During those years, I knew a wonderful man in my congregation. He was a widower without children, though he had nephews and nieces. He was quite wealthy, but at only fifty-five had suffered two heart attacks and survived cancer. His doctors advised him to live out his few remaining years in the Florida sunshine rather than the frost and snow of northern New Jersey. So he retired to Miami Beach, where he became a leader in our community.
Mindful of his physicians’ predictions, he dutifully purchased an annuity plan that would provide him with a generous income until age ninety. He fully expected to die before then. But the Lord thought otherwise, and this fellow reached his ninetieth birthday fully well, still productive, and active. But now he had no income, and he rapidly used up his savings. No bank would advance him a mortgage due to his age. I organized deliveries of food and other necessities to him.
The man had been a staunch supporter of the Ponivezh Yeshiva, giving Rav Kahaneman a sizable donation every year. One day, the Rav instructed me to take him to this man’s house. I told him that his former supporter had no money now and that our visit under these circumstances would embarrass him. Nevertheless, the Rav insisted. We arrived and sat down in the man’s living room. The Rav announced, “Until now, you have generously helped the yeshiva in its times of need. Now the yeshiva is going to repay you in kind. Every month the yeshiva will send you the amount of your monthly annuity check, and I want you to continue living as you always have.”
Offsetting the man’s protests, he added, “After a hundred and twenty years, you and I will straighten out this matter between us.” As we left, the Rav told me, “A yeshiva is also obligated to perform acts of kindness and mercy to others.” And that is exactly what he did. For the next four years, until the man passed away, the yeshiva sent him a monthly check. Upon his death, he left his house in Miami Beach to the yeshiva.
* * * * *
While still a student in Chicago, I heard a lecture by Rabbi Eliyahu Kitov that made a deep impression on me. When I met up with him in Miami Beach a decade later, I reminded him of that speech. I used his classic work Ish U’Veito in its English translation (A Jew and His Home) as the basis of a class for the young couples in our synagogue.
Rabbi Kitov was a brilliant, fiery personality. Rabbi Alexander Gross once drove him to the airport to catch his return flight to Israel. After issuing his boarding pass, the woman at the ticket counter wished him a safe and pleasant flight. Rabbi Kitov responded in a booming voice, “Amen!”
As everyone stared at him, he turned to Rabbi Gross and explained, “Our matriarch Sarah is told by someone she assumes is an Arab that she’ll bear a child within the year. Sarah laughs at this unlikely prediction by this unlikely person. The Lord reprimands her in His conversation with Avraham, asking, ‘Why did Sarah laugh at such good tidings?’” Rabbi Kitov interpreted this criticism to mean she should have said, “Amen!” Whenever anyone wishes you well, he asserted, your response should be, “Amen!”
I later met Rabbi Kitov’s daughter, Naama Nothman, a famous painter in Johannesburg. She told me her father had encouraged her to develop her artistic talent and even sent her to Paris to study.
A man of great knowledge and breadth, Rabbi Kitov was, in my opinion, much under appreciated.
