The many-splendored Bostoner Rebbe ztz”l remained, in his essence, a noble heir to chassidic greatness, a rebbe who served as a lantern for his flock and every straying sheep. Ten years on, the flame still glows

Photos: Stuart Garfield, Matityahu Goldberg, Nesanel Paterman, Mishpacha and Family archives

The phone rang one Sunday morning many years ago in the Boro Park home of psychotherapist and author Dr. Meir Wikler, and it was a chassidic rebbe on the line — his rebbe, Rav Levi Yitzchok Horowitz of Boston. The Bostoner Rebbe was flying into New York and wanted to know if Reb Meir could pick him up and drive him to the fledgling Kiryas Joel community in Monroe to speak with the Satmar Rav, Rebbe Yoelish Teitelbaum.

“I was thrilled to be able to do something for my rebbe,” Dr. Wikler recalls. “We arrived at the Satmar Rav’s home just as they were starting Minchah. The Bostoner Rebbe had the gabbai write a kvittel for him, and then asked him to write one for me too. The gabbai said firmly, ‘No, no, the Rav is very weak and we can’t let just anyone in. After Maariv, the gabbai will open the door to the Rav’s room, you’ll show him the kvittel, and he’ll let you in. Just you.’

“The Rebbe took me aside and said, ‘You have to get in to see the Rav for a brachah too. You’re married over a year and don’t yet have a child, and you may not get another chance for a brachah from the tzaddik. When they open the door a crack for me to enter, you’ll hold onto my gartel, press against my back and push in with me.’ ‘Rebbe,’ I protested, ‘I can’t do that.’ But he was adamant: ‘I’m your rebbe, and I’m telling you to do it.’ It was the only time I ever recall him giving me a direct order.

“After Maariv, we approached the Rav’s room and the door opened about eight inches. The Rebbe said it wasn’t wide enough for him and it opened it a bit more and then some more, until finally, with a crowd of chassidim right behind us all hoping to get even a glimpse of the Rav, the Rebbe pushed on in, with me right behind him. The door slammed shut, and I was in, but so terrified I tried not to even breathe too loudly.

“The Rebbe approached Rav Yoelish and whispered in his ear. This continued for several minutes until the Rav raised his hand. The Rebbe took it and said ‘Amen’ (I later learned the Rebbe had come seeking a yeshuah for a seriously ill newborn grandchild, but had not received the assurance he sought. The child did not survive). One of the gabbaim motioned for me to step forward, but I was frozen in place. The gabbai said, ‘Tell him what you need,’ and I said we were still waiting to be blessed with a child. The Rav said something inaudible and gave me his heilige hand, to which I answered, ‘Amen.’

“Nine months later, to the day, we had our first child.”

Who can know how many Jews held onto the gartel of the Bostoner Rebbe over his lifetime, as he led them from illness to healing, from confusion to clarity, from agnostic alienation to joyfully serving Hashem? Ten years after his passing this month, the number of individuals and families who owe their spiritual and even physical lives to this beloved tzaddik is simply beyond counting.

Part of the Family

Descended from the holy Rebbe Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev, the Bostoner Rebbe not only carried his exact name — Levi Yitzchok ben Sara Soshe — but the Berditchever’s legacy of overflowing love for every Jew as well. It’s one thing, however, to speak of ahavas Yisrael in the abstract, and quite another to see its profound continuing impact in the lives of those who knew him.

A former professor of mathematical logic, Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb is the picture of intellectual acuity. But sitting in his office at Jerusalem’s Ohr Somayach as he speaks of a 47-year relationship with the Rebbe, another side of Reb Dovid emerges: “Yaakov Avinu was inconsolable over Yosef. Yet, seemingly, that should have indicated that Yosef was still alive, since the dead are forgotten after a year. But, the chassidishe seforim say, tzaddikim are called living even in death, meaning they’re still with us. That’s why he couldn’t get over Yosef — and I can’t get over the Rebbe. It was losing a father. When I think about it, I start to cry.” And he does.

