Although we are now far into sefer Bereishis, I am writing this in the week of parshas Noach, which brings back a memory that I want to share.
We are living in interesting
times. As I walked to shul over Yom Tov, I rejoiced seeing so many
observant young families passing by. The sight of a mother and father pushing a
baby carriage, accompanied by a number of small children was the norm.
Recently, I have been davening at Shomrei Mishmeres Hakodesh, whose Rav and
Rebbetzin, Chaim and Devorah Schwartz, are welcoming and where the
davening is inspiring and the weekly kiddush cholent delicious. The new
shul is almost complete and the mikvah for Shabbos and Yom Tov use in the
Cheswolde neighborhood is soon to open. Although I belong to three other
shuls, Rabbi Schwartz is only a block-and-a-half from my home. It is not as
easy for me to walk to Shomrei, although not so many years ago, I could walk six
miles to Randallstown every Shabbos.
As the years pass, I am thrilled
to see the fantastic growth of the Baltimore community. We see a plethora of
new shuls opening and existing shuls building enlarged edifices. We see new
schools opening to accommodate the exponential growth of our school-age
population and the proliferation of new restaurants. I remember when going out
to eat meant going to Liebes Delicatessen.
Things were not always this way.
I remember being told by Rabbi Herman N. Neuberger, zt”l, that when
he first married his wife, Judith, and lived in Forest Park, there were no
other frum young families to visit on Shabbos afternoon. How the times
have changed.
The vast difference between the
flourishing Orthodox community of today and the world of yesteryear can lead to
a lack of understanding by our youth of the realities faced by their
grandparents struggling to maintain Yiddishkeit in the “Goldene Medina,”
the golden land, as America was called. We are taught “Al tadin es chavercho
ad shetagiah limkomo.” Do not judge your fellow until you have been in his shoes.
Many readers of the Where What
When are not products of the enclaves of frumkeit of yesteryear.
Many of us grew up in an environment where observance of Shabbos and kashrus
was far from the norm and where day schools either did not exist or certainly
did not reach 12th grade. Many of us are called “baalei teshuva,”
which, in colloquial usage, means we weren’t always as frum as we are
today. I, personally, reject that title. I was always frum – by the
standards of the community I was a part of. As I learned more, I took on more.
* * *
Many years ago, our Conservative
shul in Montgomery, Alabama hired an Orthodox rabbi, Rabbi Aaron Borow, a musmach
of Yeshiva University. This was common practice back in the 1950s. Rabbi Borow
saw that I was interested, and he tutored me for a year on Shabbos afternoons. He
taught me how to read Rashi, and the first verses of Bereishis are
indelibly inscribed in my memory. He taught me a smidgeon of modern Hebrew as
well, and I took an entrance exam for Yeshiva University High School in
Manhattan. I was accepted and entered a special class for public school
students.
There was another experience that
had a profound influence on me. I became a ben bayis at the home of
Yitzchok, z”l, and Bracha, shetichyeh, Eichenthal in Boro Park. The
connection was made by my oldest brother Herman, who was an accountant and was
acquainted with his fellow accountant, Yitzchok. Yitzchok told my brother that
when his baby brother (we were 17 years apart) came to New York, I should come
to them for Shabbos. That relationship blossomed, and I am who I am, largely
because of the Eichenthals.
When I went home to Montgomery, I
told my father all about the Eichenthals and Boro Park. It was a world I had
never seen, and I was excited by how Jewish the neighborhood was. My father,
Meyer Oberstein, came to the United States in 1924 and never lived in New York.
He had spent most of those years in our Montgomery “shtetel,” far from
vibrant Orthodoxy. But my father remembered a lot from cheder, which he
attended until maybe the age of 10, due to wars.
My father looked at me and
responded to my report, “I may not be a tzadik in Boro Park, but for
Montgomery I’m pretty good. ‘Noach ish tzadik tamim haya b’dorosav.’” He
was telling me something he had learned many years earlier; we call it “girsa
d’yankusa,” learning of one’s youth.
As I age and am close to gevuros
– as it says, “The days of our years are 70 and if, by strength (gevuros),
80” – I want my own descendants and the readers of the WWW, who are
fortunate to live in this era when Orthodoxy is flourishing, at least in our
section of Baltimore, to have a greater appreciation for those who came before
us.
* * *
I have written in the past about
my Uncle Joe. He had a much different personality than my father and was a
major influence on my hashkafos. But this article is not about him. My
father, Meyer Oberstein, was named after his zaidy, Meyer Pelcovits
(Pohlchovitz). When I was a very little boy, my father told me this story:
There was a rich man [his grandfather] in their town who was a big baal
tzedaka. Before Yom Tov, he would come to the yeshiva and pay for new
clothes for the students. He had a daughter, Chaya Sora, and he told the rosh hayeshiva
that he wanted the best bachur, a real masmid for his daughter.
He promised to support him while he sat and learned.
At the time of his telling me this
story, my father was standing behind the counter of Oberstein Grocery next to
the local housing project. He was talking about a long-gone world that, to his
knowledge, no longer existed. The bachur was my zaidy Elchonon. I think
he came from a suburb of Vilna, and my father had no idea which yeshiva it was.
