A time to weep, a time to laugh

A program that included a Siyum HaShas, videos, Torah insights and speeches, commemorated and memorialized a brief life whose influence continues to bring joy and inspiration to children and adults in the Five Towns-Far Rockaway community and worldwide.

Billed as an evening of remembrance, reflection and inspiration, a standing room only audience filled the men’s and women’s sections of the main sanctuary of the Young Israel of Lawrence Cedarhurst on Tuesday night, to commemorate what would have been Levi Yitzchak Wolowik’s 13th birthday, his bar mitzvah. He passed away when he was nine. A cross section of the community attended, men wearing knitted, suede, cloth, black kipot and black hats, women with wigs and hats, filling the seats and crowding the aisles, riveted by the presentation, occasionally broken by muffled sobs.

The first speaker quoted Ecclesiastes, about the different times in life and how rarely do two of these come together, but this would have been a time of joy but is also now a time of great pain and tears. Levi’s brothers and his father learned mishnayos together for the siyum, noting that the letters of the word neshoma (soul) are the same letters as in the word mishna. One brother read the final mishna in Masechet Makot in Seder Nezikin. Another brother expressed the hope that they would “very soon be together with Levi Yitzchak with the coming of Mashiach.” The friends of another brother, Dovid, presented a gift of the Tanya for Levi Yitzchak, a”h, on the occasion of his birthday. A film was shown of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, z”l, making a siyum on his birthday in 1988 and thanking some of his chassidim, followers, for printing a Tanya in commemoration of his birthday. One woman in the audience noted that Levi Yitzchak was born on the evening of the anniversary that the Alter Rebbe, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812), the founder of Chabad, the Baal HaTanya, the author of the Tanya, was released from prison in Russia.