The Wealth of Giving

by Dovid Zaklikowski for Hasidic Archives

In the Lubavitch community Dovid Deitsch developed a certain mystique—the legendary philanthropist from New Haven. In the mid-1960s there were few Lubavitchers wealthy enough to dispense the amount of charity that Dovid gave, and fewer in the community who did not know his name. Lubavitch in the United States was centered in Brooklyn; however the Deitsch family lived a world away from the Rebbe’s court, so he was an “out-of-towner.”

Thus when Dovid’s cousin Rabbi Futerfas was finally permitted to leave the Soviet Union, one of the first things he did upon arriving in the United States was visit Dovid. Rabbi Yochonon Gurary, at the time a yeshivah student, drove him there and was surprised to see the way the Deitsches lived. Instead of the opulently furnished home he expected, he saw pots hanging on a nail on the wall.

Decades later, now the chief rabbi of Holon, Israel, he recalled wondering whether Dovid was really as rich as everyone said since “he lived very modestly.”

Luxury in the Deitsch house meant giving extra tzedakah. When Dovid was ill at the end of his life, his daughter Rochke would visit him daily. One day she did not come, and when Dovid asked what happened, she told him that her friends encouraged her to have her color palette done. The day before she finally had one made.

“Was that something you had to pay for?” Dovid asked. Rochke told him yes, and how much. Though it was difficult for Dovid to speak, he managed to say, as his voice trembled with effort and emotion, “You could have given that amount to tzedakah.”

An excerpt from the new book Yards of Kindness: The Life of Dovid and Sara Deitsch, available at HasidicArchives.com.