Rabbi Shmuly Altein grew up in Winnipeg then returned to his hometown as a second-generation Chabad rabbi, to revitalize a community through initiatives designed to rekindle Jewish life.
“He was a Jewish leader of impact in this country,” his friend Rabbi Levi Gansburg told The CJN. “He and his wife were the ‘Jewish invigorators’ of the next generation in Winnipeg.”
Rabbi Altein died from cancer on June 18. He was 43.
He was the fifth of nine children born to Rabbi Avrohom and Brocha Altein, who moved to Winnipeg in 1972. “His parents came to the Lubavitcher Rebbe (Menachem Mendel Schneerson) with a list, and Winnipeg was at the bottom of their list,” his wife, Adina told The CJN. “Rabbi Schneerson was speaking about outreach and how every single Jew deserves a home, a Chabad House, that should be like a home away from home and he circled Winnipeg and told them to go there.” The family relocated and built Chabad of Winnipeg. Fifty years later, many Winnipeggers still have fond memories of working as counsellors at the Chabad camp and growing up with Rabbi Altein senior at the helm of the community.
Rabbi Levi Gansburg of Chabad on Bayview in Toronto met Shmuly Altein when they were teenagers, studying at the Chabad Mesivta in Detroit. “He felt it was the highest stature for him to be an emissary of the Rebbe, and to bring that love to a city that he knew well. Even as a yeshiva boy, he took many of our classmates in the summer months there. And we’re talking about 16-year-old boys. He’d convince five of his friends to fly out to Winnipeg for, two, three weeks and engage with hundreds of people in adult Jewish education.
“We got married the same time, we had kids at the same time, we moved to our respective Chabad locations, and we kept up,” Rabbi Gansburg said. Then, Rabbi Altein decided on a somewhat unusual path after graduation. “Usually you do your thing, and you maybe open your own place. But to get married to an L.A. girl, and to say, ‘You know what, I’m going back to Winnipeg,’ and convince her? Is it a shock in Chabad? Not a shock, but it’s a testament to the drive that he had, to return and amplify and modernize and advance what his parents brought in the ‘70s. Winnipeg is one of those cities that if you look over the five decades, six decades, it has shrunk and then changed. Shmuly loved thinking big, and you might think, ‘Let’s go to L.A. Let’s go crazy. Let’s go to New York. Let’s go to Toronto, let’s go to Florida. But he went to Winnipeg to think big because he had a job to do there.”
“When we dated, I’d never heard of Winnipeg,” his wife Adina told The CJN. “Never knew it existed, I’m embarrassed to say. But now I’m proud.” Adina visited Winnipeg for the first time right after their wedding, when they were still living in Brooklyn. “It was in January, and I was slipping and sliding in the snow. We lived in Brooklyn for a year, and then an opportunity came up to open a secondary centre to my in-laws. A Jewish learning centre where we would focus on adult education.”
“You had a somewhat sluggish Jewish community, and all of a sudden a young, vivacious, charismatic, smart, educated couple from the U.S, came and took the city by storm,” Rabbi Gansburg said. “They’re great connecters. They’re contemporary people, thinkers. They’re deeply Hasidic, but they just have a way with people in a city that needed a boost.”
They arrived in Winnipeg in 2007 and connected to the community immediately, starting a preschool, and visiting seniors in a retirement residence next door to their home on Shaftesbury Blvd. They brought the residents fridge magnets of their family and ‘adopted’ the residents as ‘bubbies and zaidys’ to the expanding Altein family.
The couple opened a kosher kitchen, hosted Passover seders and holiday parties. In 2010, they inaugurated the Jewish Learning Institute which focused on adult education programs. It was the first institution built for the Jewish community of Winnipeg since 1997 and more than 500 people attended its opening. “The cool part was that whichever programming we did, there were different people that came,” Adina said. “We had our ‘singles’ family and then we had the ‘Lunch and Learn’ family and the ‘Kosher Night Out’ family and the JLI learning people and the Shaftesbury people. Then at events like Hanukkah, we would try to bring everyone together.”
They built their life there and raised five children.
Danny Fliker moved to Winnipeg with his wife Aviva and son in 2014. “We were the ‘new Jews’. We are not ‘religious’ people. We are traditional but not Chabad. They invited us for Shabbat dinner and in late September, it was my first year in very cold weather, Shmuly put this sukkah together with heaters and had a beautiful party. They had Sushi and Wine events, and events for every Jewish holiday so a younger generation with kids could focus on that. He was your best friend, and he had this emotional intelligence and could connect from zero to 100. He had a mission to revive Winnipeg.”
Then, in 2017 Altein was diagnosed with cancer. “He was diagnosed with sarcoma and this sarcoma – he was not accepting it,” his sister-in-law, Soochie Eizicovics told The CJN. “He fought it in a way you can’t imagine. About five years ago the family moved to Monsey, New York, for treatments in Manhattan and Shmuly took in everything. He knew every single ‘in and out’ of his case. He was on every trial possible and while he was doing that, he was affecting people along the way. He could have completely locked himself in his house, but he started giving Torah classes there. He learned one-on-one with people on his way to treatments. He could barely lift his head up and he was giving.
“He ended up in hospital on Purim one year. He discovered that his roommate was a Jewish guy who was broken that he couldn’t hear megillah. So, Rabbi Shmuly read megillah for the other patient. That other patient passed away a week later and at the funeral his children said, ‘My father couldn’t believe that Hashem sent him an angel to read megillah in the hospital and he was so happy!”
Adina said, “When I was in it, side by side, with Shmuly, I didn’t necessarily have the same perspective of, now- stepping back and appreciating what he cared for, his ideals, his courage, his energy, his strength. It really is something special, but what’s unique to me about Shmuly was how ‘un-unique’ he is to the Chabad movement, meaning, the Rebbe’s vision of a shaliach. And the shluchim is always sent out- a husband, a wife, a family. And the central theme of that is literally, a love for God, and all his creations. This is what Shmuly embodies. Every angle Shmuly took was, ‘We bring God in here. God’s creations are something special.’ Both on the individual level that the person he meets was greeted with this warm smile and connection and in terms of building up the infrastructure of the programming we were doing.”
Friends and community members from Winnipeg flew to New York for Altein’s shiva.
An inspirational shloshim is planned in Winnipeg on July 20.
“He taught us a lot. He left a lot of projects undone,” Adina said. “The first project we are trying to pull together is to bring to Winnipeg a Mitzvah Tank. It captures the idea that wherever you go you can bring light and Shmuly was a lamplighter by being alive himself. We have our work cut out for us.”
Rabbi Altein is survived by his parents, Rabbi Avrohom and Brocha Altein, who continue their work at Chabad Winnipeg; his wife, Adina and children, Mussie, J.J., Sruly, Goldie and Yossi, and his eight siblings. His brother, Rabbi Mendel Altein continues Rabbi Shmuly’s outreach with his family at Chabad Winnipeg. A fund for the family has been established by Chabad of Winnipeg.