Send Off for Rabbi Levi Hezkia, 74, OBM
by Menachem Posner – Chabad.org
As the funeral procession wended its way through Milan from one Jewish institution to another, the crowd got bigger and bigger, swelling to 600 strong. It was a fitting send-off for Rabbi Levi Hezkia, 74, a Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi who had touched the lives of thousands of Jews in Italy.
He immigrated to Israel from Afghanistan with his family as a child and was opened to the world of Chabad by a counselor at the Diskin Orphan Home in Jerusalem, where the refugee boy lived and studied.
As a young rabbinical student in the Chabad yeshivah in New York several years later, Hezkia, who passed away on Oct. 21 after a lengthy illness, gained the attention of the Lubavitcher Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson of righteous memory. Seeing the young man’s potential, the Rebbe arranged that Rabbi Yeshua Hadad, a Chabad emissary in Milan, take him under his wing.
Over the next few years, Hezkia became an expert shochet (kosherslaughterer), mohel (circumciser) and sofer (scribe). After joining the team of Chabad emissaries in Milan in 1969, he remained there for the rest of his life, serving with distinction and devotion for five decades.
As a mohel, he would travel up and down the Italian peninsula to perform circumcisions on Jewish babies from Venice to Palermo. When a circumciser was needed elsewhere in Europe, he would gladly drop whatever he was doing to perform the sacred duty.
As chazzan (prayer leader) of the Noam synagogue, he was deeply beloved by the congregation, made up of Persian immigrants and their children, who shared a common language and culture with the Afghanistan-born rabbi.
“Rabbi Hezkia was wonderful,” attests Jacob Bassali, who grew up attending Hezkia’s synagogue. “All the people loved him. He was the mohel of all of Italy; everyone knew him and appreciated him.”
He would often arrange Chol Hamoed holiday outings, which Bassali recalls as “bringing so much joy to everyone in town.”
“He didn’t just do circumcision like a job,” says Rabbi Yitzchok Hazan of Rome, who first met Hezkia at a circumcision of a Libyan-Jewish family in Rome. “He was a joyous person, and that would spill over to everyone else. When he did a bris, there was singing, dancing and celebration that followed him.”
From the late 1970s until 1990, 150,000 Jews came pouring out of the crumbling Soviet Union into Italy by way of Vienna, waiting for visas to North America. Hezkia performed hundreds of circumcisions for babies of these penniless migrants, as well as for grown men who had been denied this fundamental rite of passage as children.
And as kosher supervisor (mashgiach) at the cafeteria of the Scuola Ebraica di Milano, he influenced generations of children, with whom he would lovingly and carefully recite the “Grace After Meals” each day.
“At a public Passover seder, there were people who knew very little,” recalled Judy Lazar, a longtime Chabad emissary to Milan with her husband, Rabbi Moshe Lazar, “but they all knew how to say the bentching because they learned that from Rabbi Hezkia.”
The connections he made would last long after he performed a circumcision or oversaw a bar mitzvah. He would maintain decades-long relationships with “his” families, inquiring about health, children, grandchildren and more.
Rabbi Levi Hezkia is survived by his wife, Rachel, and their children: Rabbi Shmuel Hezkia (Milan), Miriam Gorman (London) and Chaya Graff (Milan), as well as grandchildren. He was predeceased by son Eliyahu Hezkia.
