‘Facebuker Rebbe’ Dovid Winiarz Dies in Car Crash on Icy Sunday Morning
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Rabbi Dovid Winiarz, the self-proclaimed “Facebuker Rebbe” for his outreach efforts over Facebook, was killed in a car accident on an icy road in Maryland.
Winiarz, 49, of New York, was a passenger on Sunday morning in a vehicle that lost control in the icy conditions and struck another car. He was on his way to a Jewish outreach convention in Baltimore.
More than 400 people attended his funeral on Monday morning on Staten Island. Winiarz was the father of 10 children. The driver and the front seat passenger, as well as the two passengers in the other car, survived the crash, according to reports.
Winiarz was president of Survival Through Education Inc., which calls on Jews to discover their faith and reach out to unaffiliated Jews, and served as the rabbi at the Multi-Faith Center at the College of Staten Island, Willowbrook.
He often posted short Torah studies teachings on his Facebook page, which has nearly 13,000 followers.
Among his last Facebook posts read: “I will be travelling Motzai Shabbos/Saturday nite with the encouragement of my wife and children to a convention in Baltimore … If I am delayed in replying to messages … please bear with me.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
