In memory
Rabbi Avrohom Levi Lipskier
15 Adar I 5700 — 28 Elul 5786
Rabbi Avrohom Levi Lipskier, mashpia and rosh yeshiva, of Crown Heights, passed away on Thursday, 28 Elul, at the age of 86. He taught baalei t’shuva for more than sixty years, beginning before there was a yeshiva to teach them in.
Men came to his door unable to read Hebrew and went out as teachers, shluchim and rabbonim. He kept it open for sixty years.
He was born in Kutaisi, Georgia, to R’ Yankel and Teibel Lipskier. The family left the Soviet Union and reached America in 5708. He learned in 770, and in 5722 was sent to Brunoy, France.
In 1962, while he was still a bochur learning for smicha, young men began wandering into 770 — long hair, no Jewish schooling behind them, tired of what they had and unable to say what they were looking for. The neighbourhood was wary of them. He was not. He learned with them one at a time, then in small groups, then in a class he ran in 770 itself, which at the time struck people as the strangest thing in the building. Rabbi Yisroel Jacobson, the mashpia to the rabbinical students, told him to keep at it, and the next year opened Hadar HaTorah with the Rebbe’s blessing and put him in front of it as its main teacher. It was the first baal t’shuva yeshiva.
He married Cirel, daughter of the shliach Reb Berel Baumgarten. He taught at Hadar HaTorah until 1967, then went on shlichus to Milan. In 1972 he wrote to the Rebbe about an offer to work on college campuses, and the Rebbe told him to accept it.
That year he advertised a summer programme in Morristown, Live and Learn. Rabbi Gurary of Buffalo telephoned to say he was bringing five students down to Crown Heights for Shavuos, and that unless they went straight on to learn in Morristown they would scatter and be lost. The five came ten days early. One of them, Avrohom Schwarzberg, wanted to stay on and wrote to the Rebbe, who answered that since he had been successful where he was, he should stay. That was the beginning of Yeshivas Tiferes Bachurim, which he led for decades. In 5760 he founded Yeshivas Tiferes Menachem in Sea Gate.
The men who came were of every kind and every age: college students, Russian immigrants, professionals, university researchers, servicemen out of the forces. Some arrived unable to read Hebrew. Some stayed years, some a fortnight, some came back each winter break. He put the original texts straight into their hands and taught them the language and the reasoning to read them, on the principle that learning which does not move a man to do a mitzva and help another Jew has not finished its work. He carried an inviting smile and he gave each of them his whole attention, and whatever else they left with, they left warmer than they came.
Asked in 2012 what he was trying to give his students, he named the study and practice of Chassidus and a deep attachment to the Rebbe, and said that what this produced was not followers but leaders. He did not speak of them as his students at all in later years, but as colleagues holding the same commission.
He farbrenged with his talmidim almost daily for years, until the pace slackened to weekly and they took to knocking on his door to ask for more. He was in 770 on Gimmel Tammuz 5754. Within a day or two he gathered his students at Tiferes Bachurim into a classroom and put in front of them a compilation of the Rebbe’s teachings, set out so that the Rebbe’s own response to the passing of the Rebbe Rayatz after Yud Shvat 5710 stood beside the day they were in: the talks published, the spreading of Chassidus demanded faster, Yaakov Avinu lo meis, that Jacob our father did not die, the bond deeper rather than ended. He gave them an order of work to follow. A therapist had been handing out business cards at the Ohel that week, on the assumption that Lubavitch was on its way to mourning. His students went back to learning.
The levaya passed 770 at three o’clock on the day of his passing, and he was buried at Old Montefiore, near the Ohel. He is survived by his wife Cirel; by Mrs. Chani Kaminetzky of Dnipro, Rabbi Mendel Lipskier of Sherman Oaks, Mrs. Dinie Mangel of Cherry Hill, Mrs. Shternie Backman of Glendale, Mrs. Chaya Mushka Silberberg of Crown Heights and R’ Berel Lipskier of Crown Heights; by grandchildren and great-grandchildren; and by seven siblings.
What he built is still running. His talmidim teach, run yeshivos, sit as rabbonim and serve as shluchim the world over, and many took ordinary work and built Jewish homes with it. When he came to Eretz Yisroel in Kislev 5778, about fifty of them filled a shul in Ramot Dalet to farbreng with him, and before the evening was out they had agreed to keep gathering. The order of work he put in front of his students in that classroom in Tammuz 5754 is the one they are still following, and it runs until Moshiach is revealed.
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