146 AMI MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 18, 2026 1 ADAR 5786 20 KISLEV 5786 DECEMBER 10, 2025 AMI MAGAZINE 147 THE OFFICE UNDER THE BEDBy Libby KisznerOFFICEUNDER THEBEDTHETold he wouldn’t amount to anything, today Dovid Weitman commands an empire of chesed that is bringing hope and joy to the special needs community PHOTO CREDIT: KOBI HAR TZVI
148 AMI MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 18, 2026 1 ADAR 5786THE OFFICE UNDER THE BEDAs the congregation rises for Shemoneh Esrei, his body finally gives in. Slumped forward with one of his shoes dangling from his foot, he puts his head down and falls asleep. A man leans over him and nudges him gently, whispering his name. There’s a flicker of movement—almost a response—but then the boy goes still again. Tefillos rise up around him. Children answer, “Amein yehei shmei rabbah.” The boy doesn’t move.People begin to notice. They glance at him, look away and then look back. Something feels off, but no one knows what it is.The sleeping boy was Dovid Weitman, today the founder of an organization that helps special-needs children and their families.When Dovid tells me this story, his mind still moves the same way it did back then. Our first interview takes place on Zoom, with Dovid calling from a car in between back-to-back meetings for his organization. In one moment he is eight years old on a bench in a shul in Jerusalem. In the next, he is in a forest in Ukraine with his grandmother, a young girl learning how to survive at her uncle’s side.He is not telling me these stories in a linear sequence. He is showing me a landscape that only he can see, a place where past, present and future converge. Dovid takes in the whole picture at once; the rest of us catch up in pieces. The same mind that can’t track a single line of text holds entire worlds in parallel.People try to give it a name: ADHD, perhaps. The labels might be accurate but they don’t truly explain him. If Dovid has a diagnosis, it is simply this: he is a person who lives fully in the present, and in doing so draws other people into their own strength.Dovid relates how his father would come to the cheder with cookies from Machaneh Yehudah. “Let’s sit down and learn a little bit,” he would cajole him. Ten minutes. Fifteen. But even that was too much. Nonetheless, his father kept coming to whichever cheder or yeshivah Dovid ended up in. “My father took buses and hailed taxis just to sit with me. It was never really about learning. It was love,” he says.At home, his mother tried a different approach. “My mother brought me to private teachers and sat with me for hours drawing pictures, following the advice of an expert who said that a Jerusalem shul during Shacharis, a young boy sleeps on a narrow wooden bench under a window. All morning long he had tried to stay still, but his body refused to obey, his legs jiggling and his fingers drumming on the table. His thoughts raced faster than the words in the siddur, more quickly than a child his age could keep up with. INDovid as a young boy setting up his mother’s leichter Make itspecialWhoever you're gifting this Purim, we've got the perfect pick tomake them smile.WE SHIP NATIONWIDEGREENS13.COM5017 13 T H AVE // 718.438.7984P U R I M 2 0 2 63 ways to shopon our easy to use website,through whatsapp orcome into our store!
150 AMI MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 18, 2026 1 ADAR 5786THE OFFICE UNDER THE BEDsome children absorb images better than words.” A baalas chesed by nature who was practical and generous, she poured that same determination into the search for the key that would unlock her son’s learning disability. “As a child,” Dovid says, “wherever I went I kept hearing the same message: you are a gornisht, a nothing.”Maybe that was why he began searching for other ways to matter. When he was around eight years old, he came up with an idea: If he couldn’t learn, he could at least help others. His plan? Any boy who could say Mishnayos by heart would get a prize. He would raise the money to pay for them.For all that, his learning difficulties still left him on the outside. The other children didn’t play with him. They laughed, left him out of their games, blamed him for things he hadn’t done. They snickered when he tried to read. When he fumbled through davening or stumbled over spelling they mocked him, and he learned what it meant to be present in a room but treated as if he wasn’t there. With nowhere to belong, either in the classroom or the schoolyard, he found one place where he could shape a world that made sense: Under his bed, eight-year-old Dovid Weitman kept his own secret universe.Tiny plastic people no bigger than his thumb. A miniature empire of his own making, where no one failed tests and no one was told he didn’t matter. While other boys bent over their Gemaras, memorizing lines their fathers and grandfathers had learned before them, Dovid built chesed organizations, ambulances and shuls. While they davened, he dreamed.He couldn’t keep his place on the page. The letters slipped away from him like mercury. But in the worlds he created, he never lost his place. There, he knew exactly where everything belonged. But the home in which he was growing up was built around a very different kind of knowledge.“My mother came from a background where Torah was hu chayeinu,” he says. The granddaughter of the Manchester rosh yeshivah, Rav Yehuda Zev Segal, zt”l, she was raising 13 children, all nurtured with the hope that they would grow up to be bnei Torah and talmidei chachamim. “This is what she davened for, inspiring us through the deep reverence in which she held Torah study. Unfortunately, watching my siblings succeed while I failed one test after another, it felt as if the world had already decided that I was a lost cause. But beneath that verdict was a hunger I Dovid Weitman (R) at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new centercouldn’t yet name, something no mark on a test could satisfy.