Memory Lane: Rav Avrohom Dovid Blumenkrantz

Onward with our journey into old Boro Park, we meet a vestige of prewar Poland, an ardent Amshinover chossid who was one of the rarer immigrants from Poland in the prewar era at a time when most were from Russia, who remained completely unchanged by the landscape they he found here. He was active in Boro Park institutions, spent his days in Torah and avodah, and succeeded in establishing beautiful Torah generations. His name was Rav Avrohom Dovid Blumenkrantz. 

Boro Park 

Reb Avrohom Dovid was born in the year 1877 in the polish town of Ostrołęka, located about 120 km (75 mi) northeast of Warsaw. 

Settling in Boro Park, Reb Avrohom Dovid davened in a Shul on Boro Park’s lower avenues. But his job was as a shammas in the famed Shomrei Shabbos Anshei Sfard Shul in Boro Park, which had been founded in 1919. Thus, he spent his days tending to the shul, to his family, and learning Torah. 

His daughter Feige was getting on in years and wanted to marry a ben Torah, which was not easy to find in America of those days. So she returned to Europe, and here meet the narrative of her husband, Ha’Gaon Rav Moshe Shulman, whom we have profiled here in the past as a builder of Novaradoker Yeshivos throughout Poland, and a marbitz Torah in the yeshiva here: 

“In 1939, I married my Rebbetzin Feige, the daughter of Rav Avorhom Dovid Bluemenkrantz of Brooklyn, who came to Ostrolenka to visit her family. Following our weddings, she returned to Brooklyn and sent me an affidavit. By then, the war had broken out and I made my way to Vilna. The Mirrer Yeshiva moved to Keidan, and I threw my lot in with them. There I learned with Rav Yonah Karpilov of Minsk, Hy”d, and second seder with Rav Shimon Rom, now of RIETS… 

In the end of the winter of 1940, I received my visa to enter America, and I was meant to embark from Sweden to New York. The ways were extremely fraught, and the ships ceased traveling. This delayed my departure for another year, until I arrived in America in the spring of 1941.” As noted, Rav Moshe went on to teach in Novaradok, and to serve as a rov in a number of Batei Midrashim. He authored the sefer Gidulei Shmuel. 

In arriving to the haven of America, however arduous the journey, he was more fortunate than his mother-in-law, Rebbetzin Chaya, who had all the papers to leave Poland, but insisted on staying behind with a married daughter who had a child who was disabled, and would thus not be able to enter America. Reb Avrohom Dovid was there on the eve of the war in 1939, and with great miracles was able to flee back to the safety of America—only for those most precious to him to perish in the inferno. 

Through the eyes of the young

The granddaughters of Rav Avrohom Dovid recall him with great fondness and admiration. “He always had a brisk walk,” recalls one, “and he exhibited great energy even in his old age. According to the family, he made the shidduch for the Amshinover Rebbe following the war, and walked him down to the chupah. In later years, his daughter donated a sefer Torah in his memory to the Amshinover shul in Bayit Vegan. 

“He sat and learned all day, and he spoke only Yiddish, and nevertheless he found his way to our hearts,” says a grandchild. He cared for us in ruchniyus and in gashmiyus. He would always make sure during summer vacation, when the family used to go to the Rockaway, that the boys learned with him every day, and that the girls davened,” his grandchildren relate. 

When he prepared the bar mitzvah parshah with his grandson, the boy complained to his mother, “Zaidy is sleeping. Why are you making me do this? His mother said, just say it. And sure enough, if he made even one mistake, his grandfather would immediately perk up and correct him. He never ate meat in America. His granddaughters still wonder whether this was a kashrus concern or an expression of mourning for all those he had lost in the war 

“He was vibrant until the end,” recalls a granddaughter. “He would daven in Amshinover shtiebel, and as we lived on 14th Avenue, he would stop off to wish us a good year on his way home.

Rav Avorhom Dovid lived to the end of his life with the pain of what he had lost, but he never spoke about his wife and children who perished. “At the funeral, my mother collapsed in anguish, and I think that the intensity of the loss of her mother and sister finally set in at that moment,” reflects a grandchild. 

He was niftar in the summer of 1957 at the age of 80 and was interred in Mt Judah Cemetery following a lifetime of mesirus nefesh and many years of residence in Boro Park of yore.