Being a Greenwald typically came with Greenwald-sized expectations. Both Reb Zecharya and Reb Chananya readily admit that as much as they respected their father and were immensely proud of him, as teenagers, they still wanted to be able to carve their own paths in life.

“One year I went to Australia to do a summer kiruv program,” notes Reb Chananya. “There was no Internet then and no international news, and I’m thinking that for once I’m making my own way.”

Arriving at his destination, Sydney’s Moriah College, Reb Chananya sat down with headmaster Lionel Link, only to discover that his father’s reach spanned the globe.

“Greenwald? Are you related to Rabbi Ronnie Greenwald?” asked Link, who had spent Shabbos in the Greenwald home some 17 years earlier, unbeknownst to Reb Chananya.

“All I could think was, They knew Tatty in Australia?” muses Reb Chananya.

Reb Yisroel took a different approach to having a father who was so ahead of the curve that he was likely the only person in all of Monsey in the 1980s who had a State Department-issued cell phone, one that came with a suitcase-sized battery.

“I felt zero pressure,” he says. “If G-d had wanted me to be Ronnie Greenwald, he would have made me that way.”

“To us he wasn’t famous,” adds Mrs. Lapin. “He was just our father.”

As a second-year seminary student in Israel, Mrs. Lewenstein remembers explaining her marriage goals to a faculty member, emphasizing the importance of maturity. The faculty member tried to steer her in a slightly different direction saying, “That may be true, but you also don’t want to marry someone like your father.”

“Obviously, she had never met my father,” says Mrs. Lewenstein. “And thankfully, I did marry someone like him in many ways.”

Camp Lessons

It goes without saying that Camp Sternberg, founded by Rabbi Greenwald in 1964, was a particularly special place for the Greenwald girls. While Mrs. Lewenstein originally tried to downplay her position as the camp director’s daughter as a younger camper, wanting to make sure that people appreciated her for who she was and not for her last name, she quickly learned that introducing herself as Rabbi Greenwald’s daughter could be very useful. Besides, the fact that her father would put an arm around her, give her a kiss, and proudly say, “This is the only camper in camp I can kiss,” completely undermined her quest for anonymity.

Mrs. Lewenstein’s summer in Sternberg’s Pioneer division gave her an opportunity to see her father’s commitment to his campers in a whole new light. The program focused on utilizing the great outdoors to help girls build lifelong skills in a variety of ways and included an overnight hike to Ten Mile River, located approximately eight miles away from Sternberg. Mrs. Lewenstein and her fellow Pioneers were camped out on the far side of the river when a massive storm erupted in the middle of the night. Appreciating the hazards of the epic lightning storm, Rabbi Greenwald marshalled his troops, heading up a convoy of vans that made its way to Ten Mile River at 2 a.m.

“In the pouring rain, we organized an assembly line to transport our gear across the water, singing as we passed blankets, grates, food, and supplies from hand to hand,” recalls Mrs. Lewenstein. “He was blown away by our capability and spirit in the middle of the storm and mentioned it often throughout the years.”

When she became a Sternberg staff member, Mrs. Lewenstein suggested that the popular Pioneer program be expanded into a two-year program. Rabbi Greenwald didn’t hesitate to approve the idea, putting his relatively young daughter in charge of what became known as Intensive Pioneers, a vote of confidence that stays with her until today. Mrs. Lewenstein developed the new program using the skills her father had modeled for her, believing in and empowering her staff and her campers. Even as air conditioning and other comforts became the norm in most camps, girls (including three of my own) vied for the privilege to take part in the experience, which included sleeping in tents and stashing all snacks in sealed boxes placed high up in the trees to keep them safe from hungry bears.

As the youngest Greenwald, and the one who was the most extensively involved in Sternberg, Mrs. Lewenstein had countless opportunities to observe her father instill campers with confidence, but she wasn’t the only Greenwald to get her professional start in Sternberg.

Having passed all the requisite swimming tests to become a lifeguard by the time she was 12, Mrs. Lapin was assigned the job of working with some of Sternberg’s slower campers at the pool. She fell in love with her young charges, setting the stage for her current career as a psychotherapist.

“They were the cutest kids I ever saw, and that got me into special ed after that summer,” observes Mrs. Lapin, who began volunteering in Mishkan, a division of Sternberg catering to severely disabled girls.

