Dear Shaare Family,
A few years ahead of me in high school, there was a student with a gregarious personality and huge heart named Ben Chafetz. He never met a stranger, and had a way of making anyone feel comfortable within moments of meeting them - staying in touch over long distances and periods of time. I didn’t keep up with Ben as I should have, but every now and then I’d hear from different sources that he was living in Cleveland, was a successful entrepreneur and a devoted family man. Tragically, many, many people found out about Ben last weekend.
Ben was, apparently, an experienced pilot and he and his friend Baruch Taub were traveling back from JFK to Cleveland on Thursday evening in a small plane, returning from a funeral in New York. A combination of severe weather, low cloud cover and engine problems led to Taub calling for urgent assistance even though they were only about a mile away from Westchester County Airport. They lost contact immediately thereafter; an open field landing was impossible given the lack of visibility and the heavily wooded area. The plane, and their bodies, were recovered much later that evening. Ben sent a message to his wife and seven kids asking them to daven for him, and telling them that he loved them - a message that went out to his shul’s whatsapp group instead.
At the heart wrenching funeral, and in social media posts afterward, we learned more about these two men - pillars of the Cleveland community who lived to help others. Baruch Taub was a mechanic who was known for his scrupulous integrity and deep humility; he had donated a Torah scroll to a shul nearby his auto shop - which he had built between two shuls to make it easier to attend minyan - but refused any recognition for his donation. Ben was dedicated to every aspect of the Cleveland community (he was, for example, a member of the Chevra Kadisha) who offered generous financial support to many local institutions. In fact, he also supported Torah institutions in other cities where he did business or visited, such as Las Vegas and Orlando, and the Chabad House in Bangalore, India, where he visited every six months. Ben was a passenger on the famous El Al flight that got diverted to Athens on account of Shabbos, and wrote about his experience here. In subsequent years, he led a fundraising effort to help Chabad of Athens build a Mikvah, as a gesture of gratitude for the unforgettable Shabbos they facilitated. In more recent years, he had begun arranging his daily schedule to allow for morning and evening Torah study. Dan Eleff, a Cleveland resident and the proprietor of Dan’s Deals, wrote poignantly about Baruch and Ben in these posts.
The ever present and unanswerable theological challenge of the death of the righteous, especially at a young age, certainly rears its head when confronting these stories. It would be disingenuous to say that I miss Ben; I hadn’t spoken with him for close to 25 years. However, his big heartedness was evident even when I knew him. The world in general, and Jewish Cleveland in particular, is a better place because he was in it. May his and Baruch Taub’s memories be for a blessing, and may the lives their families continue to live be sterling tributes to the legacy left behind by their remarkable fathers and husbands.
Mystery Shul Of The Week
This landmark shul was built in a unique architectural style by Polish and Russian Jews, who wanted a place to feel comfortable in contrast to the formal and stodgy shuls that already existed in this city. It has experienced a gas explosion, and, in rapid succession, dynamiting by the Nazis and attacks by far right revolutionaries within a few weeks in 1941. Name the shul, the city in which it is located, the architectural style and, for extra points, supply a photo.
