Dr. Robert Richter, who has held various positions in New York hospitals, including nearly 20 years as General Surgeon and former Associate Director of Surgery at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, before going into private practice, passed away.
He was 90.
He was interviewed in February of 2012:
I was a child of the Depression, born in 1933 to a non-Orthodox household in New York. I attended medical school and went on to work at several hospitals throughout the city, becoming chief resident in general surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, as well as in academic surgery and private practice.
My connection with the Rebbe began in 1954 after my engagement to my wife Gladys – her grandfather was Rabbi Menachem Mendel Cunin, a prominent chasid, and her parents were close with the Rebbe’s family. Being exposed to the world of Chabad, and the Rebbe in particular, was quite a revelation.
Gladys and I would join her parents to visit the Rebbe’s wife, Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka Schneerson, and eventually I met the Rebbe independently. There were several occasions where I met him on the sidewalk and we stopped to talk. Later on, there were many times when the Rebbe, through his secretary or an invitation to his office, would question me on various medical matters that people had presented to him.
When my office was in downtown Brooklyn, the Rebbetzin would call to invite me over for cake and tea in the afternoon, if I wasn’t busy. The Rebbetzin’s cakes, I have to say, were a treasure; I know they were store-bought, but I have yet to find the store that made them. One afternoon, time flew by, and I was probably there for close to two hours. As I was getting ready to leave, she said, “My husband is coming home,” which I took as a cue to make my exit.
I walked down the front steps of 1304 President Street as the Rebbe was coming up to the house, and we met on the walkway. As anyone who has ever spoken to him has noted, when you speak to the Rebbe, he looks right at you and doesn’t seem to be thinking of anything else. It’s a totally focused attention, and it elicits the same response from the person he’s talking to. I’m sure he wanted to go home, but he started talking to me. He was asking me questions, and then giving the answers before I had a chance to verbalize them. Whatever it was that he asked me – some of it was personal, some of it technical, some of it I don’t remember – he was reading my mind. I could see his amusement. The whole thing went on for a total of ten or fifteen minutes from the time I met him until we said our goodbyes. I then got in my car and drove away.
Now I am, if nothing else, a scientist. I don’t believe in hocus pocus, magic, witchcraft, or any of these things. I came home that evening and my wife looked at me, as if to say, “Is something wrong?”
“I just had my brain picked,” I said. I’m still amazed by it. It was supernatural.
Maybe a year later, I saw someone publish an article outlining exactly the same experience with the Rebbe, and I knew that I hadn’t been dreaming. It was uncanny, superhuman, beyond any experience I had ever had; I don’t have any other words for it.
In 1969, I experienced another, more personal miracle. I had an occupational exposure to hepatitis virus and came down with a very serious case. By my reading as a doctor, it was fatal: I saw no point in being hospitalized. I got my affairs together, and since I happened to be in my upstate summer home, I stayed there, while a doctor neighbor would stop in and see me. I was only in my thirties but I was dying.
Now, you have to understand something about this virus: Hepatitis does not improve radically from day to day. In the old days before there were antibiotics, when people got pneumonia, and particularly the more virulent pneumococcus pneumonia, one of two things would happen: they either died or they had a “crisis,” in medical jargon, where suddenly, for no reason at all, the body takes over and gets better. But this never, ever happens in hepatitis. Viral hepatitis is an illness that normally progresses slowly, over several months, but occasionally it is a rapid decline. I was in a rapid decline.
One Tuesday afternoon at about 2:30 PM, I suddenly felt a weight lifted from me. I couldn’t pin it down, but from that point on I began to recover. There was a “crisis,” in the sense that I just defined it.
My wife was in the city that day and she came home at seven in the evening.
“Gee, I feel much better,” I told her.
“Oh, isn’t that nice,” she replied.
“Where were you?”
“In Brooklyn.”
“Where?”
“I went to see the Rebbe.”
I asked, “What time did you go to see the Rebbe?”
“2:30 PM,” she said. End of story. Again, I’m a scientist; an absolute, confirmed, died-in-the-wool skeptic. Of all the skeptics, I’m the chief skeptic – but there you are.”
THE HEART ATTACK
Dr. Richter also shared details from his perspective about the heart attack the Rebbe suffered on the night of Shmini Atzeres 5738 at 770 Eastern Parkway:
A few years later, on the holiday of Shmini Atzeres, 1977, the phone rang. I’m a doctor, so even though it was Yom Tov, I picked it up. All I heard was, “Get here!”
There was no introduction, but I knew it was Gladys’s cousin, Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin (Head Shliach of California).
“Is it the Rebbe?” I asked.
“Yes.”
It turned out that the Rebbe had suffered a heart attack. I got in my car, and sped over to 770 in probably 22 minutes, where I found a crowd of people in the Sukkah with the Rebbe.
“Who’s in charge here? I asked.
Everybody pointed at everybody else; nobody was in charge. There was another doctor there whom I knew – Bob Feldman. I looked over to him, he nodded, and I announced, “Okay, everybody out!”
