By COLlive reporter
Rabbi David Shvedik, the Chabad Shliach and Chief Rabbi of the Jewish Community of Kaliningrad in Russia, has suffered a stoke on Wednesday.
It happened while he was giving a Torah class to members of the community. He was rushed to a local hospital where he is being treated, with his wife and son beside him.
Rabbi Shvedik has been leading the community since 1998 under the Federation of Jewish Communities in the former Soviet Union. The city, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania along the Baltic Coast, has some 2,000 Jews.
For the last 20 years, the community rented a building to house their services and classes. A soup kitchen and day school were at another rented location. “We dreamed of a building of our own,” Rabbi Shvedik said.
In 2011, the circus that has been operating out of the historic “New Synagogue” that was build in the early 1900s has moved out and the city approved the sale of the property to the local Jewish community.
Local philanthropists Vladimir Katsman, Igor Rabinovich, Boris Pchersky and Leonid Plitman helped buy it back and renovate it. The synagogue was inaugurated in 2018 and now includes a Holocaust memorial, a school, kindergarten, community center, shops and kosher restaurants.
The public is asked to daven and recite Tehillim for Dovid ben Roza for a full and speedy recovery.
Refuah shlaima