This article was recently written by my wife and printed in Mishpacha Magazine.
It's a bit longer than what I usually write, however, I think it's worth printing out to read over Shabbos.
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My Dear Young Lady
Remembering my spiritual father & Rav, Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Chalkowski
By Malka Winner
Every conversation began the same way: "My dear young lady."
Somehow, in those four words, everything was contained: warmth, love, the feeling of being truly seen. That was Rabbi Moshe Chalkowski — someone who could tell you the truth and make you laugh in the same breath.
He was the principal of Neve Yerushalayim and the husband of the legendary Shaare Zedek midwife, Bambi. Although he was never blessed with his own children, he had thousands of daughters. I was one of them.
Not a day has gone by since his passing that I have not felt the enormous hole he left in this world and in my heart.
I brought my husband to meet him when we were dating. I knew: if the Rav approved, I could go forward. He approved. But I was still scared.
"My dear young lady," he said, "what do you do if you really want to go swimming but you're afraid the water's going to be cold?"
"You jump in?" I guessed.
He just smiled.
I jumped.
He came to my vort, wedding, sheva brachos. He served as sandak at our oldest son’s bris…
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That was who he was. He showed up.
He was a busy man, a spiritual giant, someone with a sefer perpetually open before him. But also: he wanted to be there. Because we were his.
He came to America nearly every summer to visit his talmidos in the tristate area. He attended our simchos, wrote us letters — real letters, in the old days — and later, emails, gave us time on the phone. If he didn’t answer, he usually called back.
Once, he came to Passaic to give a shiur, and needed a ride back to Brooklyn. I remember thinking: if he had been a Rosh Yeshiva, there would have been a crowd of students fighting for that honor. But he was a women's Rav. And so I got to have him to myself for that drive.
I don't remember what we talked about. I only remember what it felt like — to be in the presence of someone so humble, so beloved, and so completely unconcerned with appearing great.
Similarly, at a friend’s bris about a decade ago, my husband saw Rabbi Chalkowski on the men’s side—alone. “I got to have him to myself the whole time!” my husband said afterwards. “It wasn’t right. But also, it was wonderful!” The man was truly a tzaddik nistar.
An Israeli avreich visited our home and noticed a framed picture of Rabbi Chalkowski on the mantel. "How do you know him?" he asked, clearly assuming no one else knew. We looked at each other, equally astonished. He had grown up in Givat Shaul, in the shadow of that same quiet greatness. We each thought we had found a hidden treasure. We had both been right.
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One Sukkos, a group of nine girls had planned to eat with the Chalkowskis in their sukkah. A few days before the chag, the Rebbetzin (Bambi) got very sick and they had to cancel. They felt terrible. Rabbi Chalkowski called one of the madrichot to let her know—and he asked her which girls had planned come for the seudah.
“Oh, I’ll let them know, don’t worry,” the madricha said.
“Please give me their names,” the Rav said. “I want to call each of them personally to apologize…”
That Simchas Torah, a friend and I walked Rabbi Chalkowski back to Azriel Street. On our way back to Har Nof, we reflected on how, the night before, we had watched the dancing in Yeshivas Pachad Yitzchak, and how the Rosh Yeshiva had been surrounded by talmidim. If Rabbi Chalkowski had been a Rosh Yeshivah, we said, his talmidim would have been dancing and singing him all the way home. But he got us instead!
Another story that has stayed with me: A potential student came to meet him, and he gently asked her whether she was shomer Shabbos. "I keep what I know," she answered.
He responded, simply: "I'm the same. I keep what I know." That was him.
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He was a close talmid of Rav Shlomo Wolbe, zt”l, and he taught from Alei Shur with a love that seeped into every page of that sefer. I was part of one of his ongoing vaadim, and I cherished those lessons. If I could inherit any possession of his, I would ask for that sefer, chelek sheini — worn, marked, used nearly to pieces. You could see his whole inner life in it. He lived that mussar.
But the other thing I would choose — and it could not be more different — was the large, colorful, sneaker-wearing caterpillar stuffy he kept on the back of his tiny one-person couch. Every time I visited his small apartment on Rechov Azriel in Givat Shaul, that caterpillar stood out. It was such a perfect symbol of him: a giant of Torah with stuffed animals in his office, a package of tissues always nearby for the copious tears his talmidos shed in his presence, and somehow it all fit together.
He told us always: just be normal. And he was. Profoundly, disarmingly, wonderfully normal. He loved hearing about the world — places we'd visited, things we'd experienced before coming to Neve. When a girl asked him what to do with photos she'd taken of Har HaBayit before becoming observant, he said: "Show them to me, of course! I can't go, but I really want to see!"
Their home had another small “normal” detail his “daughters” loved: the fridge was covered in funny magnets. One read, "Save the Earth. It's the only planet with chocolate." (And yes, they always had chocolate available!) Another: "A man is the king of his castle — until his queen comes home." There were more…
It sounds like a small thing. But walking into that kitchen and seeing those magnets and the stuffed animals in the living room lightened everything. These two tremendous people had chosen, deliberately, to fill their home with laughter.
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When I moved to northern Israel, he was fascinated. He wanted to know everything about life in the North, asked question after question. He loved trains — a love born from childhood, from those school holidays when he and his twin brother Rav Yehoshua (lh”bclc, a Rav in Yerushalayim’s Gilo neighborhood) would dress in their Shabbos clothes and ride the train home from yeshiva in England. "People don't appreciate train rides anymore," he'd say. "A long, slow train ride is a pleasure. You can use the time for so many things — and of course, look out the window."
For years, he talked about riding the new train line up to visit me and my family. He really wanted to come. By the time the train was ready, he wasn't.
