Rosh HaKohol of the Adass Israel Congregation, Melbourne · A man who gave without being seen, and upheld those who could not stand alone.
Reb Binyomin Zev Koppel ז"ל, "Yomi," as he was known and loved, was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, in a home permeated with hachnosas orchim. The warmth of his mother and the enthusiasm of his father created a constant stream of guests. From his earliest years, chesed was not something Yomi did, it was something he was.
The intensity of this concern surfaced even as a young boy. On one sleepless night, his mother found him restless. "Today when I was in the city," he told her, "I saw poor people with their hands outstretched, wearing shredded clothes, and I am worried they are hungry." This was no ordinary child's response. It was the beginning of a lifetime.
Yomi was orphaned when his mother passed from illness before he was married. Yet the nisyonos of his youth only deepened his resolve. He married Sara, daughter of R' Yosef Reinitz, and together they built a home that carried on what his parents had begun, with sacred purpose and boundless generosity.
For more than three decades, Reb Yomi served as Rosh HaKohol, President, of the Adass Israel Congregation in Melbourne. Election followed election; he was returned every four years. Yet paradoxically, his position coexisted with a deep distaste for honor. He declined the designated seat at the front of shul. He stepped back from the dais. The kavod meant nothing to him. The work meant everything.
His involvement in kehilla life was total: the Talmud Torah, Beis Yaakov, Kashrus, shechita, for over twenty years. He served as Jewish chaplain to Melbourne's prisons. He worked tirelessly to cultivate achdus between neighboring kehilos, uniting Melbourne's Jewish community through the soft-spoken power of his manner and example.
The Koppel home was open to all, the table always extended, often for more than twenty guests on Shabbos. The Dushinsky Rebbe, the Toldos Aharon Rebbe, R' Shimon Gallei, and many others graced his table. Yet the most striking feature was that the downtrodden and the distinguished were treated with identical honor. Many guests stayed for weeks and months, given their own keys as if they were baalei habayis.
Three and a half years before his petirah, Reb Yomi was diagnosed with a grave machala. The doctors gave him twelve months. On the advice of his Rov, he kept the diagnosis a secret, and he was zoche to an additional three productive years, continuing his tzorchei tzibur throughout. He passed away at sixty-two and was buried on Har HaZeisim in Yerushalayim. Two shloshim gatherings, in Melbourne and in Lakewood, drew some two hundred people from all kehilos. A small indication of who this great man was.
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"You only found out later, often from someone else, that he was the one who had slipped an envelope under a doormat on Erev Yom Tov. The children were told: the recipients must remain forever a secret."- Family recollection
Reb Yomi's family chose to establish Kupas Binyomin Zev in Lakewood, the community where his children and grandchildren had built their lives, a community that embodied the same pressures, the same dignity, and the same quiet needs that had driven him throughout his years in Melbourne.
The Kupah was built specifically to serve the working family, the balabatishe, ehrliche household that manages with care and pride, but faces moments when the math simply doesn't work. The Yom Tov expenses. The simcha they've dreamed of giving their child. The illness that came without warning and upended everything.
These are the families Reb Yomi would have sought out. These are the doormats he would have knocked on. His family chose to continue that walk, systematically, quietly, and with the same insistence on absolute dignity that he modeled his entire life.
His children, Shmuly Koppel and family, Moshe Amrom Strauss and family, Moshe, Motty Rottenberg and family, Ari Brecher and family, Eli Dovid, Shloimy, and Nosson, chose to honor their father the way he himself would have chosen: not with monuments, but with action.
His wife Sara, his ezer knegdo in every sense, the woman who stood behind his every endeavor and refused to accept the dire prognosis until the very end, is the quiet force behind this legacy as well.
Reb Binyomin Zev Koppel ז"ל walked quietly and gave without fanfare. His name lives on now, in the tables set for Yom Tov, in the simchos celebrated without debt, in the families that made it through because someone reached them in time. His walk never ended. It simply became ours.
Every donation to Kupas Binyomin Zev is an act of zechus for his neshamah, and a lifeline to a Lakewood family navigating their most difficult or most joyful moments.