Today Dr. Wikler is a dispassionate healer of bruised psyches, yet for him, too, tears punctuate his reminiscences of the Rebbe. He remembers when, still unmarried, he and his brother, Rabbi Yosef Wikler, lost their mother, just 13 months after their father’s passing, and how the Rebbe flew in from Boston and was driven an hour and a half to their Westchester home to console them during shivah. Before leaving for his flight home, he asked the boys to come with him into another room, where he said, “You have a lot of good friends who will invite you for Shabbos, and you should go to them. But I’m asking you to come up to Boston for the first Shabbos after shivah.”

“What’s the inyan of the first Shabbos after shivah?” Yosef asked. “The inyan,” said the Bostoner, “is that you have a lot of friends here — but I want you to know that in Boston you have mishpachah.”

I’ve come to Boston, to the Rebbe’s beis medrash, known as the New England Chassidic Center, to behold the place from which so much life and love and learning has radiated out to the far corners of the globe and to which, in turn, Jews from every imaginable background and walk of life have been almost magnetically drawn. Miriam Rosenbloom is one of those: Having arrived in Boston in 1982 to attend graduate school, she never left, and today she works for ROFEH International, the organization the Rebbe founded in 1949 to provide medical referrals and comprehensive support for patients at Boston’s renowned medical centers.

Sitting in ROFEH’s headquarters — located on an upper floor of the Bostoner beis medrash —Mrs. Rosenbloom speaks of the Rebbe’s encompassing love. “He wasn’t merely a rav or a trusted mentor. It was a deeper relationship, because his investment in each of us as individuals was such that you could rely on him the same way a child relies on a father. You knew the Rebbe loved you because the Rebbe loved every Jew, but it was amazing that he loved your children the same way you loved your children. The Rebbe had a vast biological family, but his children are much greater in number than that. And it wasn’t an ‘I love all Jews’ kind of relationship — you became a member of his household, and with that came expectations: ‘I didn’t see you in shul, so where’d you daven? What was it like there? Were they nice people?’ It wasn’t about why you weren’t davening with him, but to understand your growth and your needs. If I had shared some difficulty I was going through and I didn’t get back to him on it, I’d get good mussar. He’d tell me, ‘A week ago you called me and you haven’t gotten back to me. What’s going on with that thing?’”

Although as a seventh-generation descendant of Rav Shmelke of Nikolsburg his roots stretch back to the beginnings of chassidus, Rav Levi Yitzchok Horowitz himself was a New England Yankee, born in Boston in 1921 to his parents, Rav Pinchas Dovid and Rebbetzin Sarah Soshe Horowitz.

Jerusalem-born-and-bred Rav Pinchas Dovid was on a trip to Europe when World War I broke out, making a return to Eretz Yisrael impossible. Forced to travel instead to the United States, Rav Pinchas Dovid lived briefly in Brownsville, Brooklyn, before accepting an invitation from Boston’s substantial Orthodox community.

In 1920, his wife and two children were finally able to travel from Eretz Yisrael and reunite with him in Boston, and the next year, Levi Yitzchok, their third of four children, was born. They lived in a huge, old house at 87 Poplar Street in the city’s West End neighborhood, which served also as home to the New England Chassidic Center. It quickly became a magnet for local Jews attracted to the Rebbe’s Torah brilliance and fiery avodas Hashem and for any traveler or meshulach needing a place to stay.

Thus did Rav Pinchas Dovid become the first Bostoner Rebbe. He later remarked in both jest and humility that he had chosen that title rather than a name reflecting his illustrious lineage from the chassidic courts of Nikolsburg, Lelov, and Tchortkov, so that “when people give me a kvittel, they should know they are giving it to a rebbe from Boston — and how much can one expect from a Bostoner rebbe?”

The Rebbe set about addressing the huge gaps in Torah observance existing in Boston Jewry of the time, introducing afternoon and evening Torah classes for elementary school children and working mightily to upgrade the three pillars of mitzvah observance — Shabbos, mikveh, and kashrus. In that last area, he waged a fierce, lengthy battle at great personal risk to have the kashrus certification of one of America’s leading meat producers revoked for fraudulently purveying treif products as kosher.