The shver, the father-in-law Meyer, lived in Tiktin. Elchonon and Chaya
Sora were married and had four children: Tzivya, Elka, Akiva, and the youngest,
my father Meyer. My father told me that Elchonon had actually gone to America but
returned to Tiktin because it wasn’t frum enough.
I have put some pieces together
and I think this is what transpired: By the time my father was born, in 1905, Elchonon’s
father-in-law was no longer alive, and the long-term support was gone. While Elchonon
was in America, a tragedy occurred. My grandmother, Chaya Sora, cut herself on
a nail, and it became infected. With no doctor in Tiktin, they took her on a
droshky, a four-wheeled, horse-drawn open carriage. By the time they reached
Bialystok, the gangrene had spread, and the doctor amputated her leg. She did
not recover. My father was an infant, and he never knew his mother.
Years ago, Aunt Celia’s (Tzivia)
daughter told me that her mother had arrived in New York and was met at the
boat by her father. But he did not tell her that he was returning to Europe on
that same ship. Celia was very angry and held a grudge because of this
abandonment. I think the reason Elchonon returned to Tiktin was that he got the
news that his wife was dead. My father did not tell me this, but Celia’s
daughter so surmised.
* * *
One day in the grocery store,
during a quiet moment, my father told me another story. There was a famous
rabbi in Tiktin, whose name he didn’t know. For some reason, my grandfather
Elchonon disputed something. I don’t know if it was halachic or lamdus,
but each held his ground, and it turned into a big dispute. My father told me
that, to settle the matter, they both presented their argument before an even
greater gadol. This rabbi heard both sides and said, “The Tiktiner Rov
is a great talmid chacham, but in this case, Elchonon is correct.” The
Tiktiner Rov told my zaidy – and my father was present to hear it – “I never
realized what a lamdan you were. Al tistakel b’kankan ela ma sheh
yesh bo. Don’t look at the barrel, but rather at the contents.”
Unfortunately, however, there was
poverty in the home and little love. Elchonon married a woman who had children,
and she only fed his children if there was food left after she fed her
children. In addition, the period around and after World War I was turbulent.
There were several wars, including one between Russia and the newly independent
Poland. During that war, a curfew was imposed, and anyone caught outside was to
be shot. My father told me that there was no food in the house, and he went out
to sell something to get food. He was caught and put before a firing squad. He
told me there were dead bodies all around. At the last minute, an older man on
a mule came by. He was a commissar and asked what was going on. They told him
that they were going to shoot my father as a spy. The old man on the mule told
them that he was just a kid and to let him go. That was how close my father
came to being shot. Imagine how it affected him. (My kids opined that the commissar
was Eliyahu Hanavi). Children growing up today in our land of plenty may not
realize what their forebearers went through.
* * *
Now we come to America, the
land of opportunity and freedom. My father sailed for America, and his sister Celia
met him at the boat. By this time, his three siblings were no longer frum.
Celia and Akiva moved to Pensacola, Florida. I learned from an interview with
my late Uncle Kiva that there was a group of freethinkers who called themselves
the Shevet (the tribe) who moved to Florida with the idea of farming and not
living off the toil of the proletariat. This led to Celia and her husband
opening Pensacola Dairy. My father’s first job in America was delivering milk
in a horse-drawn wagon. Kiva opened a grocery store. Neither Celia nor Kiva
attended the local shul, even on Yom Kippur. Think back to the home they came
from and how much they rejected it.
Meyer Oberstein, the youngest of
the three, did not adapt to the freethinkers, who had no interest in organized
religion. My father thought they were crazy. He decided to visit his other
sister, Elsie Katz, who lived not too far away, in Montgomery, Alabama. Unlike
his siblings, he decided to go to shul Friday night. There, my zaidy Weinstock,
the chasid from the Ukraine, about whom I have written previously, saw
this handsome young man and invited him home for the Shabbos seudah.
My father told me that he entered
the Weinstock home and saw my mother, their daughter Pesel. He said that they
looked at one another, and he decided then and there to stay in Montgomery and
marry this beautiful young woman. Meyer never knew a mother’s love, and in
Montgomery, he found not only a bride but a warm family, people who celebrated
their Judaism.
* * *
Why am I recounting all this? I
want readers to understand that my father and many others like him did not have
the benefits of today’s frum world. They came to a new country and had
to work hard to provide for their livelihood. We live in Baltimore, where I
understand there are several kollelim, where one can sit and learn in
security. When my father was telling me the above stories, he honestly had no
idea that the way of life that his father aspired to still existed. In his
grocery store in Montgomery, his customers were African-Americans. There were
hardly any men in our shul who knew as much as he did – and that wasn’t much by
the standards of TI or TA, which my einikalch attend today.
The rebirth of Judaism we are
experiencing today has come about primarily from the olam haTorah.
