Sara Schenirer’s Last Known Living Student Dies at 104

New York (VINnews/Sandy Eller) – A veteran educator who spent decades transmitting the lessons she was personally taught by Sara Schenirer passed away on Wednesday in Williamsburg at the age of 104.

Reizel Nechama Wolhendler, who is believed to be the last known living student of Sara Schenirer, was born in Krakow in 1917.

Her father, Yehuda Dym, would mediate questions of Jewish law for the local community and had a factory that produced clothing labels which was ultimately pressed into service by the Germans during World War II.

While many in Poland lived in very sparse conditions, the Dym family had a full time maid and a working telephone and Yehuda Dym gave the first floor of his house to be used as the Belzer shtiebel.

During World War II, the Belzer Rebbe stayed with the Dym family after fleeing his own home to escape the Nazis.

Reizel Nechama was the youngest of four children. After graduating a Polish high school for Jewish girls, she attended Sara Schenirer’s Bais Yaakov and she would often sing songs that she learned there to her five children and her many grandchildren.

“Sometimes she would tell me how if her sleeves didn’t quite cover her elbows, Sara Schenirer would look to see if there was extra fabric inside the sleeve, letting down the hem so that her elbows would be covered,” grandson Eli Wohlhendler told VIN News.

Despite the Nazi occupation of Krakow, Reizel Nechama married Chaim Shmuel Wohlhendler in 1940 at the instruction of Rabbi Yehoshua Heshel Horowitz the Chentchin Rebbe.

The couple were separated during World War II and Mrs. Wohlhendler survived both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen Belsen, trading her soup for bread to avoid eating non-kosher food.  The Wohlhendlers were reunited in Krakow after the war years, brought to America by Yeshiva Torah Vodaath in 1946.

In her lifetime, Mrs. Wohlhendler taught in three different Williamsburg schools – Satmar, Pupa and Klauszenberg, a career that she continued until she was 96 years old. The wife of one of Kiryas Joel’s dayanim told family members at the funeral that she remembered how Mrs. Wohlhendler had taught her Shir Hashirim 55 years earlier, adding that it was a privilege and an honor to have been her student.

Mrs. Wohlhendler would often tell her children how she felt privileged to be able to carry Sara Schenirer’s briefcase home from school for her and how, at the time, many in the Chasidishe community were concerned about sending their daughters to a Bais Yaakov, preferring to educate their girls at home.  A woman of dignity, Mrs. Wohlhendler would swap her tichel for a sheitel whenever her grandchildren came to visit, always escorting them to the door when they left, even if she had to do it from her wheelchair.  Mrs. Wohlhendler retained her wit and acumen well past her 100th birthday, responding to questions with answers that were sharp and to the point.

“I took my grandmother to vote in the last presidential election and on the way home I asked her ‘Bobby, who did you vote for?’” recalled Wohlhendler.  “She answered me in an amazing way, telling me in Yiddish, ‘I voted for the candidate that the Jews vote for.’”

Mrs. Wohlhendler’s funeral was held on Wednesday night in Williamsburg at the Chelkas Yaakov Bais Medrash with burial taking place in Kiryas Joel.