“In those days, it wasn’t wow to have special kids,” notes Mrs. Lapin. “My father was willing and brave and not afraid to talk about mental illness, special ed, and kids who weren’t doing well in the regular system. He had the courage to do the right thing, no matter what other people would think. I was so proud of him, and so proud to say I was Rabbi Greenwald’s daughter.”

Not knowing anyone with a disability, and thinking that wheelchairs were only for great-grandparents, Mrs. Wolff remembers being concerned when Rabbi Greenwald started Mishkan. But her father felt differently, confidently explaining that integrating those with challenges into the mainstream world was something that had to happen.

“’You’ll see, girls are going to want to work with these kids,’ he would tell us,” recalls Mrs. Wolff. “He made it so that the girls saw the Mishkan campers, visited them on Shabbos, and made connections with them. At the time there were no frum therapy programs, but many who entered those fields were inspired by what they saw in camp.”

In time, other camps started similar programs. Far from being upset that his model was being replicated, Rabbi Greenwald was overjoyed, teaching his children another valuable life lesson.

“Instead of saying, ‘This belongs to Sternberg,’ he said, ‘No, this belongs to the Jewish world,’ ” remembers Mrs. Wolff.

Spy Dad

Rabbi Greenwald’s involvement in hostage negotiations and other complex international issues wasn’t something that happened overnight, and not all the Greenwald siblings have the same memories of their father’s humanitarian efforts. The older Greenwald children remember their father working as a rebbi, as Torah Umesorah’s director of development (a job that took three people to fill when he left), and as a Jewish community liaison for two major political campaigns: Nelson Rockefeller’s 1970 gubernatorial bid and Richard Nixon’s 1972 run for the White House. It was a time when political candidates were first discovering the value of doing outreach in the Orthodox community, and Rabbi Greenwald proved to be an invaluable asset.

“The phone would always be ringing off the hook and he was always talking on two phones,” says Reb Zecharya.

“I still remember the massive boxes of candy, buttons, and stickers we had that said ‘Rockefeller for governor,’ and I might still have Rockefeller pins in my garage,” adds Reb Yisroel, who lived just three doors away from his parents for 17 years. “I definitely still have Nixon pins.”

By the time Mrs. Wolff and Reb Zecharya had moved out of the house, the younger Greenwalds were growing up in a home where their father could be home taking them out for ice cream one day, and jetting off to Madagascar the next. Rabbi Greenwald’s passion for championing the underdog, combined with his expertise in making things happen, and the very extensive network of contacts that he had cultivated over the years, transformed him into an army of one. Those skills had Rabbi Greenwald leaving his fingerprints all over the globe as he became involved in rescuing those being held against their will, fulfilling a desire he had shared with Mrs. Wolff when she was a kid.

“He would say, ‘There is one mitzvah I don’t know how to do — pidyon shevuyim,’ ” she says. “It was something he always wished he could do and it just goes to show you — wish for something and then to do it. If the opportunity arises, just take it.”

And indeed, Rabbi Greenwald did exactly that. Of course, his efforts didn’t always yield the desired results, but never for lack of trying. When Lori Berenson, a Jewish American, was convicted of treason and held in a mountaintop prison in Peru notorious for its frigid conditions, the askanim involved were afraid that Rabbi Greenwald, who was no longer young, wouldn’t withstand the arduous trip.

“They were afraid that he couldn’t make the trip so they sent a nurse along with him,” says Mrs. Lapin. “The nurse fainted, but he made it all the way up to the top.”

In the case of Natan Sharansky, one of several individuals he helped free through his advocacy, the story had a happy ending. Rabbi Greenwald took dozens of trips to East Germany to negotiate for Sharansky’s freedom, and Sharansky was ultimately freed after nine years in the Gulag.

Rabbi Greenwald often engaged in tense negotiations in hostile territory, on different occasions meeting with both KGB agents and Yasser Arafat, but his children don’t remember this casting a shadow on their childhood. Mrs. Miriam Greenwald notes that her husband was careful about what he shared with his kids, filling them in on some of the more exciting parts of his missions, while skipping over the heavier issues.

“I remember being so afraid when he was going to rescue a Jew who had been shot down in Mozambique,” shares Mrs. Lapin. “But he told me he got a brachah from Rav Moshe Feinstein and that left me with a sense of calm.”

“We always knew when he was traveling, but we didn’t know exactly where,” says Reb Yisroel. “With a few of the places he went, it was probably better that way.”

