Rabbi Sholom B. Lipskar, a charismatic and visionary figure in the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement who helped transform South Florida into a vibrant center of Jewish life and founded a national organization that supports Jews in prison and the military, died on May 3 in Miami. He was 78.
The cause of his death, in a hospital, was heart failure, said Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, a spokesman for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
Rabbi Lipskar, the son of Soviet exiles who smuggled him across the border in a suitcase, was sent to Miami in 1969 by Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe and one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the 20th century.
At the time, the Jewish community in Miami consisted primarily of affluent retirees who were not particularly religious. The city also still had neighborhoods that enforced restrictions about where Jews could own property. Rabbi Schneerson saw a different future for South Florida: as a thriving showcase for American Jewry, especially for Jews emigrating from Latin America.
Rabbi Lipskar’s first rabbinical role in Miami was as principal of a Jewish day school. In 1974, with help from his wife, Chani, he started the Landow Yeshiva‑Lubavitch Educational Center, which offered classes for students in preschool through high school. In 1981, he opened his own synagogue, the Shul, in the basement shopping arcade of the Beau Rivage hotel in Bal Harbour.
On Tuesday evenings, he offered free lectures on Judaism — a mix of stories from the Torah and discussions of Rabbi Schneerson’s insights into its applications to modern life. Rabbi Lipskar’s talks initially drew fewer than a dozen people, but within a year, hundreds of Jews began showing up.
Many had not been to a synagogue since their bar or bat mitzvahs. Some came in search of romantic partners. Others were seeking meaning.
“It helps me learn a lot and connects me intellectually and socially,” Rivka Brenners, 28, told The Miami Herald in 1989. “I feel I’ve gotten in touch with what’s mine as a Jew.”
Rabbi Lipskar’s stature in South Florida grew to the extent that Sara’s Kosher Pizza, a popular North Miami restaurant (now defunct), named a dish after him. Listed below the Nova Platter on the menu, the Rabbi Lipskar Salad was topped with shredded carrots, beets and turnips and garnished with toasted pita bread.
The same year he opened the Shul, as if he wasn’t busy enough, Rabbi Lipskar founded Aleph Institute, an outreach organization for Jewish prisoners, named after the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. He was inspired by hearing Rabbi Schneerson talk about the religious isolation that Jewish inmates experienced behind bars.
The purpose of Aleph, Rabbi Lipskar told The Miami Herald in 1984, was to ensure its clients understood that “there are Jews in the community that do not judge them and do not want them to feel like second-class citizens. We want to help them in their anguish. We want them to realize that, while they are rectifying their mistakes, they don’t have to stop functioning as human beings.”
Aleph, which now has 75 full-time employees, sends rabbis into prisons to lead Sabbath and High Holy Days services. The organization also provides inmates with prayer books, Jewish educational materials and supplies for Passover seders. (The program expanded to include outreach to Jewish military service members in 1995.)
“Aleph became my lifeline,” Madeline Villeneuve, who used the organization’s services while in prison, told The Miami Herald in 1991. “When you are in jail and you are Jewish, it is so difficult to find help. You feel so alone. It took going to jail for me to learn about the organization.”
After she left prison, Rabbi Lipskar performed her son’s bar mitzvah ceremony.
“His objective was to give people back a sense of their dignity and humanity,” Rabbi Aaron Lipskar, the chief executive of Aleph and Rabbi Lipskar’s nephew, said in an interview. “He’d say, ‘Now that you’re here, what is the purpose?’ And he would build them up and say, ‘Because you have a unique ability to be here to accomplish whatever light has to be brought into a dark environment.”
Sholom Dovber Lipskar was born on Aug. 1, 1946, in Tashkent, Soviet Uzbekistan, during the perilous times for Jews following World War II. His father, Rabbi Eliyahu Akiva Lipskar, taught in Jewish day schools. His mother, Rochel Baila (Duchman) Lipskar, was a nurse.
When he was just 20 days old, his parents fled the country for Poland. Lacking proper paperwork, they crossed the border carrying him inside a suitcase, with small holes punched in the sides so he could breathe.
The family lived in displaced persons’ camps in Germany until 1951, when they immigrated to Toronto, where Sholom studied at the Eitz Chaim yeshiva. In 1961, he moved to New York to study at the Lubavitcher yeshiva in Brooklyn.
In 1963, he joined the yeshiva at Rabbi Schneerson’s synagogue in Crown Heights.
“As you observe the rebbe, you are challenged and charged to perceive the world in a different way,” he once said. “You start seeing the physical world in the way that it was intended — to serve man instead of man serving it. Instead of working to achieve a materialistic goal, you start looking at how the materialistic aspects of the world are there to allow man to reach a higher-level goal.”
In addition to sending rabbis into prisons, the Aleph Institute arranged for lawyers to work pro bono on clemency appeals and requests for sentence commutations.
“He realized long before many others did that the criminal justice system in our country needed compassion and not just punishment,” Alan Vinegrad, a lawyer with the firm Covington & Burling who works on Aleph cases, said in an interview. “He also thought passionately that criminals should not only be defined by the crimes that put them in prison.”
Some of Rabbi Lipskar’s clemency work was done on behalf of politically connected individuals.
In 2021, The New York Times reported that of the 238 pardons and commutations granted by President Trump in his first term, 27 went to people supported by Aleph; by the Tzedek Association, a criminal justice advocacy group founded by Rabbi Moshe Margaretten; or by lawyers and lobbyists connected to them.
The charitable foundation of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, donated more than $188,000 to Aleph from 2004 to the end of 2017, The Times reported.
Rabbi Lipskar married Chani Minkowicz in 1968. She survives him, along with their children, Rabbi Zalman Lipskar and Devorah Leah Andrusier; several grandchildren; and three siblings, Rabbi Mendel Lipskar, Rabbi Yosie Lipskar and Sheva Schochet.
In an interview with Moment magazine in 2023, Rabbi Lipskar recalled his arrival in Miami.
“It was a community that not only had zero Judaism, but an anti-feeling — against Orthodoxy, against traditional Judaism, against what I consider to be the honest truth, the Torah way of life,” he said. “Most people, their initial reaction was, ‘Who asked you to come here? Why are you upsetting the status quo here? We don’t need you.’”
Times change. So did Miami. The Shul is now housed in a stunning 125,000-square-foot building on Collins Avenue and is a tourist attraction for visiting Jews.
Rabbi Lipskar “created a Jewish community which right now is one of the most intensely engaged, committed and active Jewish communities in the world,” Jacob Solomon, the president and chief executive emeritus of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, told The Miami Herald earlier this month. “He was a visionary.”
The post Rabbi Sholom Lipskar, 78, Dies; Transformed Miami and Helped Jews in Prison appeared first on New York Times.
