Moshe Rieder, a"h, remembered as 'true friend' with 'emunah pshutah'

Moshe Rieder a”h was eulogized at his levaya on Sunday, July 17, as a true mensch, a chaver tov with emunah pshutah who exuded hakoros hatov.

Rieder, 36, of West Hempstead, was nifter on erev Shabbat, July 15 (9 Tammuz).

A former advertising sales representative for The Jewish Star, he had graduated from Queens College and earned an MS degree in childhood education from Adelphi University. A graduate of HANC High School and the Yeshiva of South Shore elementary school, he also studied for a year at Yeshivat Shaare Yerushalayim.

Rabbi Josh Goller, assistant rabbi at the Young Israel of West Hempstead, told a packed levaya in the Jewish Memorial Chapel on Greenwich Street in Hempstead that the term “darchei noam” applied to Moshe — “everything he did was pleasant and sweet.”

“Every time that anyone here thinks of saying a bad word about somebody else, they’ll remember that Moshe never uttered a bad word about another person,” said Rabbi Goller, who grew up around the corner from the Rieder family.

“Anytime that somebody wrongs us and we have every right to be upset and respond in kind, we’re going to remember that Moshe never got angry. Anytime we’re faced with a challenge and we believe that we can’t surmount it, we’ll remember that Moshe had a fire burning inside of him that never allowed him to give up. He exuded his positivity to everyone around him.”

His brother Binyamin said of Moshe, “You saw the good things in life in many ways that we do not, you strived to make everyone around you a better person by showing pure love for one another.” In that way, Rabbi Goller concluded, Moshe lived up to his name, which means “to draw out,” encouraging “all of us to be as much as we can.”

“Everyone he came in contact with was his friend,” said his sister, Malke.

Speaking on behalf of Rieder’s friends, many of whom expressed their shock and grief in social media posts, Shmuel Dovid Kelemer said Rieder “had a trememdous emunah pshutah” (simple faith) and hakoros hatov (the ability to see good).