Dovid Winiarz, a popular kiruv activist who utilized social media to reach unaffiliated Jews, was killed Sunday in Harford County, Maryland, when the car in which he was a passenger collided with another car, apparently due to icy road conditions.
Winiarz, 49, widely known as the Facebuker Rebbe (the name of his Facebook page), was on his way to the Association for Jewish Outreach Professionals (AJOP) kiruv convention in the Baltimore area. The two other people in the car sustained non-life-threatening injuries, as did the two people in the other car involved in the collision.
Several hundred mourners attended Winiarz’s levayah Monday morning at the Young Israel of Staten Island. Winiarz was eulogized by Rabbi Reuven Feinstein, Rabbi Dovid Harris, Rabbi Moshe Meir Weiss, and Rabbi Yaakov Lehrfeld, his sons Shaya and Eli, his son-in-law Yosef Simon, his brother Shmuel and his mother, Mrs. Chaya Subar.
Reporting for the website Vos Iz Neias, correspondent Sandy Eller (who will profile Winiarz next week in The Jewish Press’s Olam Yehudi magazine), quoted Mrs. Subar’s request that those in the room continue her son’s legacy:
“That is the greatest kavod we can give this neshamah by continuing his philosophy. His philosophy was ‘a pintele yid is noch a yid.’ Every Jew is precious no matter what label they carry…. He knew that well and he practiced it well and that is what we have to do now is to continue the gifts that he left us.”
Winiarz’s eldest son, Shaya, recalled how his father would say, “Wherever I go, I am going to plant seeds. Hopefully they’ll grow one day. It’s not my job to decide if they grow or not. That will be Hashem’s job. I just have to plant seeds.”
Binyumin Weiser, CEO of Fidelity Payment Services, where Winiarz was employed for the past eight years, told Eller it “was a zechus to have [Winiarz] as part of the Fidelity family. His smile, good cheer, ahavas Yisrael, yiras shamayim and ahavas Torah were exemplary and contagious…. He will be sorely missed and we pray that Hashem heals the hearts of his beautiful family and all of Klal Yisrael.”
Eller, stepping out of her reportorial role, described Winiarz as “a close personal friend who literally lived to help others. Passionate about Torah, kiruv, and sharing the beauty of Yiddishkeit with everyone, Dovid lived to make the world a better place and to make sure that the light of Torah shined a little brighter on a daily basis.A proud father [of 10] and grandfather, his Facebook page was routinely filled with pictures of his children and grandchildren in the hopes that he could inspire others to understand the beauty of what it meant to raise a family in the ways of the Torah.”