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   Earl "Eleazar" Levin on February 17, 2026 at 6:37 pm

   I am Rabbi Eleazar Weissman’s great grandson. My Hebrew name is Eleazar, as I was named after him. My mother, Barbara, his granddaughter, wrote that Eleazar Weissman was born in 1857 in “Rezshatse” Russia, which was likely Rezsh Belarus. His father was Simon Yehuda-Lev, was also a Rabbi who studied under Rabbi Shneur Zalman (or possibly at his school). Rabbi Weissman came to be known as Reb Lazer, worked as a lumber estimator and as a toll collector at the northern Dvina River. He married Fruma Baila Bass, the daughter of an innkeeper, and had six children, Morris, Leon, Julia, Freda, David (my grandfather), and Harry. They lived for a time in semi-rural Kobeck. Fruma died after Harry’s birth, of milk fever. Julia, though herself just a child, raised her younger siblings. Freda died in her teens. Reb Lazer married a woman named Rahail and had two more sons, Reuben and Ben. The family now lived in Polotsk. Morris was the first to come to America, followed by Leon, Julia and David. Eleazer came to Philadelphia in 1910 to annul Julia’s marriage to a cousin, and later arranged for the two younger sons to come over. Reb Lazer came to Chicago at some point, and worked on a committee to place Rabbi’s, at a kosher meat plant, and then stepping up to the pulpit at B’nai Ruven for several years. Reb Lazer lived a rigorously Orthodox life, with his daughter Julia and her second husband, Sam Kahn, on Escanaba Avenue in Chicago. He also enjoyed time at his son the doctor….David’s farm – a retreat he had purchased near Benton Harbor, MI. His fourth son, Harry, meanwhile, had also become very prosperous, having purchased a Chicago Buick dealership early on. Reb Lazer had an aura of great dignity and respect among his religious peers as well as his family. His tombstone begins with…translated as best I could….”A great man, a shepherd of the holy congregation, for the benefit of the young men of the children of Israel.” He passed away in 1943.