Raphael Y.A. Lipschitz. The name given to me at birth has stayed with me throughout these wonderful 19 years, and I am very proud to have the name of my Zaide. Jerry (Judah Leib) Lipschitz was an upstanding member of his community in Boropark, Brooklyn living with his wife Anna (Channah) and 4 children- Mordechai, Yoel, Gittel, and my father, Ben.
Having been named after him I never got a chance to meet him, as he died two years before I was born. He taught me through stories that I heard of him that money matters not when dealing with more important things such as family and life. Having owned a jewelry store, he was getting robbed on a somewhat bi-yearly basis, and sometimes even at gunpoint. My father told me that the first thing he ever said was “Please take the money, I don’t want any trouble, take whatever you like but lower the gun”.
The final time that he was ever in the store a man with a gun robbed him, and as my Zaide went to open the cash register, the mugger thought he was reaching for a gun and shot my Zaide at point blank range in the chest. As my Zaide puts it “The bullet went in here (points to chest) and came out here (points to his shoulder blade)”. His family was lucky that the doctors were able to take care of him, and that he had multiple years of life after the shooting. Although thankfully he was alive, since that night, he had become a paraplegic and was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Through all the years in the wheelchair he was getting older and getting sick, eventually falling very ill. He was given the name Raphael (pronounced Rih-Fah-Ehl in Hebrew) to throw off the illness (a customary Jewish practice). That is the name that carried over to me in its entirety, and I am extremely proud to have it. Two final things that I got from my Zaide were his Tefillin and his sense of needing to take a shot of alcohol before leaving his store to “keep him warm”.
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