Thursday, June 23, 2016

Reb Heshy Jacob is Niftar

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Heshy Jacob at a Met Council event in 2013.
Reb Heshy Jacob, z”l, president of Chevra Hatzolah, askan, and celebrated baal chessed, was niftar Thursday morning. He was in his early 70s.
The niftar was one of the leading lay leaders of the Jewish community of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. 

Jacob, 71, was a neighborhood power player with a hand in much of the communal and business life of in Lower East Side.
As Jacob explained his own influence in a 2013 interview with the Forward: “If you’re the person that [if] somebody has a problem he goes to [you] day and night [and] you take the time and effort to help them, then they think you’re in charge.”

Jacob was building manager of two of the four red-brick co-op developments on Grand Street that remain a center of Lower East Side Jewish life, and was chairman of the United Jewish Council of the Lower East Side, a community group. He was also a leader in both the citywide and neighborhood Hatzolah Jewish ambulance services.
“For many decades, he really was the face of the Lower East Side,” said Jacob Goldman, president of LoHo realty, a local real estate business. “It’s a change of an era right now.
He was privileged to have a close relationship with many Gedolei Yisrael, and had an especially strong bond to the Rebbes of Kopyczynitz — Harav Avraham Yehoshua Heschel, zy”a, and his son, Harav Moshe Mordechai Heschel, zy”a — considering himself an ardent chassid of both.
He is survived by, ybl”c, his wife, children, and grandchildren.
The levayah is scheduled to take place Thursday, at 1:30 p.m. at the Bialystoker Shul on the Lower East Side.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why are you promoting this guy who was in the middle of the Rapfogel-Silver cess pool?

Unknown said...

Baruch Dayan Haemes ...

Unknown said...

R' Heshy Jacob ZTL was a person who loved helping others he will missed by all who know him.

Lower East Side said...

Willy Rapfliegel, Shelly Slither & their buddies helped their own tight knit circle & left others to starve.

Don't sicken us with your whitewash, Homnick.

Sam said...

Not promoting, guy just died

Unknown said...

Some of these comments sicken me because they are clearly by people who are haters; nothing anyone says will change those closed minded, narrow-thinking, ignorant fools. But anyone who truly knew Heshy, as I did for nearly 40 years, knew him to be a good man, a learned man, and the paradigm of a "mensch." Of blessed memory.