“My father’s father was chasidish, but my father had learned in Litvish yeshivos so I hadn’t grown up in that world,” he continues. “My only taste of it was when my grandfather, Reb Avraham Weitman, took me as a little boy to a rebbe’s tish. The warmth and the singing stayed with me, even if I couldn’t have said why.“One Shabbos night when I was 14 I wandered into a tish by myself. The room was packed: the chasidim singing, the rebbeat the head of the table. I stood in the back, just watching. I didn’t expect to be noticed. I was a nobody, a boy who couldn’t read, couldn’t learn and couldn’t sit still.”Then Dovid did something uncharacteristic: He made his way through the crowd and introduced himself to the rebbe. “My name is Dovid Weitman,” he said. The rebbe nodded, his eyes resting on him for a moment longer than Dovid was used to. “Zei gebentsht, Dovid,” the rebbe replied.A few weeks later, he saw the rebbe again on the street. Expecting to be forgotten, he repeated, “My name is Dovid Weitman.” The rebbe looked at him. “I know. I remember,” he said. For a boy who never seemed to fit in anywhere, who felt hurt and misunderstood, the warmth in that gaze was like a hand on his shoulder. For the first time he felt embraced rather than pushed away. “At that moment, I knew that I wanted to be a chasid,” Dovid says. “It didn’t solve my learning struggles overnight, but it gave me a sense of belonging. In yeshivah, I approached the mashgiach and asked him, ‘Can I seal envelopes in the office?’ The mashgiach hesitated, unsure what to make of such an unusual request, but he said yes. And suddenly I had a purpose. I could do something and be useful. I no longer felt like I was wasting time and I was happy.”He had always been looking for something to fix or organize. Anything was better than sitting and letting the hours drain away. Even at 14, every moment had to count.A couple of years later in yeshivah gedolah, the long bein hasedarim afternoons were the hardest. For two hours, while other boys took a nap or learned at their own pace, he couldn’t sleep, and he hated sitting around and being bored.“So I came up with another idea,” Dovid recalls with a laugh. “I announced that any bachur who woke up ten minutes before Shacharis and learned Shmiras Halashon would get paid. What did I do? I had no money. I didn’t work. But the yeshivahwas located in a wealthy neighborhood and there was a lawyer who lived nearby. I knocked on his door and asked if he needed any kind of help. I told him straight out: ‘I need the money because I’m giving it to the bachurim.’ He said, ‘I have work for
152 AMI MAGAZINE DECEMBER 10, 2025 20 KISLEV 5786THE TRAIN WINDOWyou.’ I cleaned his house and his office. That’s how I paid them.” But most yeshivos didn’t know what to do with a boy like that. By his mid-teens, Dovid had been expelled from a number of them. In one yeshivah, the mashgiach watched the boys following him out of the beis midrash. “If Dovid goes out, they also go out,” he remarked. It wasn’t rebellion; it was the pull he had on them. In another yeshivah, when a bachur whose parents were divorced had nowhere to sleep, Dovid took him to the dirahwhere he was living. His roommates weren’t happy. By the time he reached Yeshivas Mir he was living in a dirah like every bachur his age. On the outside, he fit the mold. But inside, he was unraveling.Learning had always been a struggle, but here the contrast was unbearable. He would look around the vast beis midrash in which thousands of bachurim were sitting and learning, and feel the gap between them and himself open wider. The pain was constant. To dull it, he would slip out for coffee again and again, anything to soothe himself. Evenings were no easier. He didn’t enjoy the easy schmoozing, the joking and kibbitzing in the dirah. He just couldn’t handle it, even if couldn’t explain why. He gave up his room and moved back home. His room was exactly as it had always been: the same bed, the window with its view of neighboring rooftops, the shelf of sefarim gathering dust. On the surface, not a thing had changed. Through the window came the sounds of the city settling into sleep: a garbage truck groaning down the street; a shutter banging once and then twice; two men walking home from Maariv, their voices low; somewhere a child crying and being soothed. Ordinary life continued while his had stopped.In the other rooms his brothers slept, their futures certain. In yeshivos across the country boys his age were learning, their paths clear, but he had yet to find his. The tears came The tears came from a place of shame, rage and grief, when a young man discovers that the world has no use for him.THE KOLLEL ATOptimum Conditions for Personal AliyahThriving Close-Knit Torah CommunityPleasant Out-of-Town EnvironmentDedicated Personable Rav/Rosh KollelThe all-new Kollel of Bais Medrash of Miami Beach is the perfect place to grow in Torah while building a lasting foundation for your home in a warm and close-knit makom Torah.Shteig.Flourish. In Miami BeachSHAPE YOUR FUTURE.FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO APPLYBMMBKollel.comOR CONTACT THE ROSH KOLLELRabbi Yehuda Goldfeder: 305.677.1899Now accepting applications for the upcoming Elul Zmanfrom a place of shame, rage and grief, when a young man discovers that the world has no use for him. He wiped them away quickly, as if crying would make his failure real. But the tears only came faster in great heaving sobs. He’d spent so many years trying to be like his brothers, but for what? He was still a gornisht. And with each sob came a thought, clear and cruel as a knife: You are a nothing, and you will always be a nothing.In that moment, all of the voices from cheder and yeshivah, from his rebbeim and his classmates and his poor report cards rose up at once, arranging themselves in his mind like a verdict. He pressed his face into his pillow to muffle the sound. His grandmother Asnath had learned how