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Rabbi Yehuda Chitrik a walking encyclopedia of Hasidic tales, Is Dead at 106 By Wolfgang Saxon |
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| Rabbi Yehuda Chitrik, a legendary storyteller in the Lubavitcher community, died on Tuesday at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn. He was 106 and lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the hub of the worldwide Lubavitcher Hasidic movement. The death was announced by Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin of the Chabad Lubavitch Media Center in Brooklyn. One of Rabbi Chitrik's grandsons, Ari Chitrik, said he was hospitalized on Feb. 8 after suffering a heart attack. Lubavitchers adhere to a life and philosophy centered on prayer and the study of Judaism's holy books, and Rabbi Chitrik had immersed himself in the Torah, the Talmud and related texts since his boyhood in Russia. Respected as a wise man, he was also famous for the seemingly bottomless trove of folk tales he had amassed over decades to tell and retell. In a New York Times interview in December 2004, Ari Chitrik called his grandfather "a walking encyclopedia of Hasidic tales." At the time, Rabbi Chitrik, already 105, continued to rise at 5 o'clock, attend synagogue at least twice a day, teach a class and keep up his studies with a fellow rabbi in his 90's, Meir Itkin. He also continued the tradition of storytelling at the Sabbath table, though he himself spoke up softly and rarely by then. Rabbi Chitrik shared some of his memorized folklore in an anthology, "From My Father's Shabbos Table; A Treasury of Chabad Chassidic Stories," published in 1991 in Rabbi Eliyahu Touger's translation from Hebrew. Yehuda Chitrik was born on Aug. 28, 1899, in Krasnolok, a Hasidic town in Russia. In 1913, his father sent him to study at the central Chabad-Lubavitch Yeshiva near Smolensk, where he frequently met with the fifth Lubavitcher rebbe, Shalom DovBer Schneerson. He also began to commit stories and historical facts to his remarkable memory. The school closed and students scattered after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Yehuda Chitrik, a rabbi himself by then, wound up in Kharkov, now in Ukraine, in 1926 to teach at the yeshiva. He married Kaila Tumarkin, a daughter of Aron Tumarkin, the chief rabbi of Kharkov. He also met and came to know Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who later became the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe. Rabbi Chitrik's personal recollections played a significant part in compiling a history of the rebbe's life. At the end of World War II, Rabbi Chitrik took his family to Belgium and the Netherlands, were he briefly taught Torah and Jewish traditions to the many others displaced by the war. He continued on to Montreal to teach at the Lubavitcher yeshiva and become a prominent member in the Canadian branch of the movement. Rabbi Chitrik retired in the 1970's and moved to New York City in 1983 after the death of his wife. He is survived by two sons, two daughters and, according to Rabbi Shmotkin, 20 grandchildren and hundreds of great- and great-great-grandchildren. (2149)
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