It was the day before Purim ten years ago. Rav Yitzchok Shlomo Zilberman was hospitalized for the illness from which he would not recover.

Among the streams of visitors arriving for a final conversation one last pearl of wisdom or words of chizuk was Yishai Levi who had become religiously observant thanks to his newfound association with Rav Yitzchok Shlomo.

“He was like a father to me” said Levi. “I could walk into his house at 2 a.m. without knocking on the door and he would receive me hospitably.”

At that point in time a governmental authority was on the verge of announcing the winning bids for restoration work on the historical Churvah synagogue. First built in Jerusalem’s Old City by Yehudah HaChassid around 1700 and later rebuilt by the Vilna Gaon’s talmidim it had been destroyed each time by Arabs. Levi an architect had painstakingly devoted the previous three years to researching the Churvah’s rich architectural history in his quest to be the project’s lead architect. It was a brutally competitive process with lucrative contracts at stake.

“Getting this job became an obsession for me” said Levi.

Rav Yitzchok Shlomo provided Levi with ongoing encouragement as the rav saw its rebuilding as fulfillment of the saying attributed to the Vilna Gaon that when the Churvah would be rebuilt a third time it would be a harbinger of the construction of the third and final Beis HaMikdash.

As he stretched out his hand to take the hand of Rav Yitzchok Shlomo and wish him a refuah shleimah Levi remembers some of the last words he heard from his rav and mentor: “You should be zocheh to rebuild two churvahs. One is your own and one is the house of Rav Yehuda HaChassid.”

Rav Yitzchok Shlomo was niftar four days later on 18 Adar. Before Adar concluded the young woman that Levi had met in Chodesh Shvat agreed to become his wife. He also signed a contract to begin restoration of the Churvah which finally reopened last Rosh Chodesh Nisan nine years later as a public synagogue and beis medrash.

While Rav Yitzchok Shlomo was never zocheh to daven in the newly restored Churvah his sons and extended family play a dominant role in leading the daily minyanim and shiurim that fill the Churvah with kedushah. Rav Yitzchok Shlomo’s spirit still permeates the kehillah he established in Tzion at the doorstep of where the Shechinah once dwelled and whose light he yearned to behold with every ounce of his being. Today almost all of the Old City’s 600 Jewish families are religiously observant and the Zilberman kehillah comprises about 20 percent of that. If it weren’t for their presence Jerusalem’s quasi-governmental planners might have realized their dream instead of making the Old City into a secular bastion geared even more to tourists than it already is.

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