Rabbi David Grossman, one of the Los Angeles Jewish community’s best-known and longest-serving Torah teachers, was killed in an auto accident Monday morning in Staten Island in New York City.
According to preliminary information from New York police investigators, the crash was reported about 4 a.m. Rabbi Grossman was driving northbound on the West Shore Expressway near Victory Boulevard when he stopped in the roadway for reasons still unknown. His car was rear ended by another vehicle that remained on the scene. He was transported to Richmond University Medical Center where he was pronounced dead.
With a career spanning more than 40 years in Los Angeles, Rabbi Grossman was leading a variety of classes at LINK, in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood, at the time of his death.
His funeral was scheduled for Monday evening in Lakewood, NJ.
A founding member of the Lakewood Kollel branch in Los Angeles in 1975, under the late Rabbi Chaim Fasman, Rabbi Grossman helped start Yeshiva Gedolah in LaBrea in 1981. He served as the 12th grade lecturer in advanced Talmudic studies until 2008.
Concurrently, he opened a Torah program for working young adults and college students, independent of the yeshiva.
Rabbi Grossman recently opened up a morning yeshiva for young men who are working or going to college part-time. He recorded thousands of tapes and CDs on every page of the oral Torah and many areas of Torah.
Recently, he started teaching the second half of Rabbi Asher Brander’s late Thursday night class on the Torah portion of the week.
A LINK spokesperson said that in his classes, Rabbi Grossman “exuded his customary warmth and love for every talmid (student). The loss to his family and to our community is incalculable.”
While learning in Israel in his earlier years, the rabbi met his wife, Rachel. She was the principal of Valley Torah High School’s girls division in Valley Village for many years.
Rabbi Grossman’s survivors include his children, Mrs. Sara Fisher, Mrs. Tzippy Rokowsky, Mrs. Efrat Privalsky, Meir, Avi, Binyomin, Moshe and Chaim.
