This grandson of the Chofetz Chaim stood out, for the way he turned abstract Torah into joyous real-life practice and for the love and giving he showered on all who crossed his path
“There he stood,” recalls Rabbi Sandler, “tzitzis over his shirt and under his vest; his long peyos — usually neatly tucked under his oversized yarmulke — were flying. Wearing these huge goggles, he expertly wielded his soldering gun, the sparks flying every which way.”
It was, says Rabbi Sandler, a memorable introduction to an impossible-to-forget adam gadol at his unconventional and unpretentious best.
Over the next two years, Elysha Sandler would become a talmid-for-life, learning to appreciate the multiple facets that made Reb Hillel such a rare diamond of the Torah world until his passing on the 22nd of Teves just one year ago. As a talmid and chavrusa, and even more so from the countless hours he spent in the Zaks home that was ever-open to bochurim or anyone else who needed a meal or a listening ear, those lessons still animate him a quarter century later. For Rabbi Sandler, now a highly regarded mechanech in New York’s Five Towns area, not a day passes on which his thoughts don’t return again to his rebbi’s thirst for real-life Yiddishkeit, his lucid, uncompromising hashkafos, and his open heart and hand — always refracted through the unique prism of his creative genius and genuine simchas hachayim.
His rebbi’s originality, says Rabbi Sandler, had nothing to do with wanting to be a maverick. Ultimately, Reb Hillel’s goal was simply to put everything in Torah into real-life practice, even if that meant doing things a little differently.
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