In last month’s issue of the Where What When, I began the story of Menachem Begin, one of the great leaders of our people. To recap: Begin was born in 1913 and grew up in a shomer Shabbos home in Brisk. At age 13, he joined Betar, the youth movement of the Revisionist Zionists, and became enamored of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, its founder. Jabotinsky believed that the Zionist leadership under Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion was too weak and too passive. The Revisionists had the same ultimate goal as the mainstream Zionists, a Jewish state, but they were willing to achieve their goal by force, if necessary, rather than depending on the goodwill of the gentiles.

In 1940, the Soviet authorities arrested Begin for anti-Soviet and anti-Communist propaganda and sentenced him to eight years. Fortunately, as a Polish national, he was soon released as the result of a Soviet-Polish treaty. He joined the Free Polish Army and ended up in Palestine, where he spent two years working for the Polish Army while at the same time building relations with the Betar cells there. After being let go by the Polish army, he became head of the military organization Etzel, Irgun Tzva Leumi, or the Irgun.

Who can forget the 1978 peace treaty between Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat of Egypt? Those of us without TVs in the house (no internet then) ran to neighbors to watch the signing ceremony on the White House lawn. We cried when Begin removed his yarmulke from his pocket to recite psalm 126, the Shir Hamaalot before benching – in Hebrew! This is the psalm that presages the return of the Jews to Eretz Yisrael, and Begin explained to the global audience that he had first learned it at his father’s table in Poland. He invited them to look it up in their English Bibles. What drama! What an emotional moment!

To most people under 60, the name Menachem Begin may as well be a part of ancient history. Ben Gurion is the famous one of Israel’s early days. Begin, with his diametrically opposing views, sat in the Knesset for years in seemingly permanent, albeit vocal, opposition. The Mapai Labor Zionists – a socialist, anti-religious, discriminatory (to Sefardim) party – ruled the government and dominated the society. The country was miserably poor and surrounded by implacable enemies.

Then, in 1977, in a surprise upset, Begin won the election and became prime minister. No head of the government before or since has been quite like Begin. He was one of a kind – a man of principle and resolve, steeped in Jewish tradition and feeling. In many ways, he changed the trajectory of Israeli history and laid the foundation for the strong and rich country we know today.

I want to review some incidents in his life which show the unique character of Menachem Begin so that we can have appreciation for one of the great leaders of our people.

I read a fascinating article recently in Tablet online magazine, entitled, “Baal Teshuva: The Next Generation,” by Israeli writer Dana Kessler. She tells of an interesting phenomenon that occurred in Israel in the 1970s: In the wake of the psychological upheavals of the Six Day War in 1967 (with its staggering victory) and the Yom Kippur War in 1973 (with its devastating near defeat), some secular Israeli celebrities turned “ultra-Orthodox,” to the shock of their friends. They include popular comedian and movie star Uri Zohar as well as a few prominent scientists, such as chemistry professor Doron Auerbach. The trickle became a flood. “Thousands of Israelis became chozrim beteshuva in the late 1970s and early ’80s,” writes Kessler, and “most of this first wave joined closed-off chareidi communities, believing that the light shines brightest in the world of the ultra-Orthodox.”

The Tablet article explores what happened to the children those newly chareidi Israelis who tried to integrate and become “real” chareidim. It found that the picture was not all rosy. “Now their oldest children are grown up and have children of their own, and they can testify to the fact that for many, their cultural, financial, and social assimilation into the chareidi world can be deemed a failure,” she writes. “Many of the children of the original chozrim beteshuva have since left the chareidi communities where they were raised. And while their parents have, by and large, not returned to the secular world, many have changed their relationship to the chareidi world.”

“In one era and out the other.” It’s a clever title, no? Unfortunately, I did not think it up. It was the title of a book by humorist Sam Levenson. If you never heard of him, it is a sign of your youth. He was a former school teacher who made a career out of writing funny books comparing the world of his youth to the present. He was writing around the year 1960. That date would encompass the world of my youth! I guess many of us, when we pass a certain age, recall (with varying levels of accuracy) how the world has changed.

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The first president I recall as a child was Dwight David Eisenhower. He was a hero of World War II, married to quiet, dowdy Mamie. General Eisenhower was actually offered the opportunity to run as a Democrat or as a Republican. He chose the latter and brought the party to victory after five Democratic election victories from 1933 to 1952. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected four times but died three months into his fourth term. Truman took over and was elected to a full term.) This was the early 1950s. The country was tired of the Depression and of war – both World War II and the Korean War – and sought a grandfatherly figure who was acceptable to all. I recall that one of the main complaints about his opponent, Adlai Stevenson, was that he was divorced. ‘If a man can’t control his wife, how can he control the country?” was something I heard as a young kid.

Like most of you, I have read about righteous gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Invariably, their stories are told from the Jewish vantage point. I want to take you on a journey back into that horrible time to see the things through the eyes of decent Polish gentiles. You will glimpse a story very different from the ones we are more familiar with.

Irena Sendler was a Polish woman who saved children from the Warsaw ghetto. Moreover, unlike the righteous gentiles we are used to hearing about, who acted alone, she was part of a large network of gentiles who risked their lives and saved more Jews than Schindler or other, more famous, people. Together with her friends and coworkers, Irena smuggled infants out of the Warsaw ghetto in suitcases and wooden boxes, past German guards and Jewish police traitors. She brought out toddlers and schoolchildren through the city’s foul and dangerous sewers. She worked with Jewish teenagers, many of them girls of 14 or 15, who fought bravely and died in the ghetto uprising.

This past June, our family celebrated two significant milestones. Our son Sruly and his wife Rachel celebrated the bris of their second son. They chose the name Yosef. Sruly explained that he named his son after my Uncle Joe Weinstock, a man he had never met but about whom he had heard so much. I was truly moved by this gesture. The very next day, our son Yossi, himself named after Uncle Joe, became engaged to Shevi Brody. One Yosef enters the Covenant and the other begins his new task of building a “faithful house in Israel.”

We are most grateful to the One Above for these blessings. I pray that in the zechus of Uncle Joe’s mesiras nefesh for Shabbos and Israel, these two Yosefs will be blessed and all of our family will continue to share in many brachos and simchas.