And Honor for All

Photos Family archives

The passing of great people often leaves us in a quandary, the dilemma of whether to provide readers with instant coverage — a full-scale tribute still during shivah — or to wait a bit and be able to create an article with more substance, but without the drama of presenting it while the loss is still fresh.

I recall the Friday at the end of October 2013 when Reb Moshe Reichmann was niftar and the deliberations that followed: Back then, we printed the magazine on Sunday, and the general consensus was that this wasn’t the time for a rush job. The subject of the article was about precision and meticulousness, integrity in product and reputation, and we too would do it right.

Reb Moshe Yosef (Paul) Reichmann was one of the eminent philanthropists and supporters of Torah in our generation. He was born in Vienna, Austria in 1930, fled with his family after the Nazi takeover to Tangier, Morocco, (where his father founded several Torah institutions), and then went to learn in England under Rav Moshe Schneider, who gave him a prophetic blessing that would one day reverberate around the Jewish world: Back then the yeshivah was in dire financial straits, and in order to feed the starving students, one bakery agreed to give the yeshivah the previous day’s leftovers if someone would come pick it up. Moshe Reichmann devotedly walked to the outskirts of London each day to pick up the bread — and received the Rosh Yeshivah’s brachah that he would one day become extremely wealthy and would spend his money supporting talmidei chachamim.

In 1956, after Moshe married Leah Feldman, his father called him back to Tangier to help with teaching Torah and strengthening the level of observance there. Eventually the couple followed Moshe’s brothers to Canada where they fell into property development, eventually expanding to New York City. By the mid-1980s, they were the largest developers in the world, and one of the world’s richest families.