Rebbetzin Yitty Neustadt left an imprint on all whose lives she touched

Rebbetzin Yitty Neustadt grew up in a chassidish home. But when she and her siblings asked their father, Rabbi Ezriel Tauber, which chassidish group they belonged to, he always replied, “We are the Eibishter’s chassidim.” It was an environment saturated with Torah ideals, avodah, and chesed.

The family started off in New Square, then relocated to Monsey when Yitty was 16. Reb Ezriel was a successful businessman, and also the address for all kinds of communal and individual needs. He was the author of well-received seforim on Jewish thought, and a visionary whose life’s work — including the Shalheves organization he cofounded with Rav Shimshon Pincus, and Yeshivas Ohr Somayach, which he established in Monsey — improved the status quo for Klal Yisrael. Almost inevitably, in this atmosphere, his children absorbed a sense of Klal-consciousness.

At home, Mrs. Tauber, the family matriarch (who still lives in Monsey today), held the fort with complete commitment to her family. Her children marvel that “off-days” simply didn’t exist. Whatever was going on, she constantly worked to make home-cooked, plentiful meals and keep everything running smoothly. She raised a dozen children, ka”h, and accomplished chesed as well: She’d have donations of clothing dropped at their home, which she would dedicatedly wash, mend, and pack, to send to poor families in the USSR.

Even in that environment, the third child, Yitty, stood out, with a heart as big as the world. She was reserved as a girl, keeping herself in the background — neither outgoing nor looking to be popular. But the ahavas Yisrael, which others would later describe as “almost tangible,” was beginning to flower, rooted in her good heart and an intuitive grasp of the needs of people around her. In a world that had not yet openly embraced special needs children, her sisters remember that Yitty easily held hands with and visited them. In school, she was recognized by her fellow students and teachers as being unusually refined, with an unquenchable thirst for Torah and chesed. Tehillim mechulak was not yet a thing, but when she knew that someone sick needed tefillos, Yitty divided Sefer Tehillim among her fellow high-schoolers.

When she married Rabbi Aharon Dovid Neustadt, they settled in Monsey, on Acer Court right near her parents, and the budding talmid chacham learned at Kollel Machon Lehora’ah. Yitty was blessed with children immediately. She was still so young, a busy high-school teacher, and her house was slowly filling up with a handful of little ones. But this was a time when there was little talk about having one’s own space, one’s own needs, and self-care. The young Rebbetzin never seemed to feel that being a wife and partner to her choshuv and busy husband, raising a young family, teaching, and standing at her father’s right hand in his community and kiruv work meant she was doing enough. She made time for baalos teshuvah and other women who needed support or a listening ear, often hosting them in her home.

“One Friday, I came down from my Erev Shabbos nap to find two little girls sitting playing with my toys,” her oldest daughter, Malky Lefkowitz, describes. “I didn’t even realize they were Jewish.” Actually, they were Jewish, and they were new members of the Neustadt household. A young mother with two children had run away from an abusive non-Jewish husband and somehow found her way to Rabbi Ezriel Tauber for help. Rabbi Tauber sent the threesome, barely religious and traumatized, to stay with his daughter Yitty whom he viewed as his capable right hand. He knew she would be able to help them.

Another time, two teenagers from frum families in Eretz Yisrael who had dropped out of Yiddishkeit were welcomed in. They stayed for four years, sharing bedrooms with the little Neustadt girls, and were treated as daughters by the Rebbetzin until she walked them to their respective chuppahs. There was space for everyone in Rebbetzin Yitty’s home and heart, and her gift of communication revived them.