Zalman Yudkinwas an unwavering Jewwho soldiered on for Yiddishkeit under the Soviet regime, then moved on to be a beloved international fundraiser until he passed away last year at age 98
Rav Zalman Yudkin lived a long life. Just days before he passed away last year, a visitor from Lakewood asked him how he was. “Baruch Hashem, for being 99 years old, I’m doing well,” he replied with his characteristic humor. “Although I am really much younger, because the years when I lived under Stalin hoben nisht geven gelebt — were not really lived!”
Rav Yudkin of Crown Heights, whose first yahrtzeit was on 2 Iyar, was a tayere Yid who endured a lot in his long and challenging life. As a young man, he lost his entire family in a pogrom, was sent to a concentration camp, then drafted into the Russian army, and afterward subjected to the brutality of the KGB in Communist Russia for his determination to keep mitzvos. After moving to Eretz Yisrael in 1969, he spent many years working as a fundraiser for Chabad, and was a familiar figure in shuls and homes in Jewish communities worldwide. He was a hard worker with a grueling daily schedule, rising at five or six in the morning, going to the mikveh before davening, and starting his rounds, only returning home at 11 p.m. In his younger years, he’d walk everywhere, covering block after block, even at the height of summer. He would tell people that the Lubavitcher Rebbe had given him a brachah that he’d have good legs.
He would learn with other Russian Jews on the phone, and when he sat down to eat, he often had headphones on, listening to shiurim, maybe learning Tanya. He recited Tehillim continuously and sometimes spoke in various yeshivos. On his shoulders, he wore a knapsack with a pair of tefillin.
“Rav Yudkin went all over Boro Park to put tefillin on people,” says Mrs. F. from Brooklyn, who baked bilkes and cakes for him for many years. “We knew that at about 8 a.m. on Fridays he would be at a certain suit store, so my girls would deliver a package to him there so that he wouldn’t have to stop by and would have more time for his mitzvos.
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