In retrospect, while Rabbi Greenwald appeared to be completely fearless no matter what he was involved in, his children realized as they grew older that it wasn’t that their father was unafraid, but rather he refused to let his fears keep him from doing what was right.

As word trickled out about his dramatic escapades, there were some who were attracted by what seemed like a glamorous existence.

“Guys in yeshivah would tell me that my father was so cool and asked how they could get a job with him, or find an internship to learn to do the things he did,” recalls Reb Chananya. “I would tell them that everything he was doing started with him looking at the person next to him and asking himself what they needed and how he could help them.”

“The overseas things — the spy trades, the ransom negotiations, rescuing sifrei Torah in Lithuania, and all that crazy stuff — were amazing,” adds Reb Yisroel. “But to me, the biggest thing about my father was the love and care he had for everyone, especially people who had no one else.”

While some might have been eager to share their incredible success stories with their friends and relatives, Rabbi Greenwald was cut from a different piece of cloth.

“Growing up, we kind of just knew that he got things done,” says Reb Chananya. “Nobody knows most of the stories, because he wouldn’t talk about them — you just had to be there.”

“Even I have no idea of most of the things he was doing, because he just didn’t talk about them,” adds Mrs. Greenwald.

Open House

Not surprisingly, the Greenwalds ran an open home, and the parade of people who passed through their lives over the years was anything but typical. Of course, there were the many friends, neighbors and relatives that one might expect, but there were so many others as well. In addition to the frequent visits from boys from local yeshivahs and girls from a nearby outreach school, the Greenwald home was the address for newly observant young women who had left Neve Yerushalayim and needed a place to spend Shabbos. Some came just for a meal, while others stayed for days, weeks, or even months at a time, knowing that they were welcome.

The Shabbos table conversation was always animated in the Greenwald home, and while politics, popular culture, sports, and negative conversation were verboten, just about everything else was fair game. As the youngest Greenwald and the last child left at home, Mrs. Lewenstein enjoyed more of these meals than the rest of her siblings. She has fond memories of sitting on the couch, pretending to be immersed in a book, while guests sought her parents’ advice on family, religion, or dating, conversations that proved to be far more educational than anything she could read.

“Things were never quiet, even when I was the only one home,” recalls Mrs. Lewenstein. “I came home once and my mother let me know that there was someone staying in my room — I guess my parents knew that we were okay with that. That’s how we grew up — there were some Shabbos nights that you just slept in the den.”

Some of the visitors to the Greenwald home were particularly unique. There was the Iowa farmer, the only Jew around for miles, who built his own mikveh. There was Igor the magician, who met Rabbi Greenwald on one of his trips to Russia, who hid his top hat and a pair of white doves when he came for Shabbos, bringing them out after Havdalah to make a magic show for the Greenwald kids and their neighbors. There was Congressman Ben Gilman, who partnered with Rabbi Greenwald on multiple occasions and would show up during Shabbos lunch with his entourage, leaving his RV and limousine parked on a quiet Monsey street.

There was the guy with the shaven head and the Yiddish accent who left his chassidish community to join the marines and then came to beg Rabbi Greenwald to extricate him from his service, an effort that involved calling in more than a few favors. And then there was Liberian trade minister Michel D’Orleans, who came one Friday in his limousine and confided that while he had been raised in the church during World War II, he was Jewish and wanted to have the bar mitzvah that he never had. Wanting to verify his story, Rabbi Greenwald started chanting the first pasuk of Bereishis, with D’Orleans reciting the Yiddish teitch in response. He ended up staying for Shabbos, and while others might have been somewhat intimidated by the presence of a minister, he was just a regular guest to the Greenwald kids.

“I vividly remember him sitting next to me at the counter on Shabbos morning in his white suit,” shares Mrs. Lewenstein. “I showed him how to dip our Shabbos morning treat of donuts into milk as we sat companionably together on kitchen stools.”

Shabbos meals were relaxed and easygoing, with plenty to eat, zero pressure, and food for thought as well, as Rabbi Greenwald challenged his children with questions that were designed to stimulate their brains.

“He would ask them what they thought would happen if they did a certain thing, what the reactions might be and how they might respond,” recalls Mrs. Greenwald. “He would ask them to think ahead to the potential consequences of something they might say or do, and quite often they came to the right conclusions on their own.”

The questions weren’t just about the answers, but rather to teach the younger Greenwalds to think for themselves and to realize that their opinions mattered.