to survive at a young age. When she was three years old, sitting in a Ukrainian bunker while the ghetto was emptied, her Uncle Yosef had whispered to her, “Sit still. Don’t move. Air is precious.” Yosef had dug that bunker at night while the ghetto slept, planning for catastrophe while others hoped it wouldn’t come. When the whistle tore through the darkness on 17 Elul 1942 and the soldiers shouted, people ran. In the chaos, only five of them made it inside: Asnath, her sister, her mother, Yosef and his daughter.They lived for three years in the forests, barefoot, starving and constantly hunted. They learned to eat snow and lick water from puddles, surviving on nuts and plants and mushrooms. They hid in wheatfields or cabbage fields, where thistles as high as their shoulders pierced their skin. The cold penetrated their bones. In the winter, they fought frostbite. The fear was constant and stopping meant death. Moving was how you stayed alive.On two occasions, the Nazis found them. The first time, they lined them up to be shot. Yosef gathered the children close and whispered, “We are going to our Father. If you are shot, it lasts one second and then you’re with Hashem. There, no one chases you anymore.” The children repeated after him: “Mir gayen tzum Tatte, and der Tatte is gut.”The Nazis lowered their guns. “There are a lot of Jews hiding in the forest. Every day we find a few and kill them. Do you want to join them?”“To live another minute or another hour is still life,” Yosef replied. The Nazis laughed. “Then go. Suffer from hunger. We’ll get you later.”The second time, it was the middle of the night. Flashlights shone in the children’s faces. Yosef spoke quickly. “If we give you something precious, will you let us live?” Asnath’s mother pulled off her diamond ring. It slipped from her fingers, falling into the leaves and mud. “Find it!” the Nazis ordered them. Dovid receiving a smile and a brachah from Rav Chaim Kanievsky, zt”l
154 AMI MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 18, 2026 1 ADAR 5786THE OFFICE UNDER THE BED“Let’s see who finds it first,” Yosef said. They all bent down, scrambling in the dirt. He leaned close to his sister and whispered: “Run!” She grabbed the children and took off. They were separated from Yosef. The children screamed his name until exhaustion dropped them to the ground where they slept. When they awoke, they screamed again. After a day and a half a voice answered, “I’m here.” Yosef had also escaped and managed to find them.That spring, Yosef made a Pesach Seder in the forest and sang “Leshanah Habaah B’Yerushalayim.” It was the first time that Asnath had heard about Yerushalayim. When they were given food that had been fried in non-kosher fat, he told the famished children to eat. His daughter refused. “Tatty, if it isn’t kosher for you, it isn’t kosher for me.” Asnath and her sister followed.Yosef lost his parents, his siblings and his wife. But he kept moving and creating solutions when any reasonable person would have said it was impossible. That independent spirit and stubborn refusal to accept defeat became part of who Asnath was. When she looked at her grandson Dovid, the boy everyone had written off, she remembered Yosef in the forest and saw possibilities that others couldn’t.She would carry his picture on buses and show it to strangers. “This is my grandson,” she would say, beaming. “Do you have a shidduch for him?” To Dovid, she said, “Don’t listen to what other people say.” “She gave me so much koach,” Dovid tells me now. “A lot of who I am and what I do came from her. She believed in every neshamah. Chanoch lenaar al pi darko. Every neshamahhas its own path. Whatever strengths you have, use them. That’s how she was.”Dovid’s grandmother didn’t measure success by test scores or top marks. She had watched her Uncle Yosef save lives not because he was the smartest person but because he used his talents: courage, creativity and the refusal to give up. That’s what she taught Dovid to see in himself. One evening, a friend of Dovid’s called. “We miss you around here. Where have you been? Come back to yeshivahand make things lebedig.” They invited him to a gathering. ”Dovid showed up at an apartment where a small circle had gathered: Shimmy Levy, Shulem Lemmer, Shia Morgenstern and Pini Einhorn. Someone picked up a guitar. The room lifted with music. “Let’s go to a hospital,” Dovid said suddenly. “There are sick people there who need simchah.” They went, guitars in hand.The first patient they sang for hadn’t spoken in weeks. A stroke, the nurses said. The doctors didn’t expect him to recover. The boys sang. Dovid stood at the man’s bedside, watching his face. When they finished, the patient opened his eyes and looked at them. And in a voice barely above a whisper he said two words: “Thank you.” The nurses rushed in. The family started crying. Two days later, the man passed away.Some of the chesed vans outside the Beitar centerDovid never forgot that a dying man’s last words had been “thank you” not to a doctor, not to his family, but to a group of boys who had come to sing. He kept going back to various hospitals week after week. He started keeping lists of patients who needed visits and families who needed rides to the hospital. The miniature world under his bed was beginning to take form in real life.One day, at the age of 18, Dovid walked into a branch of Bank Pagi in Geulah and asked for a car loan. A woman named Mimi Spiegelman was working there as a clerk, sitting behind a glass partition typing reports and filing forms. “You want a car loan?” she said incredulously. “You have only 200 shekels in your account.”The boy didn’t flinch. “I need it for transporting boys to the hospital. For my organization.”“What organization?” she asked, pulling up his account history. “Belev Echad (With One Heart),” he replied, telling her the name he had chosen. “I visit patients in hospitals and organize programs for—”“How old are you?”“Eighteen.”