COJO Flatbush Board Chairman Larry Spiewak – noted activist, successful businessman, devoted husband, father, and grandfather – passed away last week, leaving a legacy spanning more than fifty years of service to the community.
According to those who knew him best, there is one key to understanding what made young Larry the man he would become: As the lone child of Holocaust survivors Beno and Hella Spiewak, he had an unbreakable bond with his parents, treating them with a level of deference and respect evident to anyone who had any interaction with the family – including the legendary Rabbi Dovid Trenk, who on several occasions made it a point, in front of a roomful of students, to laud Larry’s devotion to his parents.
What sparked Rabbi Trenk’s admiration was the sheer amount of time Larry spent, as a youngster and then as a teenager, helping his parents in their East Flatbush candy store. One of his responsibilities entailed putting together the various sections of the Sunday newspapers, a tedious job that required waking up well before sunrise on Sundays and working through the early morning hours. As a result, Larry at times found himself nodding off during his Sunday classes at Mirrer Yeshiva. For this he was often reprimanded by his teachers – until Rabbi Trenk became his rebbi.
As Yisroel Besser recounts in his biography of Rabbi Trenk, Just Love Them: “Rabbi Trenk would wait until Larry opened his eyes, and then start rhapsodizing about the glory of the teenager’s kibbud av va’eim [honoring mother and father]. ‘What you are zocheh to do for your parents, every single week,’ Rebbi said, addressing not just one talmid, but the whole class, ‘is so special, you’re incredible.’ ”
Larry would remain close with Rabbi Trenk for the rest of his beloved teacher’s life, crediting him with imparting “the most important life lessons to his students, chief among them the beauty of living a life filled with empathy for others.”
It was shortly after completing his final year at Mirrer Yeshiva, as he was looking forward to starting Baruch College, that Larry’s life was suddenly, shockingly, incomprehensibly shattered. At around 6 A.M. on Friday, August 21, 1971, two gunmen walked into the Spiewaks’ candy store and asked for apple pie. When the Spiewaks told them they had no apple pie and offered them Danish pastry instead, one of the men shot Beno, killing him instantly. When Mrs. Spiewak screamed, the other gunman shot her, leaving her critically wounded.
For Larry, who’d been home at the time of the shootings, the idyllic existence he’d always known was instantly turned upside-down. In the blink of an eye, his father was gone and his mother severely wounded, with a bullet lodged next to her heart. The doctors feared that an attempt to remove the bullet could prove fatal, so for the next 35 years his mother lived every day of her life with the bullet inside her.
“It’s unfortunate,” said Larry, “but often it takes a major upheaval to cause someone to value things that people – especially young people – normally take for granted. What happened in August 1971 taught me the importance of looking after and taking care of your parents, because they’re not going to be around forever. And once you start appreciating that, your concern expands to your other relatives, and then to friends, and then to acquaintances, and then to the larger community around you. At that point I realized that whatever course my life would take, I wanted – needed – to have some kind of role in helping others.”
That need to help others became the focal point of Larry’s life. Even as a young entrepreneur starting a new business – Kwik Ticket, which since its founding has been supplying garment tags and related items to many of the world’s largest and most prestigious retail establishments – Larry made time for community endeavors, and his involvement only grew over the years.
The organizations and institutions that have benefited from his participation constitute a Who’s Who and a What’s What of New York communal life: Chai Lifeline, Yeshivah of Flatbush, Tzivos Hashem, Beth-El Jewish Center of Flatbush, Just One Life, and COJO Flatbush, among others. Larry served each of them tirelessly in various key capacities.
His association with COJO Flatbush began when he was introduced to the agency’s then-executive director, Rabbi Yechezkel Pikus. In short time, Larry became a Board member, then Vice President, and then Chairman of the Board.
His enthusiasm about the work of COJO Flatbush was unbounded. “Every year,” he said, “COJO helps tens of thousands of clients with dozens of services and programs – and we do it guided by the belief that every problem is an opportunity and every client is family.”
COJO President Moshe Zakheim says Larry’s “unbelievably positive attitude lifted the spirits of everyone he encountered. You know the old term ‘life of the party’? Larry was the life of any Board meeting, any project, any discussion with people he knew and people he’d just met, and yes, the life of any party.”
For COJO First Vice President Leon Goldenberg, what stood out about Larry was his calm and steady demeanor. “I don’t think I ever saw him angry,” he says. “His smile, his laughter, his jokes made everybody’s day. There was also this: He was involved over the years with so many organizations, and yet whenever he addressed a COJO Flatbush Board meeting, his passion was such that I couldn’t help but feel this organization was uniquely special to him.”
COJO CEO Louis Welz describes Larry as the “ultimate public servant, seeking to give back to others in any way he could.” Larry’s passing, he says, is “a huge loss to his family, to his friends, to COJO Flatbush, and to the community he served with such dedication.”
Shulamis Shapiro, COJO’s Director of Social Services, speaks of Larry’s deep-seated generosity, which manifested itself in the time, effort, and personal sacrifice he put into helping COJO live up to its mission and mandate that “Help Starts Here.” He was, she says, “such an important part of what we do here. He will be greatly missed.”
Larry is survived by his wife, Mindy; children Sharona, Ariella, Benjamin, and Rafi; and grandchildren.