Guests, both Shabbos and weekday, were warmly embraced, giving them the immediate and wonderful feeling of being part of the family, even if they had arrived unexpectedly or at the last minute. Rabbi Greenwald loved to sing, and to this day, the Greenwald children and grandchildren still close their eyes as they sing “l’mikdasheich tuv u’l’kodesh kudshin” on Friday nights, just as their father did.

While sports may have been off-limits as a topic of discussion at the Shabbos table, things were very different during the rest of the week. It was no secret that Rabbi Greenwald excelled in sports, and not only had he turned down an opportunity to play college basketball, he could sink a ball into the hoop in his Francis Place driveway from clear across the street. Rabbi Greenwald would take his kids to football games every year, and the Greenwald boys could often be found playing ball with the non-Jewish maintenance staff in Sternberg.

Family vacations typically included individuals who weren’t born Greenwalds and meals out became team activities as Rabbi Greenwald would interact with those around him. He had a soft spot for yeshivah boys and loved asking them if they had sisters in Sternberg, or if not, inquiring about their grandparents.

“Goldbaum, Goldbaum… was your grandfather in the garment business in Brooklyn?” he might ask, adding, “Yeah, you look like him,” after discovering that he was right.

Life Lessons

As much as Rabbi Greenwald was a brilliant educator, he was never one to lecture. He believed that children learn by example, and his own brood was blessed with the opportunity to learn from a master how people should be treated.

Seeing a fellow mispallel in shul perpetually nudging his kid to daven, Rabbi Greenwald suggested that he try a different approach instead.

“When you were a kid, did your father nudge you about davening?” he asked. “Did you promise that you wouldn’t do the same thing to your kids?” he continued. “Because you’re doing it right now.”

That approach wasn’t just something Rabbi Greenwald preached; he practiced it at home as well. If a child didn’t feel like giving a devar Torah at the Shabbos meal, then they were given a pass. If going to shul was an issue at times, he let that slide as well.

“My father was rarely adamant about anything involving avodas Hashem,” explains Reb Chananya. “If there was a bein adam l’chaveiro issue — we mistreated someone — then he would get upset. But this wasn’t an area where he pushed and it was always his approach: Don’t pressure your kids when it comes to avodas Hashem.”

Rabbi Greenwald made it a point to share his joie de vivre with others. A trip to get ice cream would have him telling the person taking his order for a banana split to skip the cherry on top, because he was on a diet — a line that always garnered smiles. He left big tips even on small meals because he wanted his servers to feel appreciated, in one case leaving a clearly troubled Israeli waitress with a $100 tip, even though he wasn’t a man of means.

“She was shocked and he told her that he wanted her to know that good things happen in this world,” recalls Mrs. Lapin. “He saw that she was obviously in pain and gave her something in that moment that was worth so much more than money — the knowledge that good things can happen.”

Routine cab rides in Israel would have Rabbi Greenwald engaging with his drivers and often involved singing. Irritable cabbies were a particular delight for Rabbi Greenwald, who relished the opportunity to bring some joy into their lives. He would ask the driver if he knew Kol Haolam Kulo or other well-known songs, singing softly and encouraging him to join in.

“By the time he left, even the grumpiest drivers were all smiles,” says Mrs. Lapin. “I would be under the seat, completely embarrassed by what he had done. But that was exactly the point. All the things we don’t want to do because they are embarrassing, he did to get people to smile and to share the experience.”

While Sternberg was a rustic experience, to say the least, Rabbi Greenwald was inordinately proud of the camp, and as part of Hashem’s world, its cleanliness was important to him. Campers and staff alike have memories of Rabbi Greenwald bending down to pick up bits of garbage that had made their way to the ground.

“That was so him,” says Mrs. Wolff. “When I helped out in my sister and brother-in-law’s camp in Monsey, I picked up garbage, and every time I did it I said, ‘This is for you Ta!’ Even now, when I am in school and I go down to the lunchroom with my class, I take a napkin with me so I can pick up those bits of macaroni that fall on the floor.”

Nine years after his passing, the Greenwald children still carry their father in their hearts, remembering him as a visionary with a global impact, whose dedication to his family was never diminished by his worldwide efforts to help others. His faith in his children and their abilities was unshakeable, and while typical compliments were rare, his words and his deeds spoke volumes, making sure that each one knew how much he valued them. Memories of their father dancing outside at the end of the Pesach Seder or paying grandchildren to call him each night to remind him to count Sefirah still shine brightly in their minds, and the Greenwald children hope that others will follow in his inimitable footsteps. As Reb Chananya puts it, “We just hope we can bring a little light into the world.”

