My husband Alex's father, Manny (Menachem Mendel ben Yoseph) Ragen, passed away this week. He was 92 years old and, up his last two months, had been completely independent, even caring for his wheelchair-bound wife with remarkable love and patience.

I loved him very much; I, and everyone else whose life he touched even in the briefest way.

His goodness wasn't a big, brassy horn that touted; it was footfalls, silent as a cat's. The way he gave his neighbors, Russian immigrants, 'loans' when they couldn't make ends meet. The way he found an orthopedic surgeon to help free his wife from horrible pain, when the snobbish "experts" we took him to dismissed her as a "hopeless" case. The way he worked tirelessly for the Soldiers Welfare Committee. The way he left fresh rolls every morning on the doorstep of a young family on vacation across the street. The way he fed the homeless kittens on the street. The way his pockets bulged with candy for the children in shul.

A million small kindness that made his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren love to be with him.

He was born in the Carpathian mountains, an area that changed hands and names too often to count. When Hitler invaded, he was made a slave laborer, and marched with the German Army to Russia and back, with rags on his feet. But the only story he ever told us about the Germans was the one about the German soldier at the train station. Numb with cold after traveling all night in an open boxcar, he asked the German for a cup of hot coffee. He never tired of telling us how the German soldier not only brought him a hot jug, but apologized for not having any sugar.

And after the war, when he came home and found that his wife and baby son and little daughter had been taken to Auschwitz and gassed there, and his house had been looted, he hired a cart and horse and went from house to house, taking back the plunder from his neighbors and friends - his furniture, silverware, bedding - piling it high in a wagon, which he then asked the wagon-driver to take to the train station. When they arrived, he handed the reins to the driver, telling him to keep everything, or sell it, or burn it. Empty-handed, he hopped on the next train. He never looked back.

He married again. Had another son and daughter. He opened a clothes factory. And then one day, Russian soldiers conscripted him to wash the streets. He sold the factory and took his family on the next boat to his sister in New York. And only once, when his son turned sixteen, did he take out a yellowing photograph of a young woman and two small children and show it to him, never to mention it again.

When his son got married and moved to Israel, he followed. He traded a two-family house in Canarsie for a nice four-room apartment near the sea. He spent time working for the Soldiers Welfare Committee and the local synagogue, for which he had the key.

In 2002, he invited his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren to join him at the Passover Seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya. I remember his face when he saw us walk out of the blackened, blood-spattered building unharmed. "I would never have forgiven myself," he whispered.

Whenever I hear about people who justify the commission of crimes, or acts of unkindness, dishonesty or even terror because of hard lives or terrible injustices they claim were committed against them, I think of my father-in-law, who was the gentlest, kindest, most giving and compassionate man in the world. With God's help, he outlived Hitler, Stalin and Yasser Arafat, dying at peace, in his bed, when he was good and ready.

God bless you, Menachem Mendel, the son of Joseph. May your heavenly reward include the knowledge of how much all of us loved you. And when I get to heaven, I hope to be allowed to take the elevator up to the penthouse suite to visit you, for surely you will be in the highest part of heaven.