A yearly reminder of the importance of wearing helmets while biking or skateboarding is transmitted annually by Honey Senter to the TeaneckShuls email list, always at the beginning of May.

Her concern and fear for children and adults getting hurt from accidents while not wearing their helmets comes to her quite honestly. Forty-four years ago, her brother Heshy, who was then 27, was hit by a bus in Manhattan while biking to New York Hospital, where he was doing a residency in pediatrics. Heshy was married to his wife Naomi and they had two very young sons, Yuri and Moshe Dovid.

Mordechai and I had the good fortune of knowing Naomi and Heshy, as they were contemporaries of ours. Each of us who knew them, all with young children of our own, each pursuing dreams and careers of our choosing, were absolutely devastated, together with his family, by this unexplainable loss.

Heshy was the first Shomer Shabbat resident to wear a kippah in New York Hospital. He and Naomi made it a point of offering Shabbat hospitality to any family that needed to be around the hospital area. His goal was to combine his devotion to Torah learning and to the practice of medicine.

Heshy’s birthday is May 2, and Honey feels strongly that the most significant gift that she could present to her brother would be to help prevent others from having to go through this enormous tragedy. Many years ago, helmets were little known to bike users. We have come quite a distance since then. However, there are still people who are lax when it comes to insisting that their children wear a helmet or perhaps they themselves don’t bother to put one on if they are only travelling a short distance.

The Senter family beseeches everyone, in memory of Heshy, to make helmet use an absolute for every member of your families. That would be the very best gift that they could consider giving to Heshy on the occasion of his birthday. May his neshama have an aliyah.

By Nina Glick