Never truly at home in America, where he refused even to learn English, Rav Pinchas Dovid always pined for Eretz Yisrael, and in 1934, he decided to move his family back to Jerusalem in time to celebrate Levi Yitzchok’s bar mitzvah there. Meanwhile, Rav Pinchas Dovid dreamed of building a community for religious American Jews, which he named Givat Pinchas, in the then-Arab-occupied Shuafat area of Jerusalem. In a deal brokered by Rav Amram Blau, he and a few partners purchased ninety dunams of land from a group of Arabs, and he then headed back alone to the States to begin marketing the development to prospective buyers.

But with America still in the throes of the Great Depression, the always-difficult sell of moving to Eretz Yisrael became an impossible one. (Only many decades later, after Rav Levi Yitzchok realized his father’s vision by establishing a Bostoner community in Har Nof, would Rav Pinchas Dovid’s plot of land in Shuafat become home to the frum community of Ramat Shlomo.)

Rebbetzin Horowitz struggled to stay financially afloat in Eretz Yisrael without her husband, but after two years, she could do so no longer, and she and her children rejoined Rav Pinchas Dovid in Boston. Their ship docked in New York Harbor on February 7, 1936, two years to the day after they had left for Jerusalem, and although they were greeted by a jubilant crowd, Levi Yitzchok never forgot the look on his father’s face: “It was the end of his dream. There would be no community and no future for him in Eretz Yisrael.”

Upon the family’s return to Boston, Levi Yitzchok went off to Yeshiva Torah Vodaath in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he would become close to its rosh yeshivah, Rav Shlomo Heiman, eventually becoming one of the few talmidim to receive yadin yadin semichah from him. In 1940, Rav Pinchas Dovid followed his son to Williamsburg, becoming one of the first rebbes to open a beis medrash in a neighborhood that would later become the foremost stronghold of chassidus.

Years earlier, Rav Pinchas Dovid’s vision had begun failing, and now, his health deteriorated too. In December of 1941, at just 65, he was niftar, with the mantle of Bostoner Rebbe assumed by his older son, Rav Moshe, 13 years Reb Levi Yitzchok’s senior. (Rav Moshe, who was a member of Agudath Israel’s Moetzes Gedolei Hatorah, eventually moved his beis medrash to Crown Heights and then to Boro Park, where he remained until his passing in 1985.)

A year after his father’s petirah, 21-year-old Reb Levi Yitzchok married Raichel Horowitz, also a descendant of Rav Shmelke of Nikolsburg. Born in the Galician city of Strishov, her parents had divorced when she was a little girl, and her mother remarried to the Nadvorna-Clevelander Rebbe, who later immigrated to the United States. Their wedding was a first of its kind for 1942 America: an authentically chassidic chasunah, with all the customs and trappings, and separate halls for men and women accommodating 3,000 guests for the chuppah and 1,000 for the meal.

Still a talmid in Torah Vodaath, Levi Yitzchok was not ready to follow his father in leading a community. When his father was still alive, he was approached by legendary menahel Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendelovitz, who put his hand on Levi Yitzchok’s shoulder and said, “One day, you’ll be a rebbe.” Levi Yitzchok shrugged, not wanting to hear of it, particularly since his father was then ill, but Reb Shraga Feivel insisted. “No, you will one day be a rebbe.”

And, indeed, in 1944, after the first of their five children was born, Reb Levi Yitzchok acceded to the urgings of the aging remnant of his father’s followers in Boston and returned to the Bay State with the daunting mission of reestablishing Bostoner chassidus there from the ground up. Not only was Boston not fertile terrain for growing Yiddishkeit, but also, as Meir Wikler observes, “By nature, the Rebbe was not an outgoing person; not shy, but reserved. Yet he pushed himself to reach out to others, because he felt that’s what was needed. On Leil Shabbos, instead of standing up front for people to file past and wish ‘gut Shabbos,’ he would make his way to the door of the beis medrash before they left the shul, in order to meet those people who might have been too shy to come forward.”

