For Someone Else’s Joy

by Dovid Zaklikowski for Hasidic Archives

During one particularly difficult year the board of Oholei Torah asked Dovid if he would agree to be honored at the annual dinner. “He vehemently refused,” the late Mendel Shemtov, a Crown Heights businessman, wrote in a 2001 tribute to Dovid. “In his eyes, for a Chasidic Jew it was totally out of the question.” 

In the end his brother Sholom convinced him to tolerate being honored for the sake of the school.

While Dovid accepted the honor begrudgingly, Sholom was delighted. At the dinner Sholom gave his older brother a standing ovation. “He felt so happy for the kavod [honor] that his older brother was getting,” Sholom’s youngest son, Avrohom Moshe, said.

In the years that followed, the Oholei Torah dinner honored many distinguished people, but no dinner passed without a celebration of Dovid Deitsch. 

Ads for the dinner itself, placed in local Jewish newspapers, were another source of embarrassment to the businessman, as they invariably included a paragraph of praise to himself: “We would like to honor our chairman of the board of directors of Oholei Torah, the great philanthropist and selfless activist, indefatigable communal achiever, and leading personality.”

Though he tolerated the honor for the sake of the school, the public adulation bothered Dovid. Once he complained to the Rebbe, “I can’t stand this. I go to these dinners, and everyone wants to take a picture with me, and they put my picture in the papers. I don’t like it and I don’t want it.”

“Nu?” the Rebbe replied (paraphrased). “I don’t like it either, but it makes people happy, so we have to do it.”

An excerpt from the forthcoming book Yards of Kindness: The Life of Dovid and Sara Deitsch, available at HasidicArchives.com.