Recently, I was leafing through Mishpacha magazine. Among the articles was one entitled “Guardians of the City.” It summarized the lives of rabbis who arrived in America when it was still a spiritual wasteland. The article suggests that, during our vacation time, we take a road trip to visit the kevarim of almost forgotten Torah leaders in quaint locations around North America.
The first “hidden giant” was Rav
Michoel Eliezer Forshlager,1884-1958, who is buried right here in Baltimore’s B’nai
Israel Cemetery. I have seen how, over the years, his grave has been turned
into a shrine, with place for candles to be lit by those who go there to pray. Rav
Forshlager is buried in the same row as my wife Feigi’s father, Chester Siegel,
in a section of this large cemetery reserved for shomrei Shabbos.
However, Rav Forshlager is not the
topic of this article. Rather, as I continued turning the pages of the magazine,
I came to an article that resonated with my own family history. In Winnipeg,
Manitoba, Canada, there is the grave of Rav Shmuel Avraham Abba Twersky, zt”l,
the Makarov-Winnipeg Rebbe. Let me tell you of my familial relationship with
this rebbe’s father.
Many years ago, I took a tape
recorder with me down to my birthplace, Montgomery, Alabama, and interviewed
family members. I asked my mother’s older brother, Joseph Weinstock, to tell me
in Yiddish about his early life, before he came to America. We come from
Polona, the town of the Toldos Yaakov Yosef in the Ukraine. Uncle Joe told me
that his father, my Zeidi Eliezer, was a Makarover chasid. No one I knew
had ever heard of the Makarover Rebbe until I asked Rabbi Eichenstein about him
many years later.
Zeidi used to go to Berdichev and
served as a gabbai for Reb Moshe Mordechai. In 1914, Uncle Joe made
plans to flee Ukraine and go to America. He heard that the American millionaire
Jacob Schiff was sponsoring the emigration of Russian Jews. The catch was that
you had to disembark in Galveston, Texas. Mr. Schiff wanted to spread out the
immigrants beyond New York and thought that this might slow down efforts to cut
off Jewish migration from Eastern Europe. Schiff paid for the emigration of
14,000 Russian Jews. They arrived in Galveston and were then sent to locations
in the Midwest and South.
Uncle Joe went to Berdichev and
sought a bracha from the Makarover Rebbe, Rav Moshe Mordechai. The Rebbe
blessed him and asked that, once he was settled in America, to please bring
over the Rebbe and establish a Makarover kloiz (shul). When telling this
to me, Uncle Joe laughed because of how unimaginable a Makarover kloiz
would have been in Montgomery, Alabama, where Mr. Schiff’s plan sent him.
Rav Moshe Mordechai passed away in
1920, and Rav Shmuel Abba inherited the Makarover rabbinate. Around this time,
World War I was raging and following that, the Russian Civil War. It was a
period of brutal and deadly pogroms, mostly conducted by Ukrainian
nationalists. Upwards of 100,000 Jews were slaughtered by the Ukrainians. My zeidi
only had one eyeball. My mother told me that the other one was knocked out in a
pogrom.
When the First World War ended,
Uncle Joe was able to secure one visa in 1923 for his father, mother, and
single sister and brother. He was able to bring my mother to America, and that’s
why we are alive. However, the newly coronated Rebbe and his family were not so
lucky. He fled Ukraine to Riga, Latvia. He tried several times to get a visa to
America. He got offers of employment in New York, Chicago, and Chelsea,
Massachusetts but the United States still refused him a visa. In 1927, he
received permission to emigrate to Canada. It took another two years before he
got entry papers for his family.
At this point in the story, our
direct connection to Makarover chasidus ends. Or does it? You see, Jacob
Schiff sent thousands of Russian young men all over the American heartland.
Very few of them remained shomer Shabbos. In fact, the posters
advertising the Galveston Plan specifically stated that it would be hard for
the immigrants to observe Shabbos in the New World. My Uncle Joe was a shomer
Shabbos in Montgomery, Alabama. He was the most observant layman in our
shul, and he was so devoted to authentic Yiddishkeit that, once the shul turned
Conservative, he and Aunt Rose left Montgomery and spent every Rosh Hashanah
and Yom Kippur in Israel. Is it possible the bracha of Rav Moshe
Mordechai protected him?
Some of you know that I recently
lost my last surviving sibling, my sister Elsie Blum. Over a year ago, my
daughter Shani, who lives in Richmond, Virginia, called me and suggested that
the two of us visit Elsie. She said that Elsie’s mind was sharp but her body
was weakening. “Let’s go now and not wait for the end.” Because Shani came up
and flew with me, she bought and paid for the ticket the rental car, and the
hotel rooms. Without her, I could not have done it. We visited Elsie in her
suite in a very nice assisted living facility in Fort Worth.
