The Rav's shivah house confirmed what I already suspected. Wonderful middos are rarely an accident
When Mrs. Chana Klagsbald, the mother of Rav Shlomo Klagsbald, the rav of the shul where I most frequently daven, passed away recently, I was confident that there would be some remarkable stories about her, just as there had been when his father passed away seven years ago.
The Rav is fluent in Shas and poskim. His greatness in Torah is, as Chazal tell us, “not an inheritance.” But the product of his own efforts.
No less remarkable, however, is his greatness in middos: his pleasantness to one and all, patience, and humility. One former chavrusa has told me on more than one occasion that when his sons were growing up, he always pointed to the Rav (then just a mispallel in the same minyan) as the person he would most like them to emulate. And those qualities, I surmised, have a great deal to do with his parents.
The Rav’s mother arrived in Israel as a young girl in 1936. Her father, a Gerrer chassid from near Krakow who had helped Sarah Schenirer set up the first Bais Yaakov seminary, went to visit the Imrei Emes before leaving Poland.
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