A round a year ago I wrote in this column about how Rav Yitzchak David Grossman instinctively removed his pants and gave them to another Jew relying on his silk beketshe for cover. We shared the picture and reflected on the years of training necessary until someone has the ability to naturally react that way until his impulse is to give himself away for another.
That act of instinctive giving was vintage Rav Grossman we speculated his generosity honed by years in Migdal Ha’emek by his decades-long role as patron and advocate of the poor forgotten and downtrodden.
But Sholom Mordechai (ben Rivka) HaLevi Rubashkin recently told me a fresh story involving similar greatness of spirit and a gesture not that different.
We were sitting side by side on hard plastic chairs in the stifling hot visitors’ lounge of what he refers to as “a place called prison.” (The difference being that he isn’t imprisoned; he’s in the place HaKadosh Baruch Hu wants him which is known as a prison.)
