Still Together

If you pass by the house on 20 Stricker Street in northern Tel Aviv, you might mistake it for an embassy or some kind of international headquarters. Sleek luxury cars glide into the parking area, nattily-dressed security guards jump up and open doors to powerful VIPs, and there seems to be a constant flow of service providers and secretaries going in and out. That wouldn’t be so unusual for a luxury home of some powerbroker, but here, the master of the house has not been in This World for more than 20 years. Still, the house is humming. Business goes on. For his sons, it’s still the center of their world.

Agudah MK and business magnate Rabbi Avraham Yosef (Munia) Schapira a”h used to say that Tel Aviv, where he made his home, is the holiest city in Eretz Yisrael because it’s the only one without a church. And his best friend, neighbor, and mechutan, the Sadigura Rebbe ztz”l who passed away in 2013 (his daughter married Rabbi Munia’s son Rabbi Pinchas Schapira), insisted on keeping his court there so that the city shouldn’t become an ir nidachas (an idolatrous city slated to be destroyed).

It’s no wonder, then, that the palatial villa on Rechov Stricker 20 still serves as the central headquarters of the Schapira clan more than two decades after patriarch Rabbi Avraham Yosef passed away, and is where London-and-Swiss-based millionaire son Rabbi Yitzchak Yehudah (Isaac) Schapira stays during his frequent trips to Israel.

Few Israeli politicians were able to navigate the secular-religious divide with more skill and savvy than MK Schapira. His schmoozy, easygoing persona belied his political and financial acumen, and his large girth, perpetual cigar, and fly-away peyos escaping from under his yarmulke only added to his colorful image. Yet he was Agudah’s master tactician, having chaired the influential Knesset Finance Committee, headed the Bank of Israel advisory board, and is largely credited with pulling the country out of its economic morass in the early 1980s. His multi-million-dollar Carmel Carpets enterprise eventually floundered, but he recouped his losses in real estate and other holdings, which today are managed by his sons Pinchas and Elimelech in Israel, Shmuel in Vienna, and Yitzchak in London and Switzerland.