The Novominsker Rebbe wrote poignantly of what he called an “unspoken truth”

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been reliving a small series of mental vignettes relating to the Novominsker Rebbe ztz”l, scenes that have stretched over two decades, serving as signposts along the road of my personal and professional life.

I married into a Boro Park family whose next-door neighbors were close relatives of the Rebbe, thereby giving me the good fortune to get to know his brother-in-law, Reb Yankel Landynski, who was an original: a talmid chacham of illustrious Litvish lineage whose thoroughly yeshivish appearance and demeanor gave no hint of his day job as a highly respected professor of constitutional law. My father-in-law, a mainstay of the Boro Park community, knew the Rebbe, and I recall the Rebbe reminiscing about him warmly during a shivah visit to my in-laws’ home (and about the good old days generally, including which later-renowned roshei yeshivah had played which bases in Camp Agudah).

Some fifteen years later, I began a stint of several good years assisting the national Agudath Israel in its legal and advocacy work on the special education front. This was right around the time the Rebbe had assumed the position of Rosh Agudah, which brought me into regular contact with him.

But the frequency of our interactions accelerated when the Agudah’s special education unit, Project Equal Educational Access, was instrumental in midwifing an important communal institution, the Ichud Mosdos Hachinuch of Brooklyn. This is a collaborative effort by many of Brooklyn’s leading frum boys’ and girls’ schools to ensure that children with learning disabilities receive an education tailored to their needs while remaining integrated into mainstream mosdos.

Laying the groundwork for this bold initiative required numerous intensive planning meetings, and I recall well the Rebbe’s hands-on involvement. The Ichud’s momentous inauguration came at a meeting in the Rebbe’s old beis medrash on 47th Street, to which he personally invited dozens of menahelim. In a special section in the Jewish Observer devoted to addressing learning disabilities, the Rebbe wrote poignantly of what he called an “unspoken truth,”

that the parents of a child with greater-than-ordinary needs are simply expected to be better, more noble people than those of another child. Let me illustrate. Anger is, of course, an objectionable trait in any person and is injurious to chinuch. But with regard to the chinuch of children with learning disabilities, anger can be fatal.

Shalom, and herein I include shalom bayis, is the basic ingredient of all human relations…. But in the home of the learning disabled child, the absence of a peaceful home atmosphere or the existence of excessive sibling friction is poisonous to the already fragile emotional state of such a child.

Thus, it is not an exaggeration to say that the home of such a child is, of necessity, one in which shalom and patience and the practice of middos tovos must be the norm of everyday conduct. And if this becomes a joint effort of the parents and the brothers and sisters of this child, it will be discovered that rather than a pall of darkness descending over the family – on the contrary –the entire family has become spiritually uplifted, and all the children’s chinuch has been enriched by the exemplification of the middos of chesed and ahavah and shalom and savlanus….

The parents and teachers of these children can be special people, special great people….Their challenges can be banners of excellence, of middos tovos and mesirus nefesh that other people will never achieve….The strenuous efforts and tearful labor that special people invest in their child who has special challenges will certainly evoke the chasdei Hashem of much nachas and happiness in their entire families, in all their children.

It was during my Agudah tenure that I first took pen in hand to write on contemporary issues. With Rabbis Nisson Wolpin, Avi Shafran and Chaim Dovid Zwiebel just down the hall from my office, I caught the writing bug that was in the air at the Agudah HQ at 84 William Street and later, 42 Broadway. And from the outset, and for all the years since, the Rebbe offered his encouragement. The praise didn’t have to be effusive; just the knowing smile of appreciation by someone of his stature was all one needed.

I specifically recall his positive feedback for my first lengthy published piece, a review essay I’d written at Rabbi Wolpin’s behest on Samuel Freedman’s then-much discussed book entitled Jew vs. Jew, about the breaking apart of American Jewry. Another time he told me he’d taken along on a plane trip something I’d published in memory of my mother a”h, and wanted to give me his written he’aros on it (although he never got around to doing so).

During my time at the Agudah, my eldest son became a bar mitzvah and it was only natural for us to go to the Rebbe to put tefillin on him for the first time. To impress upon him the specialness of the mitzvah, the Rebbe took out a Rambam and read with him from it the powerful description of the effect tefillin are intended to have upon their wearer. Going to the Rebbe for hanachas tefillin thereafter became a family tradition, and my youngest son merited to have his youth bookended by the Rebbe introducing him both to the alef-beis at age three and to tefillin at thirteen.

And when my grandson reached that milestone too just last week, it was those same uplifting words of the Rambam that the Rebbe had shared with my family that I now transmitted long-distance to another generation.

ALONE NO MORE During this difficult time, we have experienced tragedy, and tragedy within tragedy. That so many of our precious brothers and sisters have been taken from us in so short a time period is a never-imagined tragedy, but the bitter reality that they spent their last days and weeks on this world virtually alone only compounds the catastrophe.

The flood of coronavirus patients entering New York’s hospitals has left their physician and nursing teams understaffed and overwhelmed. Despite their truly valiant, round-the-clock work in responding to this crisis at great personal risk, doctors, nurses and other staff have been unable in many instances to provide the bedside care and attention they otherwise might.

Some of the things patients are lacking are assistance with feeding, toileting and personal care, easing patients’ discomfort and pain, answering the questions of anxious families and calming the fears of disoriented patients, and more. Beyond these specific types of assistance, there is the simple human need of those struggling to survive and overcome their illness not to be left completely alone, cut off from all contact with family and community, but instead be kept company by an empathetic, caring individual.

The need to provide urgent medical care simultaneously to large numbers of critically ill patients combined with the ever-present risk of infection and concomitant requirement to minimize unnecessary patient contact, have made it difficult, if not impossible, to attend to these other patients’ needs, which are particularly acute for patients with distinctive cultural/language barriers or religious needs.

Can anything be done to end this unfolding nightmare for patients and their families?

That’s the question that concerned members of various ethnic and religious communities in New York, whose determined efforts may now have borne fruit in a proposal put forth by a bipartisan group of New York State legislators.

In letters to hospital CEOs and administrators, dozens of members of the New York State Assembly and Senate have asked them to create a “Compassionate Helper Volunteer Program” which would enable volunteers to tend to the non-medical, quality-of-life needs of coronavirus patients. Such volunteers would utilize personal protection equipment and undergo training to follow any volunteer protocols already in place to maintain patient, staff, and volunteer health and safety.

Many of us have heard the heartbreaking accounts of frum patients who left the world without the presence of a single other person, let alone family member, present. We can hope that the proposed program will be embraced by the hospitals and implemented quickly to transform that unfortunate reality.

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 809. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com