Yiddishkeit today is very Torah centered. I love learning the Daf with Reb Eli
Stefansky every day online. It’s not the Daf, it’s the Yomi. And in my “retirement,”
I go to two shiurim, Bavli with Rabbi Shlomo Horwitz and Yerushalmi with
Rabbi Shlomo Shulman at Shomrei Emunah. But don’t think that the Jews I grew up
with were less Jewish in their neshama than the very Orthodox of today.
I can say that my parents were Jewish through and through. They didn’t keep
everything exactly as I learned in yeshiva – that you must eat exactly this
amount of matzah to be yotzei or that you couldn’t put soup on the blech
on Shabbos. But I can testify that my mother never cooked anything on Shabbos,
and she could sing all the songs at the Seder.
I was raised by people who loved
all Jews. They realized that we are an am, a people, more than just a
religion. Lately, I have read this statement from formerly secular Israelis: “I
used to be an Israeli, but now I am a Jew.” The corollary to this is, “We are a
small nation, but we are a large family.” Being Jewish is in my kishkes.
There is a reason four of our children have made aliyah and are raising
their families as Israelis. When I decided to go to yeshiva and accept the
precepts of Orthodoxy, I was not going against my upbringing. I saw early on
that, as Jewish as we were in our hearts and in our identity, it was the
observant ones who were able to pass it on to their children. Without Torah and
mitzvos, passing on the chain of tradition was very insecure.
(There is an interesting
postscript to the story of my father’s brother Kiva. Some people in Pensacola introduced
him to their niece from Cleveland, Aunt Anne. She told me that she civilized
Kiva. She made him close his store on Yom Tov and start going to shul. She had
a freezer in the garage and ordered six months’ worth of kosher meat from
Chicago. Many years later, I sent them a record – I think it was Gerrer Shabbos
nigunim or something like that. Aunt Anne wrote to me that Kiva loved
the record; he would sit down to the meal and sing along with the zemiros.)
* * *
We are living in miraculous times.
Two years ago, Israel faced enemies on all sides, and things looked scary.
Hashem helped, and look how the matzav has changed. If you read about
the hostages, you see, time and again, that even those from totally secular
environments re-discovered their Jewishness while in captivity. Many non-observant
people took on various practices, such as lighting Shabbos candles. They sing Hakodosh
Boruch Hu (G-d) loves me. But the tragedy is that 70% of American Jewry
intermarry. Most Jews in this country are illiterate Jewishly. My parents’
generation did not do Daf Yomi, but they had it deep inside. Sadly, most of
that period did not have the tools and the environment to pass it on. Passing
it on is our generation’s obligation. There is a Yiddishe neshama deep
inside all of our brothers and sisters. Let’s have the self-confidence to share
our heritage.
Let me share a memory from long
ago, years before I went to yeshiva: Rabbi Aaron Borow offered me a ride to New
York to the second-ever national convention of NCSY. There was an unknown
singer named Shlomo Carlbach there. I remember it like it was yesterday. He was
on the stage strumming his guitar. All his words were accompanied by his guitar.
He said, “Boys and girls ... if I had a choice to be very rich and live in
luxury ... and not be a Jew ... [guitar strumming] or to be poor and lie in the
gutter and have nothing [guitar strumming] ... but to be a Jew ... I’d be a
Jew.” Then he continued with a lot of lively music. The way he said it,
and the emotion that he produced in all of us, was amazing. Shlomo, in that
moment, found the door to my Jewish soul. And then I went to yeshiva, baruch
Hashem.
Recently, I came to
understand something about my father. In my youth, we would occasionally sing
the Birkat Hamazon. It never failed that, when we sang towards the end
the word, “Naar hayisi vegam zakanti, ve lo ra’isi tzadik ne’ezav vezaro
mevakesh lochem… (I was young and now have aged but I have never seen
a righteous person abandoned nor his children beg for bread,” my father always
interrupted and said, “I have seen it many times.”
Today, during my benching,
I realized that my father was recalling his own life. In his youth, his father
was the abandoned tzadik who lost the long-time support, and he was the
child, hungry for food.
When Uncle Kiva Oberstein
died, someone found a postcard in Yiddish among his possessions. They had no
idea what it said, so they sent it to my sister Elsie Blum, who lives in Fort
Worth, Texas. She gave it to the Conservative rabbi, who grew up Orthodox. He
set about translating this postcard. She sent me a copy of the
translation. The postcard was from my zaidy Elchonon writing from Tiktin,
Poland. He was pleading with his children to bring him to America. He wrote, “What
can be better than to have a father who learns Torah day and night.”
We have no record of their reply. But
Kiva and Celia were the ones who got the postcard and they were freethinkers.
They did not practice Judaism, and there was no frum community in
Pensacola. My zaidy was, in the end, a tzadik ne’ezav, a righteous man
abandoned – unlike the fate of my other zaidy, Eliezer Weinstock. Not only did
his son Joseph bring him over but his daughter, my mother, along with my father,
took him and his wife, our grandmother Leah, into their home and were careful
to run the home according to the religious standards of their righteous
parents.
Baruch Hashem, my father
didn’t follow the ways of his siblings. He married a frum meidle,
and she followed the ways of her righteous chasidic parents. Otherwise, where
would I be today?
