By Henya Laine
Dr. Ira Weiss, a world-renowned cardiologist from Chicago who served on the team of physicians who treated the Rebbe then and continued to tend to the Rebbe and Rebbetzin‘s medical needs over the course of many years thereafter, related the following story.
Sometime in 1981, he received a call from Rabbi Binyomin Klein, one of the Rebbe’s secretaries, expressing concern about the Rebbetzin’s health. The symptoms described to Dr. Weiss by Rabbi Klein led him to suspect a coronary valve infection. He made plans to travel to New York at the earliest possible opportunity. That weekend he was scheduled to attend his twentieth high school reunion and when the Rebbe became aware of that, he told Dr. Weiss that he should attend the reunion and can come to New York after it was over.
On Friday afternoon, however, Dr. Weiss decided that the Rebbe’s encouragement to attend the reunion notwithstanding, he was going to skip it and fly to New York to see the Rebbetzin, whose condition he perceived to be serious enough to warrant not delaying his seeing her in person.
He had made the decision late Friday afternoon, so that by the time he landed in New York, it was already Shabbos. Through a series of buses and subway rides he finally made it to the Rebbe’s home at 9:00 PM Friday night, where he was warmly greeted by the Rebbe, who seemed to have been expecting him notwithstanding the fact that he had encouraged him to attend the high school reunion.
Seeing the Rebbetzin in person, he concluded that his initial diagnosis was correct and that she had a coronary valve infection. He immediately coordinated a treatment protocol with Dr. Robert Feldman, a local physician, which over time effectively cured the Rebbetzin of her infection.
After tending to the Rebbetzin, the Rebbe inquired about the high school reunion he was missing. Dr. Weiss responded that there will be more in ten years, twenty years and that G-d willing he will make up for it then. The Rebbe then inquired as to whether a book was published for the current reunion. Yes, replied Dr. Weiss, wherein each of the one hundred and fifty students submits a page-long write-up about their lives. The Rebbe wanted to know if Dr. Weiss knew all one hundred and fifty students, to which he replied that he knew about half of them and would probably read their entries only.
Much to his surprise, the Rebbe asked him to read all one hundred and fifty entries and in detail. Upon his return home, he did just that, including the entry of a classmate – Doreen, whom he vaguely remembered, but read her entry per the Rebbe’s request to read them all. In it, she described how her husband suffered from an acute kidney disease which led to him becoming one of the first recipients of a successful kidney transplant at the University of Minnesota.
Reading her story, he immediately thought of one of his neighbors who had been suffering from renal failure and how dialysis was not proving to be an effective treatment for him. He decided to reach out to Doreen and have her share her knowledge and experience with his neighbor. The two couples became the best of friends, and the neighbor soon received a kidney transplant at the same hospital. Forty years later he is still enjoying a quality life, Dr. Weiss said. None of that would have happened had he not read Doreen’s story.
Dr. Weiss in his uniquely unassuming and humble way concluded the story by saying that he never asked the Rebbe point-blank as to why he insisted that he read all one hundred and fifty stories, but he thinks he has a pretty good hunch…
Wow!