“Aside from the people who will laugh and cry as they read this, there are so many others who never knew my father at all, who will say I can’t believe that there was ever a person like this,” adds Mrs. Wolff. “My father was just a regular person who took advantage of every opportunity. He could have just said ‘Nebach, what a pity,’ when he saw a difficult situation, but he did things to make that pity not a pity anymore. He made life better, just made it better, for so many people.”

Calling All Cars 

We came back from my brother Zecharya’s wedding in Israel in the middle of a raging snowstorm. I was probably 16 at the time, and a family friend came to pick us up, squishing quite a few of us and a ton of stuff into his small van. As we rounded a bend, we could see that traffic was at a complete standstill, with abandoned cars all over the place. And with more cars pulling up behind us, it was too late to back up and try a different route.

Getting out of the van, my father made his way over to a nearby car, which was occupied by several street toughs who looked like they spent all their free time at the gym.

“I’m looking for some muscle,” my father said to them. “We gotta move some cars, or we’re gonna be here all night.”

Together my father and these guys picked up stranded cars and moved them out of the way, giving us, his new friends, and several other drivers the ability to continue on. His quick thinking and confidence saved us from a dangerous all-nighter, stuck in a car, in freezing cold weather.

— Rabbi Chananya Greenwald

View from Above 

One day Steve, a professional caver, came to conduct a ropes activity with the camp’s Pioneer division in some rather tall trees. He got to work setting everything up, and when he was done, my father came over to check it all out.

“Rabbi,” said Steve, “do you want to go up?”

My father was probably in his early seventies at the time, but apparently someone forgot to tell him that, because he readily agreed. Steve strapped my father into the harness and started raising him up into the trees, as a group of Pioneers gathered to watch, clapping as he rose higher and higher.

As he dangled well over the Pioneer tents that were spread out below him, my father called out to one of the bunks. “Hey T-5,” he yelled down. “You need to make your beds!”

Steve lowered my father back to the ground, and as he set to work unhooking him from the harness he said admiringly, “Rabbi, that’s leadership!”

— Chana Shterna Lewenstein

AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY-TWO YEARS

By Suri Cohen

I

always wanted to write a book.

I never dreamed, however, that my maiden voyage would circumnavigate the globe.

I vividly remember the Shabbos morning that Rabbi Ronnie Greenwald made an unexpected appearance at our door. He was an elderly man with a heart condition, and the trek up the block back to his house was steep. But my husband had told him that there was someone in my life who was causing me great anguish, and he knew he had the words to soothe my pain. When he left, the smile on my face was genuine for the first time in weeks.

During the last year of his life, he spent early mornings in a chavrusa study session with my husband. The same joie de vivre that infused all his social interactions was now channeled into Torah study. They kept learning by phone when Rabbi Greenwald made his final trip to Florida in January of 2016, and they studied together on the last night of his life.

The last text we got from him, two days before his death, was a photo of him and a friend, up to their necks in the sunny blue waters of a Miami swimming pool. Rabbi Greenwald was radiating his trademark ebullience, and the picture was cheekily captioned, “It’s 16 degrees in Monsey.”

On the morning of his passing, my husband came to me, his face ashen. “Ronnie Greenwald,” he whispered. “He’s gone.”

That morning, my mind inevitably drifted to that last photo. It encapsulated so much of what made him unique and so very beloved — the slightly rakish insouciance, the unwillingness, or even inability, to stay within the neatly defined borders of convention, the sense of fun that made his chronological age of 82 appear like part of the joke, and the infectious joie de vivre that seemed to include the entire world in its orbit.

Those first few weeks after Rabbi Greenwald’s death, it was difficult for me to drive down the block. I would pass his house and see the large American flag he had proudly hung from a window fluttering forlornly in the breeze. The front porch where I had so often observed him relaxing was eerily empty.

When Mrs. Greenwald asked me to write her husband’s biography in the summer of 2017, I discovered a man who had barely left a continent untouched in his quest to bring light and freedom to the oppressed and downtrodden. He hobnobbed with presidents and princes, dictators and despots. The consummate diplomat, he was a genius at gauging the exact nuances that lay at the nexus of national interests and the personal needs of those at the highest echelons of power.

