Rabbi Sholom Ber Lipskar

Sholom DovBer Lipskar was born on 4 Menachem Av 5706, 1 August 1946, in Tashkent, the second of five children of Rabbi Eliyahu Akiva and Rochel Baila Lipskar. That year Chabad Chassidim were escaping the Soviet Union on forged papers. The family had tickets for everyone except the newborn, so at twenty days old he was hidden in a suitcase with holes punched in its sides and carried across the border by his grandfather.

His first years were spent in displaced persons camps in Germany, and in 1951 the family settled in Toronto. At fifteen he went to the Lubavitcher yeshivah in Brooklyn, and from 1963 he studied at 770 Eastern Parkway, in the Rebbe's own synagogue. He never forgot his first private audience at age nine, when the Rebbe listened intently as he recited by heart two and a half pages of Talmud.

In 1981 a developer told the Rebbe about his plans in Bal Harbour, and the Rebbe asked why the town had no synagogue. Rabbi Lipskar asked whether he should go, and received the answer nachon ha'davar: this is the correct choice. In December 1981 he opened The Shul, with little fanfare, in a store in the basement-level shopping arcade of the Beau Rivage Hotel, driving up from Miami Beach each week with Chani and their two small children.

The Shul grew through a shoe store, the Sheraton and a larger storefront. In 1991 it broke ground on its own building, the rabbi himself ramming a bulldozer into one of the old motels on the site, and three years later the building on Collins Avenue was finished: a South Florida landmark that changed what a Chabad centre could look like.

For more than fifty years he was at the brissim, bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings and funerals of hundreds of families, often across three and four generations. It was not unusual to find cars parked outside his home at two in the morning, belonging to people who had come for counsel.

With Professor Herman Branover he founded the Miami International Conferences on Torah and Science, and in 2004 the Chaim Yakov Shlomo College of Jewish Studies. When Champlain Towers collapsed in Surfside in 2021, the community filled The Shul's nearly completed expansion with everything displaced families needed, and turned to his steady voice, Jewish and not.