When Devorah Leah Reiter gathered women in her home every Thursday to recite Psalms together, she had one instruction: no sadness, no tears. After the prayers, she would share a Torah thought from the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—even as it grew increasingly difficult for her to speak. Then the women would get up and dance to the song “Thank You, Hashem.”
This was not the action of someone in remission. Reiter was in the middle of a seven-year battle with cancer, and she was running a Torah study and prayer circle, thanking G‑d for the many blessings she was able to enjoy even as she battled the cancer that would take her on 27 Iyar, 5786 (May 14, 2026).
For 25 years, Rabbi Yaakov and Devorah Leah Reiter helped build Chabad-Lubavitch of Roslyn on Long Island and a warm community around it. On top of her role as a mother of nine children and a community leader, she was also, by every account of those who knew her, someone who had mastered an almost impossible act: making her own pain invisible so that those around her could feel whole.
“A Different Kind of Girl”
Devorah Leah Gottlieb grew up in Crown Heights, N.Y., the heart of the Chabad-Lubavitch community. The only biological child of her mother, Yaffa Leba Gottlieb, and adopted by her mother’s husband, Rabbi Yaakov Gottlieb, she was raised in a home that was open in every sense—to foster children, especially children with Down syndrome, whom her parents adopted. The acceptance and love she saw at home proved formative and made a lasting impression.
Her childhood friend Yehudis Wolvovsky remembers Devorah Leah as being, from a young age, oriented toward her neshamah, her soul, in a way her peers were not.
“She always had a spiritual side,” Wolvovsky says. “We all had a great time together and did all the things that kids do, but Devorah Leah was on a different plane.”
She was also deeply intentional about her relationships.
“She is just the only friend who would say ‘I love you.’ She connected with people and worked hard on relationships. We, her friends, felt like we were her sisters.”
After high school, their paths ran parallel. They attended the same post-high school seminary program, married men who were close friends, had children and went on to found Chabad Houses—the Reiters to Long Island, the Wolvovskys to Connecticut. They watched each other's children grow up and, in recent years, became grandparents.
Circle of Kindness
When Reiter was 40, she got the dreaded cancer diagnosis. After it recurred and metastasized as an advanced stage-four illness, several doctors told her and her husband to, as her daughter Mushka Bernstein recalls, “go home, get comfortable, there’s nothing we can do.”
Not easily discouraged, the couple found another doctor who disagreed. Unlike the other doctors, he had an optimistic attitude that gave comfort to the Reiters, as did his belief that as a doctor he is an emissary for healing.
“According to the scans, the doctor said it didn’t look good. And because she was physically small, he didn’t know how her body would handle chemo, but she was determined to fight and see to it that her husband had a wife and her kids had a mother,” says Bernstein, who serves as a Chabad emissary in Toronto. “The only reason she fought all these years is for her kids; she said that many times over. It was always her thing: I need to make it to one bar mitzvah at a time, one wedding at a time.”
She made many of them. And between them, she kept working.
Before her illness, Reiter had been a preschool teacher, ran Friendship Circle for children with different needs, and co-directed many programs at Chabad of Roslyn with her husband. The question, once she was sick, was what she would do now.
“Instead of being depressed and not doing anything, she decided to do what she could,” says Bernstein.
Her family says that she deeply believed that the situation she was in was for the good and that there was a purpose behind it. She sought to find that purpose, and as an emissary began looking for ways to use her illness and what she was going through to help others.
To start, she founded the Circle of Kindness—now Devorah Leah’s Circle of Kindness. The aim was, and continues to be, to help families facing a cancer diagnosis. Devorah Leah would reach out to the families and ask them what they needed, be it a car ride to chemo treatments or a bowl of chicken soup. She would then reach out to her list of volunteers, many of whom were friends in the community, and pair up the families with a friend. Volunteers with the Circle of Kindness also packed and delivered holiday packages for the families.
Reiter would use her own experiences and find things that helped her cope with her illness to provide those who were also ill with a little relief. For instance, Reiter found massages to be helpful and she reached out to a salon to offer their service to other women who were ill.
Every step of the way, despite her own challenges, Reiter would encourage those who were also struggling with cancer. She would speak about her faith in G‑d, her bitachon, and how that was helping her. She encouraged them to stay strong and hold onto the joy, and, of course, to reach out to G‑d.
She also rallied friends for her Thursday morning “Prayer Circle,” another component of the Circle of Kindness. The women would gather every other week to pray for those in need of a refuah shelama, a complete healing. They would recite the names of each person they were praying for, making the prayers even more personal. And as they enjoyed some snacks, fruit and other treats, the women were careful to make blessings on the food in the merit that those who are sick be healed.
Members of the Circle of Kindness did it all, and continue to do so even now, while abiding by Reiter’s dictum of everything with joy.
Rosie Gottesman, who moved to Roslyn in 2019, met Reiter for the first time at a holiday meal at the Reiters’ home. She had only met Rabbi Reiter until that point and did not know about the illness. When she arrived, Devorah Leah was asleep on the couch and did not appear well. After the holiday, Gottesman called Rabbi Reiter and offered to help with carpool or errands. During the pandemic, she began driving Reiter to chemotherapy appointments herself, and the two women grew close.
“She was purely nonjudgmental. She opened her house to me and my husband and my son,” Gottesman says. “I always told Devorah Leah I owe everything to you. I was in such a bad place and the Reiters turned my life around—no question.”
Battling with Joy
Throughout everything, Reiter held firm to one conviction: suffering was not a reason to be sad. She told everyone around her to approach her illness besimchah, with joy, and she meant it.
“She believed deeply that that was what was going to help her,” says Wolvovsky.
When she was admitted to the hospital, she would tell her children that G‑d had a plan, and it would be fine.
“She was always positive. She didn't show us any upsetness,” says Bernstein.
She also held firmly to the belief that her own struggles did not diminish anyone else’s—that her friends’ ordinary concerns were just as worthy of her attention as a terminal diagnosis.
“I always just want you to be my friend and share things with me,” she once told Wolvovsky.
Even as her voice weakened near the end, she stayed attuned to her children’s and friend’s lives in fine detail.
Says Gottesman, “She brought us all together. I have friends in Roslyn only because of Devorah Leah. Toward the end, I went to visit her twice a week, and even though she wasn’t talking, you still felt she was connected to you. She was a selfless woman who was always here to help everyone else, no matter what was going on in her own life, and that is truly hard to find nowadays. You don’t see women like her.”
In addition to her husband, she is survived by their children: Mushka Bernstein (Toronto); Chana Wagner (Portugal); Mendel Reiter, Sara Reiter, Esther Miriam Reiter, Tzvi Reiter, Fraidel Reiter, Yosef Reiter and Shneur Reiter; and grandchildren. She is also survived by her parents, Yaakov and Yaffa Gottleib (Brooklyn, N.Y.), and Mordechai Banayan; in-laws Dr. Levi and Raizel Reiter; in addition to her siblings.
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