Sheloshim For Levi

They are unusually inspiring people. I’m sitting with Rabbi Zalman and Mrs. Chanie Wolowik just 22 days after their nine-year-old son, Levi Yitzchok, a’h, suddenly and inexplicably passed away. This coming Monday night, the Five Towns and Far Rockaway communities, and indeed Jewish communities far and wide around the world, will be marking the sheloshim, the end of the 30-day period since Levi’s passing.

“The house feels empty without Levi,” says Chanie. “He was my sidekick and went almost everywhere and did everything with Zalman,” she said. Their older son, Mendel, is away attending Yeshiva in Detroit and the next boy is seven years old, she explains, so just when they had started to have another big boy around the house they are now once again, she feels, dealing almost exclusively with little kids.

As Chabad sh’lichim in the Five Towns, the Wolowiks are natural born leaders. Still, however, they are first and foremost parents, who are raising a beautiful family and who raised a remarkable young man who left us for reasons that are far beyond our comprehension but certainly way too soon.

“I don’t know how I am functioning,” says Reb Zalman. “I feel like my physical strength is gone, but at the same time I’m working longer hours each day and doing more than I did before.” The passing of young Levi Wolowik almost a month ago left a community stunned and gasping for its breath. No one understands why Zalman and Chanie were selected for this most trying Divine test, but they seem to boldly resist the natural desire to ask why or probe where there are no answers or any level of understanding. Instead they are occupied with the mission of what to do next and to make sure their son’s life will be a catalyst for good in this and other communities around the globe.

Chanie brings books of letters to the table. The thick, plastic-covered pages chronicle fresh memories of Levi and the kind of young man he was—his extraordinary, sensitive nature as well as the deep and abiding kindness he displayed to classmates and others, either in yeshiva or in his parents’ shul at Chabad of the Five Towns. The books also feature e-mails from friends and family stationed around the world as emissaries of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. They are out there living in the larger metropolises as well as the hinterlands because the Rebbe adopted as his mission to be there for other Jews, who are often disconnected from Judaism. Who was going to do it if he would not? Could he leave it to another rabbi and another time, or would he seize the opportunity, shake the Jewish world, and turn it upside down if need be, all in the name of bringing Jews closer to their Judaism.

But he would not be able to succeed unless he had the cooperation of his sh’lichim, the young men and women who loyally take on the most seemingly insurmountable missions in the sometimes most exotic and unusual places around the globe. And they go there and set up a home and a shul because you are there and at some point you might need them.

And don’t think that the Five Towns is tended to just because there is such a thriving Orthodox community here. In many ways, it’s just like Reno, Nevada or Knoxville, Tennessee. One can live amidst Jewish book stores, shuls, mikvehs, and glatt kosher supermarkets and somehow be unfamiliar with what a kosher chicken is or on what day of the year Yom Kippur falls.

Maybe it’s difficult to fathom, but there is a religious void in our neighboring Jewish communities that the Wolowiks have gracefully filled over the last decade and a half. It’s for that reason, amongst others, that when news struck about the premature passing of Levi, the pain was felt and continues to be felt far and wide. The personality of a shaliach, however, is to move forward, despite the personal pain or whatever the nature of the crisis. The reflex reaction is to fill whatever void is created with something positive and good. To that end it was almost instantaneously decided to create a Jewish Media Center in Levi Yitzchok Wolowik’s memory. Meetings are currently taking place to formulate the format and nature of the service, which will for now most likely be set up in the Chabad House in Cedarhurst.

“I knew it before, but it’s been brought home to me in a deeply personal way that this is an incredible community that we live in,” says Rabbi Wolowik. He and Chanie talk openly and candidly about that Shabbos, the day they were thrust into the center of a parent’s worst nightmare. “The police were here, the detectives were here, as were many members of our local Hatzalah organization,” says Zalman. “They sensitively but very determinedly wanted to ascertain the cause of death,” the rabbi says. “I told them, ‘I can help you with that,’ and I explained to them that my son passed away because it was his time.”

Chanie Wolowik pulls out more notes and says that she wants to of course thank everyone that has provided them with so much personal and emotional support over this last month. But, she says, she wants to make a point of thanking the Nassau County police officers that spent that entire Shabbos day with them in their home. They include Officers Wall, Cohen, and Prince; Detective Muchow; Detective Nill; Sergeant Foley; and Sergeant Cauldwell. “They were extremely respectful of the situation,” the rabbi says. He adds that in the course of the day, Officer Cohen reminded the rabbi that he once responded to an emergency at the Chabad House in Cedarhurst, and that after it was tended to, the rabbi helped the officer put on tefillin.

