Popack Marks 90th Birthday

By COLlive reporter

Elderly Lubavitch chosid and real estate bigwig Shmuel Isaac Popack has celebrated his milestone 90th birthday surrounded by the happy faces of his children and grandchildren.

The location: Toms River Township in New Jersey.

The occasion was the completion of a new Torah scroll written in his honor which will temporarily reside in the local Chabad House headed by his granddaughter Chanie and her husband Rabbi Moshe Gourarie.

Arriving on Shlichus just 5 years ago, the Gouraries invited quite a crowd of friends and supporters. 250 people attended the dancing, hakafos and the dinner that followed,

For some, it was the first time they ever witnessed this religious ceremony, Gourarie told COLlive.

Popack, a longtime Crown Heights resident with his wife Miriam, wrote the last letters in the Torah, emotionally thanking the almighty “for all the wonderful things.”

His son Yossi Popack, a real estate merchant himself, then proceeded to raise the Torah. A second son, Rabbi Yisroel Meir Popack, a Shliach in Denver, did the ‘Gelila’ wrapping.

Police blocked off the road to make room for the joyous dancing. “If they do what is done here, then no town should be without a Chabad,” Merrill Butler, a local resident, commented at the dinner the followed.

With no permanent location for the Chabad House, the event was held in the now vacant Beth Shalom, an historic synagogue build in 1924 by Jewish farmers – the first in Ocean County, NJ.

For a town that was anti-Semitic, the public celebration was an attraction, as Yossi Popack and Rabbi Ephraim Piekarski, a son-in-law of the elder Popack, specified in their speeches at the sit-down dinner.