“You’re 18 years old with 200 shekels in your account and you’re asking for a loan of 50,000 shekels.” The woman was laughing now. “Do you have parents?”“Yes.”“Maybe you should tell your parents to come down to the bank.”Dovid gathered his papers together and left. Mimi had watched the way his shoulders didn’t slump when she laughed. The way he held the folder as if it contained something valuable. An hour later, she pulled his application out of the reject pile. She smoothed it flat on her desk and read through it again. There wasn’t much there. No income, no credit history, no cosigner, nothing that any rational person would call grounds for approval. Just a name—Dovid Weitman—and a note in the margin in the boy’s handwriting spelled so badly that she had to read it twice. She brought it to her supervisor. “This kid,” she said. “I want to approve him.”“Are you crazy? He doesn’t have any money.”“I know. But I think we should do it anyway.”Her supervisor looked at the application and then back at her. “It’s your funeral,” he said.She approved it. Fourteen years later, Mimi Spiegelman is the branch manager at Bank Pagi in Ramot. 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156 AMI MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 18, 2026 1 ADAR 5786THE OFFICE UNDER THE BEDunder the pillow could now move into the world.After that, doors began to open in ways that Dovid cannot explain. His voice turns wistful as he recalls the moment. “The rebbe gave me his brachah to go forward and build, paying no attention to those who would discourage me.” He began to understand that his avodah was not to get rid of the parts of himself he thought were deficient, but to channel who he was into chesed, to become a kli. “Ever since that day, I always consult him on every decision. He changed my life.“Even though I didn’t grow up chasidish, I don’t care what people think. I have a rebbe. He is the one person who made it possible for me to help the thousands of people I’ve helped over the years.“At my son’s bris, which was held in the Rebbe’s private room, he gave my son a heartwarming brachah, that he should grow up to be yarei shamayim with Torah and maasim tovim. I was such a chutzpanyak that I said, ‘I want you to bentch him that he should do chesed like I do but even more.’ The Rebbe smiled and said, ‘Vus hub ich dich gebencht? What did I just bless you with? Torah is chesed, and chesed is Torah.”Gedolim saw something in Dovid as well. Rav David Abuchatzeira would point to him and tell others, “Look at this young bachur. If he refuses to allow anything to stand in his way, you can do it too.”what no one in that branch ever got. “That loan changed my career,” she says.With his new car, Dovid began coordinating hospital visits and organizing programs for families with special-needs children. One day he went to his rebbe. “Rebbe,” he said. “I have good news.”Dovid told him about the hospital visits and the programs he was running. “But now I want to make it official,” he said, his voice quickening with excitement. “I’m calling my organization Belev Echad.” The rebbe was quiet. Then he said, “I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time.”With those words, something inside Dovid fell into place. All this time, while Dovid had been failing and floundering and trying to become someone else, the rebbe had been waiting for him to become exactly who he was. What had existed His avodah was to channel who he was into chesed, to become a kli. [email protected]בס“דSurvived an Accident,Healthy and WellA mother’s emotions are heard over the phone line: My daughter was out shopping l’kavod Shabbos, when she wasknocked off by a speeding car!My heart pounded in fear, but then came the unbelievable report from the hospital: She was perfectly okay, baruch Hashem!It’s surely the heilige Tehillim which brings the perfect shemirah for our entire family. How lucky we are to be able to thank Hasham for such great chassadim!Please, continue my partnership in the Meron minyan for another yearSupport these holy bnei torah to continue pray for you every day of the year!February 2026 TuesdayFebruary 3 fifffflffiflflffiffiffCall Today!fifffflffiflfflffififffflffiflffiffifffflffifflflffiflfflffi ffi fflffiffiffffiffffffiflffiffffiffffiffifffflffiflfflfflffi fflffi ffifffflffifl ffifi ffifffflffifflfflffi ffififfi ffifflffi ffiffl ffi ffiffiffififffflffiflffifffflfflffflfflflfflfflfflffl fflfifffflffiflffffflffifflfffflff fflffl fflffffl ffl ff fflffiffififffflffiflfflfflfifflffffi fflffi ffifflffi ffi ffi ffi ffiffi fiffifffflffffiffiffiffffi ffl fffflfffffflffl fflffiffi ffifflffiffiffl ffifflfflffiffi ffifflffi ffiffiffifflffiff ffiffi ffffiffffiffi ffl ffl ffflfflff ffiffiIn the beginning, Belev Echad existed mostly on paper. Without a computer at home, Dovid walked 30 minutes to his sister’s apartment several times a day to send emails, planning events that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars he didn’t have yet.One afternoon, while visiting a hospital, Dovid stopped beside a female patient whose eyes followed the small group of boys who had come to sing. “I want my husband to hear this,” she said, handing Dovid her phone. Dovid took it and asked the man on the other end what song he wanted them to sing for his wife, and they did. As the melody filled the room, the woman began to cry tears of happiness.“You are the only person in ten years who has spoken to my husband like this,” she said. Then she paused. “Do you know who he is?”Dovid did not.