There’s plenty to cry about, but right now there are no tears. It’s not unlike the story of the young Jew who endured the worst torture during World War II. At the time of his deepest suffering and with his life hanging in the balance, he would assertively and emphatically call out to G-d, saying, “Hashem, know this, whatever You are going to do to me, I’m still going to believe in You.” The deep and abiding faith that we all share as Jews is that there is a Divine logic that is beyond our intellectual grasp. Our G-d sees a bigger picture, which we are unable to view from our all-too-brief chronological vantage point. We can’t make sense of it and it hurts us very deeply on a human level, but way out there there’s something larger and all-encompassing.

Chaia Frishman, Levi’s 4th-grade secular studies teacher at Yeshiva Darchei Torah, said, “When playing any sport versus another team, Levi was so happy for the opponents when they won. If there ever was a dispute as to who won a certain play or shot, Levi was the first to say to give it to the other side, all in the name of shalom,” she said. “Levi was a prolific writer whose daily journal displayed the maturity of a boy older than his nine short years. His entries show his sense of humor, love of life, and deep thinking into issues, all the while being the normal nine-year-old boy that he was.” “The tragic loss of Levi Wolowik will forever be embedded in our class’s heart. But knowing Levi’s desire for everyone around him to be happy, we know that the best testimonial we can make to him is to try to infuse as much simcha and mitzvos into our day,” she said.

In one of the notes from Levi’s rebbi at YDT that Chanie had in her book, he writes that since his passing, each morning the young boy who leads the davening for the class does so by using Levi’s siddur.

Rabbi Yakov Bender, rosh yeshiva of YDT, said, “Levi had extraordinary midos; he was a geshmake young man, always polite and respectful—an exemplary student who learned very well.”

On the Friday morning before Levi passed away, Rabbi and Mrs. Wolowik were involved in a drama that had been playing itself out over a number of days. A non-observant couple they had befriended in the neighborhood experienced the death of her father, who was living in a trailer park in Florida. The plans were to have the father’s remains cremated and the ashes sent to the family here in Woodmere. When Zalman and Chanie got wind of what was planned, they worked on the couple for days to plead with her to intercede and give her father a Jewish burial.

“I related to her just about everything I could think of to implore her to cancel the cremation,” said Chanie. “I told her about the concept of the resurrection of the dead in the days of Mashiach and about how Jews who survived the Holocaust managed to evade Hitler’s inferno and how because of those miracles there is a Jewish people that exists and thrives today.”

Chanie said that her neighbor thought that it was probably too late and that the deed was already done. She nevertheless beseeched her friend to call Florida and find out if the cremation could still be canceled. At the same time, Zalman was busy mobilizing the sh’lichim he knows in nearby Sarasota, Florida, to get involved and do what they could to get the deceased out of there. The cremation was canceled ten minutes before it was to take place. The casket was placed on a flight to New York and the young woman’s father had a traditional Jewish burial at a cemetery here. It was a harried and even nerve-racking couple of days for the Wolowiks. But then that night Levi was taken from them and things would never be the same.

King David, in Tehillim, chapter 90, writes: “Satisfy us in the morning with Your kindness, then we shall sing out and rejoice throughout our days. Gladden us according to the days You afflicted us, the years when we saw evil.” At Levi’s levayah, as the procession paused for a few moments when the cars passed by the Chabad House on Maple Avenue in Cedarhurst, Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, the young boy’s grandfather, said as he stood over the aron, “Levi was a shaliach of the Rebbe.” Hard to fathom that a young boy at the age of nine years has this kind of sh’lichus in his blood, but clearly Levi Wolowik did.

Before we concluded our talk about the upcoming sheloshim, Reb Zalman repeated in an undertone and in Hebrew, as he did over the hour several times, “Hashem gives and Hashem takes.” He walked me to the door and stepped outside with me, but then closed the door behind him. It’s after 10:00 p.m. on Sunday night. I’m walking to my car and Zalman tells me that he has an appointment to put up mezuzos on the doorposts of a home in Back Lawrence. I imagined that under different circumstances Levi may have been at his father’s side. For now, it will have to suffice that he is in our thoughts and on our minds.