A story about a few words Reb Dovid once said, which captures so much of what made Reb Dovid the venerable personality he was
As the shloshim for Hagaon Rav Dovid Feinstein ztz”l draws near, I feel compelled to offer a personal remembrance, albeit obviously inadequate, to honor the personal connection my family had to the Rosh Yeshivah and his yeshivah. This connection took several forms, one of which was based on our Lower East Side roots, beginning in the first half of the last century with my grandparents, Joseph and Celia (Yosef Chaim Eliezer and Tzivia) Kobre, whose names to this day remain engraved in gold on the wall of Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ), visible as one enters the building.
The connection continued into the next generations; and even before I went off to attend high school and beis medrash at MTJ’s Staten Island branch, while growing up in a home where there was nothing higher on the scale of values than uncompromising reverence for gedolei Torah, I knew that “gedolei Torah” was synonymous with Rav Moshe Feinstein and Reb Dovid.
After the petirah of my mother a”h, my father closed his life’s circle by moving back to the East Side where he was born, raised, and lived his early married life into his thirties, and his connection to Reb Dovid became only closer. As I write at the desk in my study, I look up to see the plaque Reb Dovid presented to us at the MTJ kollel dinner honoring my father’s memory, the inscription signed by Reb Dovid remembering “HaRav Mordechai Kobre ztz”l as a good neighbor and great supporter of the kollel’s needs.” And, many decades later, our family was also the beneficiary of a powerful brachah bestowed by Reb Dovid, for which we remain forever grateful.
Chazal teach that “ein osin nefashos l’tzaddikim, divreihem hein hein zichronam — we don’t erect monuments for tzaddikim, because it is their words that are the best way to remember them.” I will thus share a story I recently heard from Rabbi Elchanan Adler, a rosh yeshivah in RIETS, about a few words Reb Dovid once said — and generally, a few words are all he ever said — which captures so much of what made Reb Dovid the venerable personality he was.
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