Man with the Plan     

Rabbi Nochum Stilerman, the legendary fundraiser who raised over $400 million for various causes over half a century, reinvented himself in his 70s, when he became a kollel avreich and created a 300-page spreadsheet for every waking moment of the rest of his life. With his passing last week, he left his younger friends an invaluable legacy: how to turn a rigorous regimen into routine and live life by design instead of default

Rabbi Nochum Stilerman, who passed away on Sunday at the age of 83, was one of the most interesting people you could hope to meet. And that was largely due to his own intense interest in other people.

That interest led him on a five-decade fundraising career that generated more than $400 million for a diverse array of causes. It brought him into contact with numerous giants in the Torah world, and drew him in his later years to Eretz Yisrael, where he joined Yeshivas Mir. It was there that he made perhaps his most enduring impression on the Jewish collective consciousness, in a famous encounter with the Rosh Yeshivah, Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel ztz”l.

Reb Nochum never had a birth certificate, which complicated his aliyah process in 2012. His parents had neglected to obtain one, as they were fleeing Russia in the middle of World War II. He was born in Oryol, a city approximately halfway between Moscow and Kiev, in Sivan 5701/1941.

His bris became the subject of a famous song by Rabbi Yom Tov Ehrlich: “A Bris in Moskveh.” His father was the mayor of Oryol, a position that conferred some privileges, if not freedom. The song recounts the story of a bris conducted under utmost secrecy in the Soviet Union, where mitzvah observance was a crime. Even in those circumstances, the family strove to maintain Jewish tradition.