Most of us have made a meal for a family in crisis, visited an ill friend. But for one woman, those simple acts of kindness became stepping stones to helping build Ezer Mizion, one of the largest chesed organizations in the world. In a rare and candid conversation, Rebbetzin Leah Chollak’s husband speaks of the great woman we just lost.
As Rebbetzin Leah’s husband, Rabbi Chananya Chollak, sat at his father-in-law’s side in various hospitals, he had occasion to observe the difficulties facing other patients’ families. He saw parents struggle to divide their time between hospitalized children and little ones at home, families at bedsides with no food to maintain their strength, and patients forced to rely on costly ambulances for their frequent hospital visits.
These and other challenges, intuited Reb Chollak, could be resolved with some careful coordination, some kindhearted individuals, and a little elbow grease. He began arranging for people to stay with hospital patients to give relatives a much-needed break. He invested in a van to transport kidney dialysis patients to and from the hospital for free. His wife Leah began bringing her home-cooked meals to the hospital. In 1979, from the modest Chollak home, the organization we now know as Ezer Mizion — Israel’s largest health support organization — was born.
And behind the scenes, Rebbetzin Leah Chollak a”h was the heart and soul of the nascent organization.
“At first, we were living in a two-room apartment. That was where it all began,” Rabbi Chollak remembers during the shivah for Rebbetzin Leah. “Families of sick people and others who needed our help came to see us there. We didn’t have a shred of privacy. Leah would be sitting in the other room with five small children, trying to raise them with a sense of normalcy. And I would think to myself, ‘Master of the Universe, how is she able to do it all in this small apartment? She needs so much strength.’
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