What if those old pairs of tefillin collecting dust could find a new home and give nachas to the neshamah at the same time?

Photos: Elchanan Kotler

One person has his righteous grandfather’s tefillin sitting in a closet, while another fellow has decided he wants to commit to wearing phylacteries every day, but can’t afford a new pair. In Israel these days, where a spiritual awakening has put the demand for tefillin through the roof, what if those old pairs collecting dust could find a new home and give nachas to the neshamah at the same time?

IT was known as the battle of Tel Saki, one of the most difficult battles of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and one that by a sheer miracle helped prevent the Golan Heights from being captured by Syria. The price was high, though, as the burning, smoking tank had sustained a direct hit from a Syrian anti-tank missile, and both inside and out were the bodies of Jewish soldiers who had lost their lives. Yet the rescue force found a small ray of consolation, a light in the heart of the inferno — a pair of tefillin had survived intact.

Fast forward nearly 44 years, to July of 2017. A young officer named David Golovensitz a”h — a former talmid of the Bnei Tzvi yeshivah in Beit El and of Yeshivat Shavei Chevron — was killed during a military operation in Chevron. David was a natural leader, and while still just a teenager, he established several chesed organizations, including food distributions for needy families and a “draft” of yeshivah bochurim to bring joy to weddings of new immigrants and others without family.

“Right after the shivah, my wife told me, ‘Shimon, go and give a pair of tefillin to a soldier in David’s memory,’ ” says Shimon Golovensitz of Efrat, former director of Mayanei Hayeshuah Medical Center and a communal projects innovator. “So I called someone I know who deals in tefillin, asked what a pair costs, he told me $500. Now, just a few hours before our son was killed, I had returned from the US where I’d escorted a planeload of olim, so I stuck hand in my pocket and pulled out my remaining US cash — exactly $500.

“That was for the first pair of tefillin, and somehow, it just snowballed. Now we’re sponsoring over 1,000 pairs of tefillin for soldiers every year. All the officers know me by now, so whoever wants tefillin can get in touch with me. A few weeks ago, I got a message from a soldier who’d never put on tefillin before, and one of my delivery boys — young fellows who go from base to base on their motorcycles — happened to be two minutes from his base, and by the time I hung up he’d already sent me a clip of him with the tefillin.”

Who are the soldiers that have been contacting Golovensitz over the past six-plus years? He says it could be a soldier from a poor family who might have put on his father’s or uncle’s tefillin until the army but never spent the money on a pair of his own, a soldier from the former Soviet Union who never had a bar mitzvah, or a lone soldier whose family lives abroad and isn’t religious.

“I get about a hundred requests a day,” Golovensitz says. “They text me things like, ‘I never wore tefillin before and never thought I would, but now I want to, so please send me. I don’t want to go into battle without them.”