I asked my sister to tell me about
our grandparents. My Bubby Leah died before I was born. That’s why I am named
Leonard. My Zeidi Eliezer Weinstock was senile when I was young and died when I
was eight. So, I really had no relationship with either of them. Elsie was 15
years older, and she literally grew up in close proximity to her grandparents. You
see, in the old house in the old neighborhood, there were three bedrooms. My parents
slept in one, my two older brothers, Herman (17 years older than me) and Albert
(13 years older) slept in the second bedroom, and the third bedroom had two
beds, one for Zeidi Eliezer, and the other one was shared by Bubbe and Elsie. Elsie
grew up sleeping in the same bed as her grandmother and they were very close in
every way.
I asked Elsie if any of my mother’s
siblings were left behind in Ukraine. She said that yes, two, who were both
married, Henoch and Elka. Elsie said that every night, she and Bubbe said “Krishma”
together, and Bubbe prayed that her children were still alive. Under Stalin, it
was not possible to communicate by mail, and then the Nazis came and shot the
Jews of the Ukraine. One other sister, Rochel, and her husband Avrohom
Chudnowski, did go to Cuba. From this, I learned that Elsie grew up saying the
Shema every night with her Bubby. I think it had an impression on her.
Elsie told us that Zeidi Eliezer
was so strict that he would not eat meat or chicken in America. He remained the
same Makarover chasid in Alabama as he had been in Polona. Zeidi had a
minyan every weeknight in our home. One evening, Elsie was sitting on the front
porch, which is how you cooled off back in the 1940s. A car pulled up and a man
got out and asked Elsie, “Is this the house where you can say Kaddish?
We are passing through from Columbus, Georgia, and they told us that we can say
Kaddish at this house.” Elsie told them they had the correct house and to come
on in.
We had a lovely visit with my
sister and with her son Marvin, who is an attorney in Fort Worth. Marvin told
us all about the latest doings of his precocious daughter Lizzy Savetsky. This
leads to another thread in the story.
I believe the bracha of Rav
Moshe Mordechai helped keep my Uncle Joe frum, and he was a major
influence on my thinking. I believe that Elsie’s Krishma with her Bubby
also had a long-term impact. So here goes:
After high school, Elsie won a
scholarship to a Zionist Retreat, Brandeis Institute. There she met Julius, who
was from Fort Worth, Texas. A year later, they were married. Elsie adapted to
the standards of Fort Worth. She was as observant as everyone else in their
shul. She and Julius raised their two sons to be very Jewish, but their level
of observance was the same as everyone else in their town. Their son Marvin
became a very successful estate attorney, and he sent his two children to Trinity
Valley, the fanciest private school in Fort Worth. Their daughter Lizzy went on
a Birthright trip to Israel.
Lizzy chose to attend New York
University because she planned a career on stage. She attended a Birthright reunion
and met a boy there. They were attracted to each other, but there was an issue.
The boy was from a shomer Shabbos family in Woodmere, and he told Lizzy
that if they were to get serious, she would have to become observant. She had
no idea what that entailed. So, one fine day, I got a phone call from my great
niece, Lizzy. “Uncle Leonard, I have a boyfriend, Ira. He is Orthodox. What do
I do?”
I called Rabbi Jonathan Schippel
of Birthright, and he took it from there. Lizzy was brought into the fold, so
to speak and learned enough to commit to observance. Ira became a plastic surgeon,
and they live on the Upper East Side, where they belong to a shul called the
Alt Neu shul. Lizzy developed a very successful career as an influencer,
primarily devoted to women’s fashion. Several years ago, she made a major
change. She stopped pushing clothes and devoted her program to Israel and
Judaism. Lizzy Savetsky has 503,000 followers on Instagram. She is one of the
top influencers promoting pro-Israel and pro-Judaism values on the internet.
She is hired to speak all over the country and associates with the upper crust
of the pro-Israel community. She is flown to Israel often for conferences.
If you look up Lizzy’s
information, you will see prominently pictured her great-grandfather Eliezer
Weinstock, who is clearly missing one eyeball. She is proud of her heritage and
doing quite well championing the State of Israel. She can often be seen on the
internet expressing her distaste for the current mayor of New York. My sister
Elsie used to tell Lizzy to run for mayor herself. Who knows? The girl has
ambition and charisma.
I will close with what I said at
the funeral of my dear sister. Elsie was Jewish in her kishkes. That is
something you do not learn in school but from your home and family. She passed
this on to her children and grandchildren, I believe that Elsie saying kriyas
Shema every night with her righteous bubby gave her the merit, the zechus,
that 90 years later, Elsie has a granddaughter who is shomeret Shabbos
and whose children attend an Orthodox day school together with my grandchildren.
Yes, there is zechus avos,
and Hashem has given my Zeidi and Bubby nachas in Gan Eden.
