Dovie Heller shies away from discussing the endless community efforts he has engineered throughout the decades.
So, we’ll let Heller’s lifelong friend and former Denver Rabbi Mordecai Twerski speak for him:
“I’ve known him since childhood,” says Twerski, who now lives in Brooklyn “and his honesty and his commitment to the community, to the Jewish lifestyle, to his family, is impeccable.
“He is simply an honest, caring, giving, responsible person. He dedicated his life to helping and being there for everybody who has ever come to him during difficult times.”
After a few more attempts at prodding Heller to divulge something of his good works, he simply offers this:
“I never really think about that,” Heller says. “I just think if something has to be done, I do it, and that’s it.
“It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s with the community, or if it’s in the shul or whatever it is. If it has to be done and I have the time and ability to do it, I do it.
“If everybody has the thoughts that somebody else is going to do it, nothing is going to get done right.”
Heller’s personal commitment was passed down to him, he thinks, from his father Vevel Heller, who died in 1957.
“I guess maybe it was my father’s fault,” Heller says with a grin. “Because he was so involved in the community, that caused us to be involved also.
“We thought that was normal. That’s what you did.”
Heller reflects on this, on the morning of his 84th birthday. When asked how he planned to celebrate, Heller reveals that, in a few hours, he and his wife of 63 years, Fran, would head to DIA and embark on a trip to Israel, coinciding with a great-niece’s wedding.
“We have a lot of family there,” says Heller, “and it’s important to visit them.
“Besides, it’s important to go and support Israel.”
Perhaps you’ve run into Dovie Heller over the years. His father, Rev. Vevel Heller, was one of the original members of Zera Abraham. In 1945, Rev. Heller brought the young chasidic Rabbi B. C. Shloime Twerski there, where Vevel Heller was a long time leader, who also blew the shofar on Rosh Hashanah and led the prayers on Yom Kippur.
In 1970, Dovie helped found the Talmudic Research Institute (TRI) with Rabbi Shloime Twerski, who was succeeded by Rabbi Mordecai Twerski after his father’s death in 1981. For some 30 years Dovie served as gabbai at TRI. For the last 20 years or so he has been very active at EDOS.
“Because I work for myself,” says Heller, “I can take that time out and do all these things.”
Heller’s family fled Poland in 1892 and landed in Denver. Vevel Heller, born in 1865, was a shochet, mohel and ran Rose Hill Cemetery.
Dovie followed in his father’s footsteps, operating Rose Hill Cemetery on two occasions. He has also been a kosher supervisor, heavily involved in real estate management and circled back to lifecycle work at Rocky Mountain Monuments.
“I know most of the people in town,” Heller says. “It’s just one of those things that is a part of life, I guess you might say.”
Despite Heller’s deep ties to the cemetery and monument business, he will not lean on that expertise for his eventual needs. As it turns out, Dovie and Fran will have plots in Bet Shemesh, Israel, 30 minutes west of Jerusalem.
“It’s my mother-in-law’s fault,” says Heller, whose apparent penchant for “fault” comes with somewhat of a smile.
“Fran’s parents are buried there,” Heller says, “and when my father-in-law died they bought plots for their three children and their spouses.
“So, we’ll eventually end up in Israel.”
Hopefully, those arrangements are many years in the offing, though Heller did get a scare a year ago when he wasn’t feeling well and passed out. After weeks of tests, doctors had to perform a quadruple bypass surgery.
“They said, ‘you’ve got a 78% blockage in all four of your arteries.”
Heller responded to the doctors: “No kidding?”
“They said I had to do something about it, so they did.”
With his medical warranty renewed, Heller is about to take on another large project.
“Some of my relatives contacted me, and they want to have another family reunion.”
Plans are in the works for the reunion in 2025. Heller expects about 300 relatives to be on the invitation list, a family tree that sprouted in Denver when Vevel left Ratne, a small town in Eastern Europe, for the US in 1892. Vevel and his first wife Basie, who died in 1934, housed many relatives in Denver when they emigrated to the US, including members of the Sosny and Feige families.
Included in the Heller family tree are those in the Hendler (Reizel “Rose” Hendler was Vevel’s second wife and Dovie’s mother) and the Tajerstein-Auger families.
“We have a very large Denver family, though the family has kind of spread out a little bit,” says Heller.
Apparently, some members of the Heller family simply assumed Dovie would spearhead the reunion. Who else?
© IJN 2024