He Paved the Final Path

Yankie Meyer didn’t just organize chairs for shivah houses. While Misaskim, his brainchild, dives into action whenever a Jewish neshamah departs from This World, the list of initiatives was endless for this one-man chesed machine who, with discretion and dignity, was the consummate advocate for the needs of every Yid, in both life and on their final journey

Even as a young kid,

Yankie Meyer — young, energetic, and in a perpetual rush — was always eager to help out a fellow Yid. But he never forgot a lesson he learned when someone close to the family passed away, and there were many arrangements that had to be made.

“I came home from yeshivah, heard the tragic news, and immediately hurried over to the house of mourning to offer help,” he told Mishpacha in a wide-ranging interview a few years back. “I ran all the way there, then ran up six flights of stairs and entered the apartment breathlessly, with a splash. My father was standing there, and he looked up at me. ‘Nisht azoi kimt men arein tzi a niftar — that is not how one enters a house of mourning,’ with such haste, energy, and liveliness instead of with poise, dignity, and levelheadedness. He sent me back home.”

If the thousands of shocked, broken Yidden who attended Yankie Meyer’s levayah in Boro Park last Friday could tell his father one thing, it would be, “Yankie learned how to do it.”