The Horowitzes moved to the new Jewish neighborhood of Dorchester, where the Rebbe struggled just to find a minyan of men for davening. The large, rambling four-story house at the corner of Seaver Street and Columbia Road had shul on the first floor, a mikveh in the basement, and numerous guest rooms for travelers and meshulachim. The Rebbe set to work, and within a few years, there would be a new mikveh, a chevra kaddisha, and even chalav Yisrael.

In 1949, the Rebbe received word that the Chazon Ish had recommended that a Jew from Jerusalem named Ornstein have heart surgery performed by a Boston doctor named Dwight Harkin. The Rebbe contacted Dr. Harkin, who agreed to do the procedure, only the 91st of its kind to be performed, and arranged for Yiddish-speaking volunteers to stay with the patient round-the-clock in the hospital. He also calmed Mr. Ornstein’s fears of undergoing an operation during the Nine Days.

The night before the operation, a telegram arrived from Bnei Brak conveying the Chazon Ish’s blessing that “the operation should be with hatzlachah.” Indeed it was, and thus was ROFEH International, the Rebbe’s monumental project providing support for out-of-town patients and their families, born.

ROFEH — an acronym for “Reaching Out — Furnishing Emergency Healthcare” — has in its 70 years of existence given healing, hope, and a warm home away from home to countless thousands of ailing Jews from abroad. The Rebbe’s youngest son, Rav Naftali Yehuda, who is the current Rebbe in Boston and head of ROFEH, says his father, who was medically well-versed, had a rapport with even the busiest, most successful doctors — they always picked up the phone when it was Rabbi Horowitz on the line.

In addition to medical referrals, the organization also provides patients with housing, food, translation, and anything else to ease things for them in their time of need. “The Rebbe,” says Rav Naftali, “was able to connect to every type of individual, from gedolei Yisrael to the simplest person. The Vizhnitzer and Klausenberger Rebbes, Rav Shmuel Rozovsky, Rav Shneur Kotler, Rav Boruch Sorotzkin, and Rav Sholom Eisen, all stayed here. They were all very different types of Yidden, and my father was able to relate comfortably to each of them.”

The Rebbe became particularly close with Rav Avrohom Genachovsky as a result of several trips he made to Boston with his son, Yoni, who eventually was niftar in his teens. Altogether, they spent several years in Boston, and he even wrote a commentary on the Shev Shmaytsa on the stationary of Children’s Hospital. “Reb Avrohom felt deep hakaras hatov for what the Rebbe had done for his family,” says Rav Naftali. “He would host my father’s tish on his visits to Bnei Brak and would hand-mill wheat grains for him to use Erev Pesach in his matzah baking.”

The Rebbe was also close with Rav Shach, who sent a number of people to Boston for treatment. “Once,” Rav Naftali remembers, “when my father was in Bnei Brak and someone told Rav Shach that he was planning to visit him, the Rosh Yeshivah exclaimed, ‘The Rebbe is here in town!?’ He picked up his hat and coat and made his way to where my father was staying.”

Dr. Yosef Dovid Hollander, a neurologist who had a close relationship with the Rebbe, says that “non-frum and non-Jewish doctors alike respected him greatly and were happy to give him of their time, but he wouldn’t ask them to provide their services gratis or at a reduced fee. He would only use his connections to gain access to top doctors and to enable patients to be seen and treated without a long wait. As his network and his reputation grew, it became a matter of prestige to help the Rebbe, and he would honor physicians at ROFEH’s dinners.”

The responsibility for paying medical bills, however, always remained that of the patient. At times, doctors offered to volunteer their services, but pressing them to do so risked creating a reluctance to take future ROFEH patients. Once, Meir Wikler relates, a girl from Eretz Yisrael received three months of treatment, resulting in a six-figure hospital bill. Through the standard negotiating process, the Rebbe was able to reduce the charges to 20-thousand dollars, the sum he knew the father had raised for his anticipated medical bills. But his elation turned to shock when the man said he would pay only ten thousand, arguing that he needed the balance for a dowry for another daughter. “If you walk away from this hospital bill,” the Rebbe pleaded, “they’re not going to take another Yid from Eretz Yisrael. You’re ruining it for all future patients.” When the fellow remained obstinate, the Rebbe didn’t say another word, and instead paid the $10,000 balance from his own pocket.