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His advice felt, always, like more than advice. It felt like truth.
He told me for a long time to stay in a job I was growing to hate for its toxic environment — and then one day, quietly, he said: leave. "Hashem has always taken care of you until now. What makes you think He's going to stop? My dear young lady, He will find you a new job." I left with nothing lined up. Within a short time, I had something new. I felt his blessing traveling with me.
A close friend of mine was torn — should she go back to her small Midwestern hometown, where she felt she belonged or stay in New York for the sake of shidduchim? He listened to her. Then: "Hashem knows your zip code. Go home." Within weeks she was dating the man she would marry.
And then there was the milchigs. I was once joking with him about shidduchim and announced I could never marry someone lactose intolerant — I loved cheesy dishes too much. He gave me a look. "Hashem has a sense of humor," he said. "You'd better watch out." My husband is lactose intolerant. Of course.
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One Rosh Hashanah, he and his wife hosted me (and others) for a meal. I have carried one memory from that evening ever since: the way he bentched. I have never seen anyone recite Birkat Hamazon like that — every word deliberate, every Divine Name treated as something precious, sacred. By the time he finished, he had broken a sweat. Watching him was the greatest lesson I ever received about what prayer could be and what Rosh Hashanah is.
Every Tisha B'Av night, he would take the entire seminary on a tour of Yerushalayim — off the bus at different points, his voice low and serious, speaking in the darkness about what the Holy City had once been and what had been lost. I no longer remember his words. I remember his tone. That gravity was its own teaching.
But he also taught with humor, when the timing was right. In discussing the three things one can use for kapparos before Yom Kippur (a chicken, money, or a fish), he told us that when he was a young man in yeshiva they had had to use a fish (I can no longer remember the specific circumstances). He described how the fish flopped all around and slipped out of their hands. “I don’t recommend it!” He chuckled.
He did not like the labels “FFB” and “BT.” “If anyone asks, say you’re FLL,” he would tell his students. “Frum from learning!”
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The Chalkowskis had a wonderful relationship, full of love, mutual respect, and good humor. Everyone everywhere always knew his wife from Shaare Zedek and from her eponymous irgun, Matan Beseter Bambi, but fewer people knew him… He was a well-kept secret!
A dear friend once said to him, “Wow, your wife is such a strong, powerful woman. It would be so amazing if she could give some classes here at Neve or even just a talk every once in a while.”
And he said with a big smile, “Nope!” He explained, “Everywhere else in the world, I'm Mr. Bambi, and here, Neve is my turf.”
Another friend told me that she and her husband visited him during their struggle with infertility. He listened and offered words of chizuk, of course. And then he shared that he believed Hashem had taken the ability to have children away from them so that they could give themselves fully to the klal. Nevertheless, he never stopped davening for a for a yeshua.
He once shared that it really pained him to visit the States and see how many of “his” girls were still single. “They are doing everything right! Everything! They should be married.” For some things there were no answers…
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He had a few sayings and teachings that have stayed with me, the kind that reorient everything.
If a girl would come out of the bathroom and start walking down the hall reciting Asher Yatzar on the move, he would stop her. "It's not Tefilat HaDerech," he'd say. "Stand still." It sounds small. But it wasn't. It was about presence.
He would say: "Teshuva is for things you know you're doing, not things you think you did." I have returned to that line every time I found myself spiraling in guilt over something I was maybe even imagining, a narrative of my own creation. He cut through the fog of unnecessary self-torment with the precision of someone who understood both halacha and the human heart.
And this: "The purpose of the whole world is kavod Hashem." Simple. Total. Everything else flows from it.
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Each time I visited their tiny apartment (one bedroom, one bathroom, a miniature kitchen that two people could barely stand in), I felt like I’d been through a carwash for the neshamah. Somehow that place existed in a different dimension, where emes was clear and priorities were straightened out.
I once remarked to a friend that if only I could move in there for a few days twice a year, I would be an entirely different person. “I feel the same,” she said. “But where would we sleep?”
“Under the table,” I answered. We both laughed. But also: we really wished it could have come to pass.
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Since his passing, I have been privileged to hear scores of stories from other talmidos — women who knew him for over fifty years, women who met him only several times and never forgot it, a woman who even forgot her own name (!) she was so overcome by his presence, women who are Torah teachers because of him…
The depth of his impact is staggering and, I think, not fully knowable. There are countless dorei doros that exist because of him. I do not exaggerate. The stories I've shared here are only a handful... There are thousands more, carried in thousands of hearts.
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In his final years, his short-term memory began to fade. Yet his Torah never left him. He could still discuss halacha, still hold a conversation about hashkafa or give hadracha with full clarity.
The last time I spoke with him, about a year and a half ago, he no longer remembered me. I had called because I'd had a dream: he finally came to visit, on the train, just as he had always planned.
I told him the dream. He loved it.
At the end of the conversation, he paused. "I know you just shared a dream with me," he said, "and it made me happy. But I can't remember it. Can you share it again?"
I told him again. He said how much he had enjoyed it. How happy I had made him.
I hung up and sobbed. From love, and from pain, and from grief that was already beginning before he was even gone.
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He passed away the week before Pesach, on 7 Nissan. There were no hespedim — as is customary in Nissan. His talmidos said it was fitting. He was too much of an anav for eulogies.
At the levaya, family members turned to his many daughters and said the traditional words of comfort. HaMakom yenachem… And then they added: only the Makom can fill the space he left.
They were right.
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"Never run for a bus," he used to say. "If you miss it, it wasn't yours to take."
He never missed anything of ours.
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L'ilui nishmas Rabbi Moshe Mordechai ben Meir.