“My husband is Yitzchak Aharonovitch, the Israeli Minister of Public Security who oversees the police.”Dovid took the phone back from her and told her husband, “What just happened now is hashgachah pratis. I am making an event for families with special-needs children and the police are refusing to approve it. I am asking you to help me.”There was a pause. “I want you to come tomorrow to the special police gathering that is being held in Modiin,” Aharonovitch said. “Call my wife on the phone when you get there.”The next day, Dovid stood by the gate and watched numerous senior officials arrive. When the 19-year-old told the guards he had a meeting with the police chief they laughed. “Forget it,” one of them said. “It’s only for police officers.” “Just check,” Dovid insisted. “He’s expecting me.”They didn’t bother. The minutes ticked by. Twelve o’clock came and went. Then by hashgachah pratis, one of the highranking officials was running late. The head of the police was still outside when Dovid’s phone rang. It was Mrs. Aharonovitch, calling to speak to the guards on Dovid’s behalf. Suddenly, the guard’s expression changed. “You see this boy?” he said to the other members of the security detail, apologetic now. “He’s supposed to meet with Aharonovitch. Let him in.”Later that day, Aharonovitch told his audience about the young man who had brought joy to his suffering wife. “This boy is making an event for hundreds of families with special-needs children,” he said. “He’s only 19 years old. Have you ever heard of such a thing? You need to make this happen.” So they did.Only later did Dovid learn that Mrs. Aharonovitch had been in the hospital only that one day “I have millions of stories like that,” Dovid says. “I take the steps to make things happen even when it seems impossible. Dovid with some of the boys he helps take care of during a concert for Belev Echad
158 AMI MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 18, 2026 1 ADAR 5786THE OFFICE UNDER THE BEDdonation from America,” they told him. It wasn’t a large sum, but at least he was going home with something. It wasn’t the end; it was the beginning.For the next few years the shadchanim didn’t even call. Desperate, Dovid went back to his rebbe. The rebbe cried right along with him. Then he asked him a simple question. “Did you check your tefillin?”Dovid’s father was surprised. “We paid a fortune for these tefillin. There’s nothing wrong with them.” But Dovid insisted. The call soon came back from the sofer. The tefillin were pasul. That same day, his mother received a call from a shadchan with a serious proposal that got the ball rolling.Today, when I ask to see the results of all his efforts, Dovid replies, “You need to come and see the Belev Echad center. I’ll send a car for you. You can’t write about it without seeing it.” He won’t take no for an answer. This is how he operates.The following day I stand at the entrance, trying to process what I’m seeing. I’ve visited many facilities before: community buildings, chesed organizations, youth programs with good intentions and modest budgets. I thought I knew what to expect: a room with some equipment, perhaps a sensory corner, the usual. But this place is something else entirely.A miniature city spreads out before me, a world built for children with special needs. Yellow taxis wait at checkered stands. A red fire station has a truck poised to move. An airplane anchors one corner, so big and realistic that it had to be brought in before the doors were built. A massive ball pit sits precisely at wheelchair height. Around it are spaces for baking, art, music and movement. Nothing feels added on. Every room is built with intention, every inch of space thought through.Bedrooms line the upper level, their windows facing down into the main hall, a deliberate design choice so children don’t isolate. This is not a place to disappear behind closed doors but to remain connected and visible, part of whatever is going on. On Shabbos, these rooms are filled with kids and their counselors while their families get some respite. For the kids, it means checking into rooms instead of wards, sitting through unhurried seudos and ending on Motzaei Shabbos with a melaveh malkah accompanied by music and stories that sends them home a little stronger for whatever awaits them on Sunday.The entire campus is itself a miracle, with multiple theraThen out of nowhere something shifts. A delay. A phone call. Something you could never plan. I really believe that if you want to do something good with all your heart, things start to happen.”When Dovid was still a teenager, a neighbor in his shulnamed Chaim Kaufman noticed the spark in his eyes. One day, he approached him with a smile and handed him a donation. “Kol hakavod for what you are doing,” he said. It was the recognition, the sense that someone had taken his dream seriously, that stayed with Dovid.Years later, Dovid showed Kaufman a homemade model of Belev Echad’s future building. Kaufman was impressed and became a partner in the project. As the work was nearing completion, a significant sum was still missing. Dovid’s rebbe told him, “By Zos Chanukah you will have the money.” On the night of Zos Chanukah Kaufman called Dovid on the phone. “I want you to go to sleep tonight knowing that you have the funds,” he said.In the meantime, Dovid was still living in his parents’ home. All of his siblings were getting married and building families of their own. But for him, shidduchim were not working out. When Dovid was 21, he flew to America for a shidduch. His whole family assumed he was going to get engaged. It didn’t happen and he was devastated. Before he left for the airport, the people he stayed with, Yoel and Chavy Katz, reached into their pockets and handed him some money. “This is your first peutic spaces and programs that run week after week. That a man who cannot read government forms and never completed a conventional yeshivah track now oversees multiple buildings, staff, schedules and logistics on this level is the clearest proof of what his mind was always meant to do.When Reb Chaim Simkowitz and his son Reb Yitzchak arrived in the middle of construction, they asked, “How are the children going to get here?” Reb Chaim funded a van on the spot, and today a big operation of vans crisscrosses the country bringing kids to the center, taking them to and from doctors, physiotherapists and hospitals, or home from the