And then, Dr. Wikler adds, there was the other, extra-medical advocacy of the Rebbe: “My friend’s wife received an ominous medical diagnosis, and he rushed to the Rebbe to share his worry about what a test to confirm the diagnosis might show. The Rebbe reassured him that all would be okay and gave him a brachah, and the fellow went home greatly relieved. The next morning, the husband was elated to learn that the results were negative. When he came to the Bostoner shul to use the mikveh, he passed by the Rebbe’s office and found him asleep at his desk. He had sent my friend home to sleep soundly through the night, while he, the Rebbe, hadn’t gone to bed that night at all, staying up instead to daven for another Jew.”

Over the course of the 1950s, the old Jewish neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester began changing, prompting a Jewish exodus headed for the upscale Brookline area of Boston, and in 1961, the Rebbe followed suit. The New England Chassidic Center relocated to a large, four-story townhouse on Beacon Street, Brookline’s main thoroughfare, and with the move, a new and important chapter opened in the Rebbe’s life.

Boston is a major American college town, with universities like Harvard, MIT, Brandeis, and Boston University, each boasting tens of thousands of students, a large percentage of whom are Jewish. Slowly, students, as well those in Boston for jobs in fields like medicine, law, and high-tech, began discovering the jewel of dynamic Jewish living and chassidic warmth nestled nearby on a tree-lined Brookline street, and before long the trickle of visitors turned into a mighty stream. Every Shabbos, tens of students would join the Horowitzes for davening, meals, and lectures, with the overflow of guests who couldn’t be accommodated at the Rebbe’s own expansive table (in a dining room whose removable roof turns it into a succah) being redirected to local frum families.

In 1961, when, save for a handful of trailblazers, kiruv was almost an unknown word in America’s Orthodox Jewish lexicon, hundreds of students crowded into the Bostoner shul for a rousing Purim celebration, with live music, skits, and grammen. The next year, the festivities were moved to a local public high school cafeteria, and the tradition has continued there ever since, with hundreds enjoying a catered meal, live band, and the antics of a duly appointed Purim Rav (a role Meir Wikler filled for two decades).

Two years later, the Rebbe held his first major shabbaton for hundreds of college students, which became a regular feature of the Bostoner calendar. A particular high point of the year was Simchas Torah, when the shul would be mobbed by thousands of students and curious locals, spilling into the surrounding streets.

With newly-observant graduate students and college faculty members putting down roots in Brookline and joining the Bostoner beis medrash, it became an eclectic scene. Rabbi Gottlieb recalls what a revelation it was to first encounter the Rebbe and his shul: “Such warmth, intelligence, education, commitment, and sensitivity in a supposedly ‘medieval’ Jew! And a chassidic congregation full of mathematicians, sociologists, lawyers, and doctors! Obviously a lot more had been hidden from me.”

Hershel Miller, today a Boston tax attorney and graduate tax professor, was introduced to the Rebbe by Rabbi Gottlieb, who was his Johns Hopkins philosophy professor, as someone who “was able to see into each person, perceive their essence, and give them what they needed.” At Rabbi Gottlieb’s urging, he and his wife traveled from Baltimore to meet the Rebbe, and after sitting in his study for an hour, they walked out knowing they wanted to move to Boston.

Hershel recalls a Bostoner beis medrash filled with “people in full chassidic levush, those with a kippah serugah, and others who didn’t know which way to hold a siddur, and the magnet that drew them all here was the Rebbe. They’d hang onto his every word. He, however, was completely unassuming. He’d try to glide by the shul’s daf yomi shiur soundlessly, so the attendees wouldn’t stand in his honor.”

Dr. Tzvi Segal, a physicist who arrived in Boston in the thick of the kiruv heyday, observes that “you can tell a lot about a leader by the people around him: If they’re utterly dependent on him, he’s not a good leader, only if they’re bright, creative, contributing people in their own right. The people around the Rebbe, coming from a very wide range of experiences and professions, were great people to be around, and everyone felt at home and included.”

