
My father, Rabbi Chaplain Abraham Avrech, z’l, passed away on March 15, 2014, which the Jewish calendar translates into the 13th of Adar. Thus, last night — Jewish holidays begin after sundown — commenced the fourth Yahrzeit, memorial, without my father’s physical presence in this world. My father was 94 years old.
He is gone, but he is certainly not forgotten.
I ponder the astonishing trajectory of my father’s life. Born in a tiny impoverished Polish town, my father and his family emigrated to America where they found the liberty to live as Jews and Americans.
My father reveled in Americanism, even as he lived the life of a Torah Jew and a religious Zionist.
Like most New York Jews, my father was a lever-pulling Democrat for most of his life. But in his later years, he realized that the Democrat party had changed into a crypto-socialist organism dedicated to subverting American exceptionalism, the Constitution, and home to anti-Israel, Jew-hating leftists.
My father was appalled by ex-president Obama; that a man who was a member of a Jew-hating church for over 20 years was elected to this nation’s highest office was, to my father, a ghastly subversion of the ideals of the America he loved.
As we head into Purim, the holiday in which Jews remember an ancient Persian regime that sought to annihilate the Jewish people, I will read Megillat Esther and proudly remember my father: a pious Jew and a proud American.











May HaRav Avraham ben HaRav Shmuel’s neshama have an aliyah.

As usual, you honor your dad with your eloquence and you honor our tradition of Kabayd Ha-Av. I still see him (circa mid-1970’s? at the JCH of Bensonhurst) pointing at your printed name, Robert, while beaming about “My son, the publisher!” No one could come between “Arthur Wein and his daily, crazed, JCH competitive swim workouts” except Rabbi Abraham Avrech, who would dispatch an emissary to go down to the pool to request that Arthur excuse himself to volunteer his presence in the Beit Knesset for the sake of making a minyan for those reciting Kaddish.
Thanks so much for the vivid memory.
May his neshama have an aliyah.
(I hope I’m using that phrase correctly, Robert. Forgive me if I haven’t…)
Perfect. Greatly appreciated.