Bob and I took it from there and we stayed with the Rebbe. We called specialists for any information we needed, and handled everything medically until a cardiologist, Dr. Ira Weiss, came in from Chicago. We were practicing out of our specialty, but thank G-d, we made no mistakes.
For the first twenty-four hours, we tried to convince the Rebbe that he needed to be in the hospital. For monitoring and for administering medications, I explained that an intensive care unit was the best place.
“That’s not convincing,” he countered. “Cannot this all be done here?”
I must have turned pale but I had to give an honest answer. “With great difficulty,” I said. The Rebbe took that as a yes.
At 2:30 in the morning I called the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital and explained what we needed for the Rebbe. Within an hour all the equipment began to arrive at 770. There was never a need to move the Rebbe to an intensive care unit because we basically established one in 770.
His knowledge of medicine just amazed me. As a patient, he knew the right questions to ask and often I’m sure he also knew the answers before I gave them. Overall, he was the smartest man I ever met – in every sense of the term. I was continually impressed during our conversations with what he knew. I learned to never assume that he didn’t know something; when I did, he would prove me wrong – but always with a smile.
MIRACLE STORY
Dr. Richter merited to witness and take a role in an open miracle of the Rebbe.
In the afternoon of Tuesday, 9 Adar II 5733 (March 13, 1973), Mushka Raskin, a 13-year-old student at Bais Rivkah High School, located at the time at Snyder and Bedford Avenues, in Brooklyn, was crossing the street outside the school and was struck by a speeding van.
She was taken to Kings County Hospital in a coma. Upon receiving the news, her father, the legendary chossid, Rabbi Dovid Raskin, wrote a heartfelt pan to the Rebbe, ‘giving her over’ to him.
The Rebbe, in response, instructed his Mazkir Rabbi Leibel Groner to contact Dr. Richter. Upon arrival at 770, Dr. Richter went in for a meeting with the Rebbe.
“I was working at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital at the time when I received a phone call from Rabbi Groner,” Dr. Richter shared. “He told me that the Rebbe wanted to see me urgently. When I arrived, I went straight into the Rebbe’s room. The Rebbe told me that Rabbi Dovid Raskin’s daughter, Mushka, was hit by a vehicle and she was taken unconscious to the neurosurgical ICU at Kings County Hospital.
“The Rebbe asked me to go and see her, call her name and see if she responded, and then afterwards I should report back to him with as many details I could give. I went to the hospital for about a half hour and spoke to the residents who were caring for her. They informed me that she was brain dead and they had little hope of recovery.
(Based on the criteria we had at the time, they assumed she was brain dead. She was areflexic [no reflexes, which is a sign of severe brain injury], decerebrate [abnormal posture that is indicative of severe brain injury], and EEG [a device that records electrical function of the brain] was flat-lined [also indicating severe brain injury]).
“I came back the following night [Wednesday evening] and reported this to the Rebbe,” Dr. Richter told. “The Rebbe told me then, without any hesitation, that he wants me to visit her daily and report back to him personally – no matter what time. I asked if Shabbos was included, and he said yes. (On Friday nights, when I would pull up at 770, I had to keep my engine running and would ask a yeshiva bochur to watch my car in the meantime…).
That meant to me that, if the Rebbe was having me do something that involved sakanah [a life-threating matter], I was not simply acting as an informant for the Rebbe, but was acting as an agent for something directly related to her health. So I visited her daily (Shabbat and Sundays included), and I would go to her bedside and call out “Chaya Mushka,” but there were no changes and she remained unconscious.
“I would report to the Rebbe daily, and he would tell me to continue what I was doing and call her name. This continued for approximately three weeks. When I would update Rabbi Raskin on her condition, I never sensed any anxiety; it was as if he was expecting a complete recovery.
“One day, when I called her name, she opened her eyes. She did not talk; she just looked at me. I got goosebumps. I reported this to the Rebbe, and he told me that it would not be necessary to continue the daily visits. I then asked the Rebbe if he knew all along that she would recover. He made a twinkle with his eye, as if to say he surely did…
“I personally did not think she would survive, and, if she would, she would not function normally. I have seen many traumatic brain injuries throughout my career, including fatal ones, and the injury to Mushka should’ve been fatal. This was a pure miracle of the Rebbe, and I had the great fortune to act as his shliach. I did not see her until her wedding [in 1981].”
Dr. and Mrs. Richter were honored guests at the wedding of Mrs. Mushka Pearson, who went on to have children and raise a family.
LEVAYA & SHIVA
Dr. Richter’s levaya was held on Monday, March 11, at Plaza Jewish Community Chapel in New York City. Interment was at Mt. Moriah Cemetery in Fairview, New Jersey.
The family will be sitting Shiva through Wednesday, March 13, at 145 West 86th. Street, Apt. 8A, New York City, and from Thursday until Sunday morning, March 17, at 52 Canterbury Lane, New Milford.
