At the JEC’s annual testimonial banquet Rav Elazar Teitz and Rebbetzin Elisheva Teitz are honored by their son Rabbi Eliyahu Teitz on behalf of the JEC community for their 50 years of leadership.
Photo by Harris Saltzburg
July 3, 2008
More than 540 supporters of the Jewish Educational Center in Elizabeth gathered to honor their community’s religious and educational leaders and a life-giving organ donor on June 25.
The JEC’s 68th annual testimonial banquet was held at the Hilton Garden Inn in Staten Island.
Rav Elazar M. Teitz, rabbi of the United Orthodox Community of Elizabeth and dean of the JEC school, and his wife, Elisheva, were recognized for the accomplishments of their 50 years of communal and educational leadership. Larry Seidman of Hillside received the Lev Tov Award for his act of life-altering hesed (loving-kindness).
According to the account in the gala program, about a year ago, Seidman came upon an advertisement: A 28-year-old woman, Rachaeli Yifrach of Brooklyn, suffering with chronic kidney disease and in the advanced stages of renal failure, was seeking a compatible donor. He recalled what his father, Morris, endured before succumbing to the same disease, and — knowing Yifrach’s life depended on a transplant — he responded to the ad. He underwent the kidney removal surgery last August.
In presenting the award, Rav Teitz said, “Larry Seidman is truly a hero of klal Yisrael. He has imbued with new meaning the phrase ‘to give of oneself,’ ‘g’milus hesed b’gufo.’ It is humbling indeed to be witness to such an act of selflessness.”
Sharing the spotlight with Seidman at the gala were his wife, Rebecca, and Yifrach herself, beaming up at her benefactor.
Seidman asked the assembled crowd, “If you can save someone’s life without putting your own in danger, why shouldn’t you do it?”
For him and his family, Seidman said, the decision to literally save a life has been transformative. “I now look at life in a completely different way and find that I appreciate things differently,” he said. “The experience has provided an entirely new meaning to the expression ‘without your health, you have nothing.’”
Rabbi Eliyahu Teitz, associate dean of the JEC, thanked his parents on behalf of the JEC community and the Elizabeth/Hillside kehilla for their half-century of selfless, dedicated leadership.
Delivering an emotionally charged d’var Torah, he described Rav and Rebbetzin Teitz as outstanding educators — his mother as a revered teacher of biology and Tanach, his father as a mathematician, unrivalled talmudist, posek (rabbinic decisor), and advocate for agunot, women whose husbands will not give them a religious divorce. He also acknowledged them for being loving parents who had the rare ability to make “every moment a teaching moment.”
Responding to the community’s accolades, Rav Teitz discussed the challenges of the past, present, and future. He spoke of his father, Rav Mordechai Pinchas Teitz, describing him as a visionary leader who understood the profound complexities confronting the Jewish people as the United States supplanted Europe in the history of Diaspora Jewry.
It was left to him, he said, to facilitate his father’s dream, to ensure that his tremendous legacy survives to succeeding generations. He said, “We can’t fill his shoes, but we can walk in his footsteps.”
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