wander… but now, now, kulam misrakzim al haTorah, you are all concentrating so intently on the Ribbono shel Oilam’s Toirah.’ That was reason enough to break out in song, and so he did, “V’taher libeinu….” He was definitely not typical.”

But perhaps more than anything else, what Reb Dovid took with him from his years with Reb Shimon was the understanding that the rebbi-talmid relationship extends beyond the transmission of Torah, to a holistic involvement in the talmid’s life, bestowing love and showing genuine concern for every aspect of his wellbeing. Before handing out his written tests, Reb Dovid would ask the test-takers two questions: Had they gotten eight hours of sleep the night before? And, had they eaten breakfast yet? A negative response to the first one meant returning to the dorm to rest up, and to the second query, being handed a few dollars for a trip to the cafeteria.

“He was a real rebbi for us,” muses Rabbi Weinberger, “exuding warmth and caring and involvement in our lives. I’d often skip breakfast and stay in the beis medrash after Shacharis, but one day, he came in and saw me there and asked why I wasn’t eating. I said I didn’t have an appetite, but after saying something about the importance of pas shacharis, he took me by the hand and brought me to his apartment, where the Rebbetzin made me breakfast. There were some pretty hardened cynics among us, but with his kindness and his love, he won us all over and we became devoted to him heart and soul.”

Basking in the Glow

There was kindness, too, in the way he chose to give over Torah to his students. Although he was a massive talmid chacham who had mastered all of the classic yeshivish Torah, Reb Dovid’s priority was to make sure his students would know how to learn a blatt Gemara, how to parse the Rishonim carefully, discerning meanings in every word of a Ritva, a Rashba, a Tosfos. As Rav Kahn puts it, “He was so accessible that three-quarters of the people connected to him had no real sense of his gadlus in Torah, and he certainly never paraded it. It was said of him that he knew the Ketzos Hachoshen, the Nesivos Hamishpat and the Shev Shmaytsa like we know Ashrei, but you never got that sense being around him. You just knew there must be a reason for why people respected him so much.”

Once, when Reb Dovid was working through a difficult Rashba in shiur, Rabbi Weinberger glanced over at Reb Dovid’s desk, where the sefer lay open in front of his rebbi. “Both he and I had the Rashba open in front of us, but as I looked down at his, I realized he wasn’t on the right page — he was saying the entire long paragraph by heart, word for word. People never realized this about him: They know about him as a rosh yeshivah, a tzaddik, but he knew kol haTorah kulah, everything. And yet, his devotion to us meant ensuring that we mastered the fundamentals of learning, rather than being able to say his own Torah.”

Everything he said and did had one overarching goal: To build a young man up, in Torah and avodas Hashem, and never, ever to knock him down. Rabbi Weinberger reminisces about “how he understood American boys to an amazing extent. Even the mussar he gave was always positive. Other rebbeim would be harder on guys, making fun of movies, baseball, all the things that guys were into. But I don’t remember one word from his mouth making fun. Just lifting up Torah, lifting up the Ribbono shel Olam.”

And that uplift, he says, extended also to the parents of his talmidim. “On more than one occasion,” says Rabbi Weinberger, “he called my father to say, ‘Moishe had a good sevarah today.’ It wasn’t what they call nowadays a ‘nachas call,’ no one trained him to do that. It’s just that he knew my father was a tzubrocheneh Yid from the camps and he wanted to lift him up by telling him that ‘Moishe said something good to answer a Reb Akiva Eiger,’ after which my father would walk around for two weeks on a cloud.”

Rav Kahn says that Reb Dovid “was some people’s tatteh, but everybody’s zeideh, which meant that you walked away from him in a glow, there was a certain aura about him that made you feel very good about yourself. And for many people that was very, very positive in terms of their sense of belonging and their avodas Hashem. I have the feeling that a lot of the boys, had they not had that connection to him, would have been turned off, alienated to such an extent that they could have literally slipped away. But they had this incredible person who made them feel so good and when they looked at who he is, they wanted to relate to that.

“He had this unusual ability to relate to people with whom he no natural connection. But the talmidim knew he was trying to relate to them and it worked. There are dyed-in-the-wool talmidim of YU who were extremely close to him, for whom he was their connection to the Ribbono shel Olam. And yet, Reb Dovid never made any concessions, he never did anything to make anyone feel he was ‘one of the boys.’ He was just the Suvalker Rav. He never made English even his second language. His language was Yiddish, but when he had talmidim who didn’t understand it, he began to give shiur in Hebrew; not the real modern Ivrit, but a passable, yeshivish version. That’s the Suvalker Rav. “The comfort level people had with Reb Dovid was unbelievable. It was the rarest combination: You had a lot of respect, felt an incredible amount of warmth, but no fear whatsoever — a true zeideh,” says Rav Kahn. “I think everybody had the sense that if you hung on to him, you’d be connected to the derech Yisrael sava, that you, too, would have one foot in the pre-Holocaust world of Lita, of the yeshivos. Yet, nobody ever thought of him as a throwback to another era or that he was no longer relevant, because a zeideh’s always relevant. That’s the point of a zeideh — he’s not supposed to be exactly like me, he’s from a previous generation.”

The kesher Reb Dovid developed with his students during the two years they spent in his shiur remained strong for decades afterward. And although he championed the notion of devoting oneself to the klal by entering the fields of chinuch and rabbanus, talmidim stayed close with him no matter which career path they eventually took. By the time of his passing in 1993, his teaching and guidance and, even more, his unwavering example, had helped mold entire generations of American boys.

Listening to those who knew Reb Dovid so well, it’s hard to believe it has been a quarter-century since he took leave of us, so vivid are the memories, so deeply do the feelings register. Then again, as Reb Moshe Weinberger says, tapping into his feelings for his rebbi, “I think about him every day…. When Torah is given over with love, it makes its way not just into your heart but into your head.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 715)