At the dawn of the project, Mrs. Greenwald handed me a list of some 50 people to begin interviewing. The list metastasized into the hundreds, as many conversations with interviewees ended with, “But you must speak to so-and-so.” I had a year of rollicking adventure, as Ronnie’s name magically opened all doors.

My husband and I sat with the Novominsker Rebbe ztz”l, whom Ronnie had memorably introduced as the keynote speaker at a Nefesh convention. “The Rebbe and I were in eighth grade together.” Pause. “And look what happened to him when he grew up.” I spoke with Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch, one of his closest friends from his yeshivah days, who reminisced nostalgically about the “flamboyant flair” with which Ronnie accomplished everything he set his mind to do. Rav Yeruchem Olshin recalled being a young boy entranced by Ronnie’s dancing on Simchas Torah at the 14th Avenue Agudah minyan. “He danced like a groise ben Toirah. You could see his deep love and connection to the Torah. He was the ruach chaim of the entire minyan!”

A tantalizing reference to Alan Dershowitz among the tangled threads of a spycraft saga led to an email correspondence with the celebrated lawyer, although I was never able to pin him down for an interview. Rabbi Avraham Tanzer of Johannesburg via Williamsburg and Telz entranced me with the tale of his involvement in an early pidyon shevuyim success in the African bush on Pesach. I spoke with Swedish activists who worked on behalf of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust and who was later arrested and detained by the Soviets, and State Department lawyer Jeffrey Smith, who was closely involved in various rescue efforts.

Attempts to reach Rabbi Zecharia Wallerstein a”h, the tireless advocate for struggling teens and young adults, proved fruitless until I was able to corner him at a convention; and Rabbi Aaron Kotler, former CEO of Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, recounted riveting tales of joint activities on behalf of Klal Yisrael, as well as successful recoveries of genizah and seforim from prewar Europe.

En route to Vilna, the two had a morning stopover in Frankfurt.

“I stopped a German police officer in the airport, and asked him, ‘Excuse me, is there a Jewish synagogue here?’ The guy looks at me, and says in guttural German, ‘Not here. We burned them all in 1938.’

“When I told Ronnie about the encounter, he got really angry, and said, ‘Aaron, we’re davening right here.’ Then he looked around — we were sitting in chairs at the gate — and said, ‘No, it’s busier at the check-in counter. We’re going to daven there.’

“So we put on tallis and tefillin, walked over to the check-in, and started davening at the top of our lungs. Everybody was staring at us. Then two Israelis pass by, and started yelling, ‘Meshugaim! You’re crazy! Go pray in a corner somewhere!’ Ronnie said to them, ‘Let me tell you what just happened.’ When they heard, they put on tallis and tefillin and davened with us. They told us it was the first time in twenty years that they had put on tefillin.”

There were countless tales from Camp Sternberg girls whose lives were transformed by being pulled into his orbit, as well as girls and boys, men and women from all walks of life, many of whom passed through his doors and lived in his house, who were forever changed, and in some cases literally saved from death by his tireless energy and matchless ahavas Yisrael.

Camp Sternberg psychologist Ditza Berger once walked into Ronnie’s office after discovering that a camper had been abused by her grandfather to find him on the phone with the girl’s father. “You think you’ll brush this under the rug? Don’t you ever think I’m letting go of this. If I ever hear that your daughter has any contact with her grandfather, I’m calling social services.” The man sounded belligerent, but the rabbi was not fazed. “You’re threatening me? I’m not scared. I will have social services at your door.”

One of the first nights of camp, Rabbi Greenwald welcomed a blind girl enthusiastically and told her that he had been waiting for her to come to camp for many years. He explained that a previous experience with a blind camper many years prior had been so positive for her and for the camp that at the end of the summer, he sent out letter to rabbis across the country, inviting them to send any vision-impaired girls to Sternberg for the summer. “Your rav responded when you were still a baby. I told your parents that whenever they are ready to send her, Camp Sternberg is waiting for her.”

And always, there was the cheeky, irreverent humor of this deeply serious and seriously funny man. While on a mission to Rome in a quest to repatriate Israeli MIA’s, Ronnie diplomatically refused an invitation to join a meeting with the pope on the second day of Succos. However, as he later told his wife Miriam, he regretted the lost opportunity to exclaim, “Gut yuntiff, pontiff!”

