Positivity: Benzion Dunner’s random acts of kindness
From London, England (HT, and thanks for the heads-up, to Jill at Writes Like She Talks)
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 01/04/2008
In life, Benzion Dunner was little known outside his community. It is only in death that the extraordinary philanthropic activities of the businessman known as “God’s postman” are being revealed, as thousands in Britain’s Orthodox Jewish community and beyond mourn his passing.
And what a bittersweet story is unfolding, proof that the good that men do is not always “interred with their bones”.
No one can presume to know Dunner’s state of mind before his death last month, but surely his devastated family can draw consolation from the fact that, in the hours leading up to it, the 45-year-old property tycoon was doing what he loved best - giving away his money.
While he supported educational, children’s and old people’s organisations here, in America and in Israel, it was charity delivered at his own kitchen table that he favoured.
Dunner once described himself as a “poor man with money”. It wasn’t his to put in a bank, he said: “[God] entrusts me to do with it what He would want me to do.”
It was a duty he took seriously, dealing with callers to his home seeking help with the cost of medical treatment, schooling or simply the essentials of day-to-day life.
One man, threatened with eviction from his home in Jerusalem, travelled to north London to appeal directly to Dunner and received the money he needed.
“No one was turned away,” his friend Chanoch Kesselman said. “Without exaggeration, he was one of the greatest contributors on the planet today. He was very warm, approachable; he didn’t stand on ceremony. He was not an acquaintance of anyone; he was their friend.”
Once a year, during the Festival of Purim that celebrates the delivery of Jews from bondage in Persia, hundreds of people with financial troubles would flock to Dunner’s home in Golders Green.
They queued patiently to see him and tell him their problems and, depending on his analysis of their needs, he would write them a cheque.
By 4.30am on March 21, he had dispensed £2 million in this way. Less than 24 hours later, he was dead at the wheel of his Bentley, following a collision near Bournemouth.
The cause of death is reported to have been a heart attack, rather than serious injury sustained in the accident. His passengers - two of his nine children and a 77-year-old woman - and the passengers in the other car suffered only minor injuries.
More than 3,000 people attended his funeral, which was held, according to Jewish custom, the following day.
Dunner was the grandson of Rabbi Josef Dunner, one of the last rabbis to be ordained in Nazi Germany and who escaped to Britain in 1939. …..
Go here for the rest of the story.
