Mrs. Steif lived her life with a quiet, sincere effort to give of her assistance, skills, advice, resources, and tefillos to others
T
here weren’t too many frum Jewish children in the London of the early 1940s, and Brandi Steif remembered having few playmates of her own age group while growing up. She was born in London in 1943, in the thick of World War II, while the European continent was up in flames.
Mrs. Steif was the oldest child of Reb Moshe Dovid Weissmandl, the only surviving brother of rosh yeshivah and Holocaust rescuer Rabbi Michoel Ber Weissmandl. Her father had arrived in London from Nitra, Slovakia, shortly before World War II broke out and became the assistant of Kindertransport hero Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld.
In 1950, the Weissmandl family left London for Toronto, Canada, together with Mrs. Weissmandls’s parents, Rabbi and Mrs. Ephraim Nussbaum, and her four brothers. Later, Reb Moshe Dovid moved his family to the New York area where he could find more options for the traditional chinuch which he sought. Brandi had already finished high-school when the Weissmandls moved to Saddle River Road in Monsey in 1961, where they were among the first few hundred frum families to build up the community.
The oldest of nine children, Brandi always felt a deep sense of responsibility for her siblings. Even later, as she ran a home and family of her own and worked full time, they never faded into the background of her life; their lives, their families and their needs were of paramount importance to her. She was the mainstay, the rock of the family, and generous to the nth degree, quietly happy to provide any practical support she could for family members, checking in on anyone who was unwell.
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