center. Later, when a real estate developer offered to pay for a paroches in the center’s shul, Dovid pointed to a row of small dormitory buildings on the plans. “Why not fund one of these instead?” he asked. A building was funded before the meeting was over, and another piece of the city under the bed Dovid once imagined moved toward reality.Almost daily, parents call the center asking if their child can attend a Shabbaton. Most have to be turned away. The rooms fill quickly. The waiting list grows. For the children, it’s an adventure. For the parents, it’s the first time in months that they can spend Shabbos with their other children and give them their full attention.Moshe Wiederman is quiet and unassuming, the kind of person who prefers to stay in the background. Last Simchas Torah, Moshe and his wife Ruchi were the ones Dovid called when he was about to close the respite program for lack of funds. “But what about the parents?”Ruchi asked. “It’s the one time of year when mothers want to go to shul and watch her other children dance.”For families with special-needs children, every Yom Tov is a reckoning. The father goes to shul and the mother stays home, or the reverse. Simchas Torah is the day when both want to be there. Moshe told Dovid he would do whatever he could, and not to close the door yet. That night, Dovid called the families to tell them that the program would be open after all. Messages came back one after another. Parents crying, their voices shaking with relief.Most days, though, the question isn’t Simchas Torah but what happens to these families the rest of the year. Most people would think wheelchair ramps, therapy equipment and trained staff. But Dovid thinks about Snoezelen multisensory environments. 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160 AMI MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 18, 2026 1 ADAR 5786THE OFFICE UNDER THE BEDtion. At the entrance, a waterfall cascades down one wall.“We used to laugh at his dreams,” Yisrael Berlin, Dovid’s trusted manager tells me. “But we don’t laugh anymore. We’ve learned that he makes dreams happen.”A decade ago none of this existed. Dovid’s close friend Yehuda Nakash was one of the first people to see it coming. “Come to America,” he said. “I’ll introduce you to some people who can help.” He didn’t know who those people would be, but he wanted to try. Yehuda brought Dovid to Rabbi Yosef Ozeri. “Just listen to Tusdae corporia di volorumqui derati delique magnita epratib eatemos comniscipit mi, volupta testoritatis ut parumthis guy for a minute,” he said. “He has big plans, and I’m telling you it’s not a dream.” Dovid shared his vision and spoke from his heart. Learning was hard for him, he explained, but he wanted to do something meaningful.Rabbi Ozeri sent him into a classroom of boys who were struggling as he had. They were restless, high-energy and unable to sit still. “Look at this man,” he told them. “He’s like you. Reading is hard. Writing is hard. And look what he’s building!” When Dovid left, Rabbi Ozeri would later say that he had never seen a class sit so still for so long as they did while listening to him. For the first time they were hearing that even when you can’t learn the same way others do, you still have something meaningful to contribute.Rabbi Yosef Ozeri introduced Dovid to Ralph Mizrahi. At the time, Dovid was 25 and Ralph barely 21, working in his father’s office.“So I see this guy walk in, and I’m thinking this is some meshugener,” Ralph says with a smile. “High energy. You felt it immediately, but you could tell his neshamah was shining through.”Ralph introduced him to his father and his partners. “The next time Dovid came to New York he arrived with a massive suitcase. He took out a three-dimensional model of the campus he envisioned and set it down on the conference room table. Once they saw it, my father and his partners immediately donated the music room. It was one of the first major gifts the center received,” he says.Ralph has raised money for a lot of causes in Brooklyn. “But I’ve never seen anyone that young with learning disabilities and an attention span that doesn’t let him sit through a shiur build anything close to what Dovid has,” he says. Even government bureaucrats trained to say no find themselves saying yes in a country where the services Belev Echad offers receive little public support. Every program depends on whether someone is willing to underwrite the next step and make it happen. Beyond the main campus, Dovid has quietly established numerous programs and networks without his name attached, communities he built from nothing and handed off to others to lead.Dovid does not take a salary. He works 18 or 19 hours a day. His relentlessness is visible in every corner of the building in which I am standing. Just beyond the main hallway is a simchah hall built to accommodate children with complex medical needs, many of whom have spent more time in hospitals than in classrooms. Here, bar and bas mitzvahs and Yom Tov celebrations are filled with music, festive food and dancing—wheelchairs and oxygen tanks welcome. Outside, the day is winding down. Happy but exhausted children are helped into vans. Volunteers check names and buckle seatbelts. Parents will get their kids back calmer than when they arrived, having had a few hours of rest.Ruti Lieder, 26 years old, runs the operation with a baby on her hip. Schedules, children’s files, Shabbatons and therapists all pass through her hands.“How did you learn to do all this?” I ask.She shifts the baby. “I didn’t learn it. I just do it because it needs to be done.”“She learned on the job,” Dovid says. “I don’t take people with fancy certificates. Here, we give them a chance.”Around Ruti is a small ecosystem of women like her, none of them hired for a diploma on the wall but trained on the job until they can run entire programs. The boy once told he would never amount to anything is very good at developing leaders.A boy appears at my elbow. He’s maybe 19, has Down syndrome and his face is set in total seriousness. “Noach,” he announces, stopping in front of me with an outstretched hand. I nod and introduce myself.“I’m the manager here,” he tells me in Hebrew. “Do you need anything?”Belev Echad center in Beit ShemeshAt a special gathering for school administrators across Eretz Yisrael
