Stories Of Greatness

The commandment to eat matzah on the holiday of Pesach is prefaced with the words: “And you shall guard the matzos.” Jewish tradition calls for keeping watch over the matzah from the time the wheat is taken to the mill to be ground into flour, and it is kept under careful supervision to ensure that it does not come into contact with water or any other moisture. The grinding, packing, and transporting of the wheat from the mill to the bakery is done under the strictest supervision, to ensure that it does not come into contact with water, and all of the utensils used for processing the wheat must be clean and dry.

The early 1950s was an especially terrible time for Jews in the Soviet Union, a period filled with terror and dread. With a maniacal tyrant leading the country, Joseph Stalin’s infamous “Doctors’ Plot” was at its peak, and Russia’s Jewish physicians were disappearing rapidly. People were being purged left and right, never to be heard from again. Around the world, Jews wept and pleaded for Divine salvation, but there was none yet in sight.

The power of t’shuvah is great. Sometimes, all it needs is a little nudge from the right source.

The story is told of a Yerushalmi Torah scholar from Meah Shearim, who was studying a certain topic and realized that he needed a rare sefer that was not commonly found in most yeshivos and shuls. He knew that in the large central library in Jerusalem, there was an extensive collection of rare s’farim and decided to go there in the hopes of locating the sefer. As this was to be an all-day outing for him, he packed himself a lunch – an egg sandwich – and headed off to the library.

The Gemara says that rich people are stingy. Rav Shimon Sofer zt”l explains that if a rich person was not stingy, his tz’dakah would be meaningless. Hashem makes him stingy by nature so that parting with his money will be a challenge, even though financially speaking it is not. This way, he, too, can earn the great mitzvah of tz’dakah with m’siras nefesh just like his less affluent brethren, who are parting with money that they can ill afford to part with.

In the early part of the 20^th century, a young girl stood near her father on the dock of a Polish harbor, a steamer trunk at her feet. Out of her nine siblings, 12-year-old Rose was the child chosen to be sent to the “golden land,” America. Life in Poland was hard, hunger a constant visitor in her home. After much scraping and pinching, her family saved enough for a single one-way ticket to the United States. And Rose, the youngest of the nine, was the lucky one chosen to go.

In 1929, Rav Boruch Ber Leibowitz zt”l and his son-in-law, Rav Reuven Grozovsky zt”l arrived in New York City to raise direly needed funds for the Kamenitz Yeshivah. On every occasion that Rav Boruch Ber spoke, he described the material poverty and contrasting spiritual riches of the yeshivah. But money was hard to come by; times were tough, and the language barrier made things all the more difficult. Fortunately, they found a native of Kamenitz who had lived in the United States for some time, Rav Yitzchok Tendler zt”l, rabbi of the Kamenitzer Shul in New York, and rosh yeshivah in Yeshiva Rabbi Jacob Joseph, who volunteered to help them. His task was immense, bridging the gap between two spiritual giants and the land of materialism and secularism. To this, add fund-raising during the Depression. The results could not be very lucrative.