Despite the very large numbers of people frequenting the shul, never did the Rebbe lose sight of them as individuals, each with his or her own story, interests, and needs. Hershel Miller observes that “there were lots of people coming from non-religious backgrounds and they often had complicated relationships with their parents, with issues like whether and how to eat in their parents’ nonkosher homes. But instead of giving the identical advice to all, the Rebbe would tailor his counsel based on each individual’s unique situation. And the parents developed such respect for him that they would often end up calling him for advice, even on matters not relating to their kids.”

Mrs. Miriam Rosenbloom recalls an early, formative experience that helps illuminate the Rebbe’s success with newcomers to Judaism: “When I relocated here, I was starting grad school and didn’t have a lot of money, and I was trying to figure things out. I said to my father, ‘I think I’m going to live with an Orthodox family, and I’ll figure out if that’s what I want to do.’ But he said to me, ‘I’d rather you didn’t do that, because then I’ll never know if it’s because you’re feeling obligated to people because they’ve been kind to you. I’d rather you borrow the money from me to set up an apartment for yourself,’ (although he never did have me pay him back).

“I told the Rebbe I didn’t know what to do, and he said to me, ‘You’re changing your lifestyle, and to your parents, it feels like you’re turning your back on them. Your father wants to show you how much he loves you, and the only way he can do that right now is by giving you money to set up an apartment in this place he doesn’t even want you to be, with these people he isn’t even sure he wants you to be with — and you’re going to tell your father, “No, I’m not going to take from you?” How else can he be a father to you right now?’

“The sensitivity to perceive that by taking money from my father I was actually giving to him… this is what was so amazing about the Rebbe. He wanted you to take all the best things of what you were before and bring them along with you, because that richness of who you are as a person is what got you on the journey of adding mitzvos to your life — the sensitivity to realize that I had wonderful parents, a great childhood, a fantastic life, but I wanted to be better. Baalei teshuvah have to be very careful that they’re not running away from something but running to G-d, and the Rebbe could distill that. He didn’t want you to stop being the person you were but to become better than you were yesterday.”

Like the Rebbe, says Hershel Miller, the Rebbetzin “was very down-to-earth and related strongly to people. She would hold court in the kitchen, making kugel as these college girls with no background would be sitting there talking to her, and even though she was like from another world, she’d find some way of relating to them.

“She also had a way of communicating even with those others found difficult or strange. My wife told me that one Yom Kippur, a woman walked into the ezras nashim dressed like the Kohein Gadol. She sat down in the back row and over the course of several hours slowly made her way up to the second row. When the Rebbetzin looked over her shoulder and saw her, she said, ‘Why don’t you come sit up here with me?’ They began talking and the woman mentioned her interest in getting married and asked if the Rebbetzin had any ideas for her. The Rebbetzin replied, ‘If you want to meet more guys, you might want to try getting rid of the Urim V’Tumim…’ ”

Even as he was actively working to bring disconnected Jewish souls back home, the Rebbe was also very much a rav to the local frum kehillah, ensuring all of its necessary institutions were in place, and today’s solid, growing religious community owes a great deal to the Rebbe for its foundations. According to Dr. Hollander, the Rebbe was very instrumental in the founding of the Torah Academy elementary school, and “for years, his financial support for it was critical. I don’t think people realized how much support he gave the school, and without a school to which mechanchim and yungeleit could send their children, we wouldn’t have a kollel, a mesivta, or a Bais Yaakov here today.”

Rav Naftali adds that his father also built the local mikveh, and when someone once asked Rav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik, who held the official title of Boston chief rabbi, about it, he replied, “Anything the Rebbe built has my full trust. He knows mikvaos backwards and forwards.” But beneath the layers of mekarev and rav and medical advocate, the many-splendored Bostoner Rebbe remained, in his essence, just that — a rebbe, a noble heir to multiple generations of chassidic greatness. It was from that essence, from the heart of a rebbe pulsating with love for his own flock and for the straying and ailing sheep, too, that all else flowed.