162 AMI MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 18, 2026 1 ADAR 5786THE OFFICE UNDER THE BEDSEND FRESHLY MIXED, BAR-QUALITY COCKTAILSTO UPGRADE THEIR PURIM CELEBRATIONS. THE ULTIMATE MIXPERIENCE 052.226.2433USA: +1 917.745.3729BARTRENDER.CO.ILTHE PERFECT GIFTLUCIDCR.COMVIEWOUR FULLMISHLOACH MANOSCATALOGONLINEroom. If you need to make a call and you’re already in bed, go out of the room. Two, learn two halachos every day. My grandfather, Rav Yehuda Zev Segal, used to say that it brings yeshuos into your life. Three, eat breakfast and supper with your wife without your phone. Four, go out with your wife once a week, even if it’s just for an hour. Five, talk to your wife every day. Really talk and connect.”Someone knocks on the door. A staff member steps in with some government forms to be filled out.“I can’t read them,” Dovid tells me, handing them back. “This guy is very talented when it comes to these things.”He takes another pull on the nargilah. For a moment he’s still. Then his phone buzzes again and he’s up, gesturing with the hose while talking to someone in the doorway. It might be about a building permit. It might be a donor. Possibly both.Some people assume that money comes from glossy brochures and gala dinners, but Dovid disagrees. “Everything comes from Hashem,” he says.One day, an old friend named Tom John Or-Paz sent him a WhatsApp out of the blue: Hi, what’s doing? Dovid wrote back, “Baruch Hashem, I’m here at the building and my workers are laughing at me.”He had already plunged into the project, moving forward as if the money would magically appear. “You don’t find millions of dollars so fast,” people had told him. “You’re a nut. It doesn’t work like that.”“Dudi,” Tom replied. “I’m giving you most of the money. The rest you’ll raise.” He helped Dovid finish the building and even bestowed his name on it: the Tom John Or-Paz Center.“My rebbe gave me one rule to follow: If you want to be matzliach, go forward. Don’t look back and always be mevater. The money will come from wherever it’s meant to come. My job is the chesed, not the cheshbonos.”During one Belev Echad event nine years ago, a six-yearold boy named Chezky Turnheim was brought onto the stage. He was connected to monitors. His bones were fragile. He had osteogenesis imperfecta, the severe kind, where a wrong movement can fracture tissue and bone. He needed A counselor suppresses a smile. “Noach helps everyone,” he explains. “He knows where everything is, who needs what and when things are supposed to happen.”Noach nods, confirming that this is accurate. In his own way, he runs this place.This is Dovid’s gift. He doesn’t see a “case.” He sees a person. When he looks at someone that way, the people around him begin to see things that way too.Everywhere in the center are traces of the families who pass through: framed photos, thank-you notes taped to walls and crayon drawings belying well-meant advice about what is “realistic.”Dovid’s rebbe once told a couple with a special-needs daughter to keep her at home. This child, he said, would teach their other children what chesed shel emes looks like: helping someone who cannot give anything back. When the couple was expecting another child and the doctors urged them to terminate because of concerning findings, the rebbe told them to do nothing. A healthy baby was born. When they came to thank him, saying that the yeshuah had come “after despair,” he answered that it was ye’ush shelo midaas, despair without true understanding.It is that way of seeing, refusing to write off a life as “too hard” and insisting that there is hidden purpose in even the most complex cases that animates everything in this building.A child with autism makes a beeline straight for Dovid and wraps his arms around his waist, pressing his face into Dovid’s chest. Dovid doesn’t break off our conversation. His hand drops casually to rest on the boy’s head as if this happens all day, every day. He keeps talking, gesturing with his other hand to make a point. The boy stays there for a minute, maybe two, then releases him and walks away, satisfied.Throughout the evening, I watch this pattern repeat. Children gravitate toward him. A girl in a wheelchair rolls up to hold his hand. Another boy tugs at his coat to show him something. A child simply wants to stand near him for a moment. Dovid keeps moving, never breaking stride. His attention stays on whomever he’s speaking to but his body language says, “Yes, I’m here. I see you. You’re safe.”In his office, Dovid sits down and then stands up, then paces a bit and sits down again. His phone is buzzing constantly. He takes out a nargilah and lights it. “This helps me slow down enough to talk,” he says.He turns his phone to show me a photo of his wife and four children sitting on a carpet. The youngest is maybe a year old. All of them are looking at the camera. His eight-year-old daughter is sitting in the middle. “My family,” he says.Before he got married, Dovid went to a chasan instructor. “He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t need to teach you how to talk,’” Dovid recalls with a laugh. “‘It would only be a waste of time for both of us.”The instructor did learn with him. But first, he drew clear lines.“He said, ‘You’re a busy man. You run things. You help people. So I’m giving you five rules for marriage.’ Dovid counts them on his fingers. “One, leave your phone in the living “We used to laugh at his dreams. But we don’t laugh anymore. We’ve learned that he makes dreams happen.”Getting ready for the ribbon cutting at the Beitar center with rabbanim and dignitaries
