That utterly natural, unaffected concern for family became Rav Dovid’s inheritance as well
In the humble environs of New York’s Lower East Side, the premier posek of the Jewish world resided in simplicity. Rav Dovid Feinstein had no airs and no formally appointed personal staff, but Rabbi Yissachar Ginzberg served as his right-hand man and was privy to many informal conversations.
Rav Dovid Feinstein was a young boy in Russia when a bizarre law was passed prohibiting Jewish boys from attending the Pesach seder so that they wouldn’t be corrupted by the practice of “extorting” their fathers for the return of the afikomen. Instead of attending the family Seder, four-year-old Dovid was sent to a neighbor.
When he was five, he saw a pile of seforim on his father’s desk. He asked his older sister Fia (later Rebbetzin Shisgal) what those books were. She told him they were seforim and proceeded to teach him the Alef beis. By the age of eight, young Dovid knew the entire Tanach baal peh. He knew it so well that the townspeople used to play a game challenging him to complete a pasuk. If he won, he got a kopek. He acquired so many coins, he bought himself a watch with those winnings. “When he came to America at the age of nine,” Rabbi Ginzberg relates, “he was wearing that watch.”
In America, he grew to be a gadol in Torah and middos. Rabbi Ginzberg recalls an anecdote that demonstrates the Rosh Yeshivah’s extraordinary love for Yidden. Toward the end of his life, a weekly paper asked the Rosh Yeshivah to answer a question for their back page: If you could choose one person to join you at your Shabbos table, who would it be? Rav Dovid didn’t answer Moshe Rabbeinu, the Vilna Gaon, or the Chofetz Chaim, as other respondents did. Instinctively he responded, “I would invite three aniyim, three needy people.”
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