Teaching and Reaching

Photos: Family archives

There were so many bereft students and relatives who felt they had a special place in Rav Dovid Wolpin’s heart, and were surprised after his petirah to find out how many others felt the same. But Rebbi, longtime mechanech and talmid chacham, who passed away a month ago on 3 Nissan, had room in his heart for all of them

When Rav Dovid Wolpin, a longtime marbitz Torah and mechanech in Monsey, passed away a month ago at the age of 81, it wasn’t just his family and community who were plunged into mourning. Generations of talmidim, who had been students of Rav Dovid’s decades earlier, felt the loss keenly. They were used to turning to Rebbi for advice, for encouragement, and just to share what was going on in their lives. Perhaps the secret to this enduring connection lay in the advice Rav Dovid gave his own four daughters before they went into chinuch: Treat each student as a “mamme’s kind,” a mother’s child, he exhorted them.

He gave this same dedication and attention to each of his talmidim, and they responded in kind, establishing relationships that lasted long after they left the classroom.

Rav Dovid Wolpin was born in 1943 in Seattle, Washington. Both his parents, Reb Ephraim Benzion and Kaila (nee Krasnitzky), were children of emigrants from Russia who had crossed the ocean in the early 1900s. They got married in 1925 and had five children, four sons and a daughter.

Zeide Ephraim Benzion’s staunch refusal to work on Shabbos meant the family often went hungry. When he was offered a position as a melamed in a Talmud Torah in Seattle, then home to a sizable Jewish community, he eagerly accepted.