164 AMI MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 18, 2026 1 ADAR 5786THE OFFICE UNDER THE BEDround-the-clock care. The doctors had told his parents not to expect much.“What would you like us to do for you?” someone asked into the microphone.“I want to go to Uman,” Chezky said. “Before I’m seven.”His classmates had already gone to the kever of Rebbe Nachman and told him what it felt like to stand there. In the Breslov tradition there is special significance to visiting before that age, and Chezky wanted to go there too. The room stayed quiet for a moment. Then Dovid said, “Okay. We’ll do it.”Phones began ringing. They coordinated a medical travel company, an El Al flight with full clearance, a physician and volunteer escort as well as wheelchair-accessible vehicles in Ukraine. On the day of his departure, Chezky arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport surrounded by volunteers. He could not stop talking. “I’m going to Uman! I’m going to tell all my friends that I also went to Uman.” He boarded the plane with his parents, his face lit up with pure excitement. When they landed in Kyiv, a driver and escort were waiting for them. For Shabbos they went Mezhibuzh, the town of the Baal Shem Tov. But Chezky kept asking, “When are we going to Uman?”On Sunday, they drove there. When they reached the tziyunof Rebbe Nachman, Chezky’s father wheeled him through the crowd of men davening. His mother walked close beside him. Someone steadied the oxygen tank. At the kever, the excitement on Chezky’s face shifted into something deeper. His eyes filled. A tear slid down his cheek. Together with his father, Chezky said the entire Tikkun Haklali. Then he davened. For his family. For everyone who had helped to make this happen. For all of klal Yisrael. He had made it. Before seven.Because when Dovid Weitman hears a six-year-old say, “I want to go to Uman,” he does not see logistics. He sees a child. And he says yes. One time, a supporter who had been funding a tefillinproject through Ralph Mizrahi called to say that he couldn’t do it anymore. Ralph was already stretched thin and going through a difficult period himself. Exhausted, he called Dovid to tell him the news. “This is your shlichus,” Ralph told him. “You’ll find someone else.”Dovid smiles as he recalls what happened. “Der Eibershter firt der velt,” he says. That same day, Ralph ran into an acquaintance who mentioned, almost in passing, that his mother was looking to take on a meaningful mitzvah. Ralph called Dovid, stunned. In less than 24 hours, the support he needed had been replaced. He then tells me another story. A young man, still a teenager, was left partially paralyzed after a diving accident. Even putting on tefillin became a struggle. When he passed away at the age of 19, his mother wanted to do something with the grief that wouldn’t let go. She thought of tefillin. How hard it had been for her son. How much it had meant to him.Through a family friend she met Dovid Weitman. Together, they began sponsoring tefillin for boys who couldn’t afford them: orphans, children with special needs, families in crisis.There was one more thing the boy’s mother wanted to do. With Hashem’s help, her older children would get married L-R: Shia Morgenstern, Ahrele Samet, Pini Einhorn, Shulem Lemmer and Dovid Weitman during their first hospital visitone by one. When the time came that would have been her son’s turn, she wanted to mark it not with the wedding he would never have but with a hachnasas sefer Torah l’iluy nishmaso. That would be his simchah.When she later became ill, Dovid went to visit her in the hospital. “I’ve been dreaming about this sefer Torah,” he told her. “Let’s do it now. It will be a zechus.”They began it together. Every child from Belev Echad is being invited to sponsor a letter. The mother’s dream of a celebration is already taking shape, guided along a path that only heaven could have arranged.Stories like this are not anomalies. They are the pattern. When Dovid doesn’t know how to move forward, he goes to the window and talks to Hashem with the same certainty his uncle once felt in the forest and asks for what these children and families need. “These are Your children,” he says. “You have to help me.” Then he turns back to his work, already forging ahead. This certainty comes from what his rebbe taught him: “Don’t try to fix the world; try to do for the world. They are two different things.”“I didn’t feel good about myself as a kid. In fact, there were times when I hated being me. I thought I was the only one alive who was so hopeless. But I learned that you don’t have to become a different person. You need to find the rebbe—or sometimes the grandmother—who can see what’s really inside you.”This is a story of a child who couldn’t sit still in a classroom but can now command a room full of government ministers, financial gatekeepers and families in crisis. A boy repeatedly kicked out of yeshivah who now runs centers that support thousands. He doesn’t separate vision from action, or dream from reality. He sees the building before the foundation, the organization before the first donor and the possibility before anyone else thinks of it. Then it exists.“The system rejected me,” Dovid says. “So I built my own.”Before I leave, Dovid is already moving on to the next meeting, phone pressed to his ear, gesturing with his free hand about a building permit or a donor or both. He is still in motion, having never stopped.The office under the bed has moved aboveground not as a metaphor but as reality. What was once plastic is now concrete. What was hidden is now visible. What once fit beneath a mattress now requires three buildings, with two more under construction. Maybe this is what his grandmother understood and his rebbe recognized from the start. What looked like a flaw was never one at all. It was actually a gift. ●When Dovid Weitman hears a six-year-old say, “I want to go to Uman,” he does not see logistics. He sees a child.