On one of his frequent trips to East Berlin, when asked if he was concerned about looking too Jewish in the country that had spawned the Holocaust, Ronnie was dismissive. “My name is Greenwald. I’m from Brooklyn. I tawk funny. I got a big nose. What, they’re gonna think I’m Chinese?”

During his negotiations on behalf of the MIAs, he once flew on Kuwaiti Air, the only yarmulke-wearer in a sea of kaffiyehs. As he made his way to his seat, his seatmate looked at him with distaste and spat out, “You’re living where my parents were born.”

Without missing a beat, Ronnie beamed at the Arab, grabbing his hand warmly. “Your parents are from Boro Park?”

Sitting down next to the totally befuddled man, he confided, “I don’t actually live in Israel, but I have children who do.” They got into a conversation which lasted the entire flight. The man told him that his father, who lived on the West Bank, was having trouble getting medical care. Of course, as soon as Ronnie got off the plane, he made a few phone calls and took care of the problem. The Arab didn’t know that it was his lucky day when Ronnie Greenwald sat down next to him!

At the start of this project, Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz a”h told me, “In my opinion, this biography is one of the most important that ArtScroll will publish.” I believe he meant that the life of Ronnie Greenwald, while breathtaking in scope, was, to a certain extent, a model of accessible greatness. He was a yeshivah guy, a Pirchei guy, a camp guy — a regular guy.

We can’t scale the Andes or face down East Berlin commissars; most of us won’t influence thousands in camp for decades or be a beacon of hope to innumerable boys and girls clinging to Yiddishkeit, or life itself, by a desperate thread. But we can each stop, take a second look, notice a soul in pain, validate the worth of those around us, learn to look without judgment, smile, and increase our acts of kindness.

Ronnie showed us how it’s done.

Better Believe It

I spent two summers in Australia, and during my second summer there, the people I was staying with set me up with their daughter’s best friend. I met her parents very early on and they asked me what my father did. It was a question that I always hated — first of all, we never really knew what my father did, and second, it didn’t matter how he made his money; what mattered was how he lived his life.

I shared a few stories of my father’s accomplishments with them, and after I left their house they turned to my future wife and worriedly said to her, “Are you sure about this guy?” because they had trouble believing everything I had said. When our parents finally met, my in-laws asked me why I hadn’t told them about my father.

“I tried to tell you,” I said to them. “But you didn’t believe me!”

My in-laws weren’t the only ones who doubted my honesty during that fateful meeting. Thirty-eight years later, my wife still tells me that she was astonished by the stories I had told, and while she didn’t doubt my honesty, it was pretty difficult to accept that they were actually true.

— Reb Chananya

Just Desserts

A favorite Shabbos guest would often drop off a Boston cream pie for dessert before his visits, and on those occasions when my father would see the chocolatey concoction arriving, he would corral me into playing a practical joke on my mother.

After telling me to get a big knife, he would take a moment to plan just how big a slice he was about to carve out of that pie, chuckling as he plotted his latest prank.

“We’ll cut this piece out, and then when Mommy opens it for dessert,” my father would say, his laughter escalating as he spoke.

“She’ll think… ha ha… she’ll think that we… ha ha ha…” he would continue.

That thought usually ended mid-sentence because my father was laughing so hard in anticipation of his upcoming mischief that he just couldn’t go on. We would hide the piece that my father had so meticulously removed from the pie, put the rest of the dessert back in its box, and wait for the fun to begin.

Toward the end of the meal, my father would innocently call out to my mother, “Dear, isn’t it time for dessert?”

By that time, he would be laughing so hard that he couldn’t speak, even though my mother hadn’t opened up the box yet. Of course, my mother knew exactly what had happened, but she was a good sport and always played along.

— Chana Shterna Lewenstein

Piece Offering 

There was one instance where we went out for pizza, and we bumped into someone who was a frequent guest in our house. She must have been 30 years older than me, and as she sat down with us, there was one slice of pizza left on our table. Technically, it should have been mine to eat, but I told her to take it and enjoy it.

At first she hesitated, but after my father explained that some people are happy when someone else has something, she took that last slice of pizza. I understood that the reassurance my father gave her was also a subtle compliment to me, and it was clear from his face how proud he was of me. I know for sure that my spine got a little straighter as I sat there, and I remember it as such a sweet moment.

— Chana Shterna Lewenstein

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1076)