There was a Leil Shabbos tish, replete with divrei Torah, niggunim (often Bostoner compositions), and calling people up by name to receive shirayim of half an apple. As Shabbos waned, there was a Seudah Shlishis, where, Hershel Miller says, “when he spoke, I’d be thinking, ‘Gosh, he’s talking to me,’ until afterwards, when I’d say that to a friend and he’d say, ‘No, he was speaking to me,’ and it turns out that we had all felt that way.”

“Mesorah,” Dr. Wikler observes, “was a very high priority for the Rebbe, seeking to maintain as much of what came before him as possible.” To this end, he put great effort into publishing a siddur following the nusach and customs of Bostoner chassidus, which the Wikler brothers sponsored. Here, in the birthplace of the American Revolution, was a Yid out of Nikolsburg, a descendant of the Baal Shem Tov himself — but one, as Hershel Miller put it, “who also knew what happened with the Red Sox the night before (although you weren’t quite sure how he knew).”

If he was a slightly unconventional rebbe, there were some unlikely chassidim, too. Rav Naftali tells the story of Rabbi Tzvi Travis, who was in a horrific car crash in Maine, the only chance for survival being with an airlift to Boston by private plane. “My father contacted President Kennedy, whom he knew from his years as a congressman, then senator, and he advised getting hold of his brother Ted, who was then in a tight race for a US Senate seat. The latter lent his personal plane for the airlift, and when he asked for a blessing to win his Senate race, my father said, ‘I bless you to win all the Senate races you’re in.’ He went on to be a long-serving senator, but when some years later he was mulling a run for president and wanted a blessing, my father said, ‘You have the Senate? Let’s not talk about the presidency...’ But my father never looked upon his contacts with such people as something to boast about, merely as something he had to do in order to accomplish on behalf of fellow Jews.”

Rav Naftali, of course, also has yet another perspective, which only he and his siblings can provide: “He gave you his undivided attention. I so clearly remember our Leil HaSeder, when he had to give attention to the guests, but we felt so privileged to be with him and to see his avodah, that we got much from him in that way. From the age of five, each one of us got a Seder plate, so we were like adults at the Seder, and we felt so good about it.”

Rekindling the Light As he entered his seventh decade, and with a lifetime of multifaceted achievement already behind him, the Rebbe refused to rest on his laurels. Having inherited a fervent love of the Holy Land from his father and wanting, finally, to return there and build what had eluded his father, he set out to create a Bostoner community in Eretz Yisrael.

In 1984, Beis Medrash Givat Pinchas — the very name planned for his father’s ill-fated community in Shuafat — opened in the Har Nof neighborhood of Jerusalem, and a flourishing community grew up around it, which continues today under the leadership of his middle son, Rav Meir Alter. “He wanted a place in Eretz Yisrael,” Rav Naftali explains, “where everyone could be comfortable no matter who he is and how he looks, because it can be very difficult for Americans in particular to integrate into chareidi society there.” That inclusive diversity has indeed become a hallmark of the community.

Although he still spent half the year in Boston, the Rebbe took an active interest in communal affairs in Eretz Yisrael, and was invited to join the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah there. In 2005, distraught over the impending expulsion from Gush Katif, he took a contingent of followers down to spend Shabbos in one of its beleaguered towns. And for several years, he would travel to Kiryat Arba for Shabbos parshas Shelach, when we read of Kalev going to the kivrei haAvos in Chevron. As his health began to falter, the Rebbe became a full-time Har Nof resident until his petirah at the age of 86 on 18 Kislev 5770.

One summer, Meir Wikler visited the Rebbe in Har Nof and found him to be unusually buoyant. With obvious relish, the Rebbe began speaking of how he had successfully restored the minhag of earlier generations to make a hadlakah on Lag B’omer at Rabi Akiva’s kever in Teveriah. Beginning with a handful of participants, it is now an annual event that draws thousands. “And I thought to myself,” Dr. Wikler reflects, “here is a rebbe who had helped thousands return to Yiddishkeit, who created mosdos, events, publications, who turned over worlds… and what is he most proud of? That he reinstated a minhag in Klal Yisrael.”

It was, until the end, always about Klal Yisrael.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 789)