For months, the community of Beitar has been united in prayer for the recovery of 34-year-old R’Shimon Herschler. Family members, neighbors, and even those who did not know him personally were shaken by the news last night that the young father had passed away at Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital in Jerusalem. Shimon had already fought cancer once and won the battle. Tragically, however, the disease came back and claimed his life. Left behind are a crushed widow and 7 children, the youngest of whom is a 2-month-old baby girl.
R’Herschler was a talmid chacham who dedicated many hours a week to helping chassidim purchase homes & start communities. A Boyaner chassid, R’Herschler was very close with the Rebbe and an esteemed member of the community. In his dying days, he was also extremely close with Rav Elimelech Biderman, who spoke with him at length by his bedside in the hospital.
Hundreds filled the streets of Jerusalem Saturday night to mourn the passing of R’Herschler, including Rav Biderman who gave a particularly powerful hesped:
“What will be with the children?,” he cries out in Yiddish in a video taken by a bystander, surrounded by weeping mourners. “The children! This shabbos, Hashem blew such a loud shofar A young man.
Cry shofar, cry! Cry for your young children, for your babies.”
A Chesed Fund page was started to help Mrs. Herschler raise 7 children on her own. She has not even returned yet back to work from having given birth, and she sits shiva with a house full of children, the youngest of whom will never know her father.
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