As a young boy with a healthy sense of curiosity, I wanted to know why R’ Schneersohn had called for my father at this late hour. * It was only years later that I heard what happened at a “din Torah” that took place that night between the rav and his wife with my father as the adjudicator, and his creative “p’sak.
The following story happened Erev Pesach. But first some background.
Little by little, Anash refugees left the DP camps. Many of them, including my parents, arrived in Paris, poor and bereft of everything. The Joint continued to help out and rented some buildings for them to live in. These were buildings that had formerly served as hotels. I was born in the Hotel Prima. About two years later my parents moved to the Hotel Moderne where I grew up and spent my childhood.
When I turned six, despite my young age, my father sent me to Brunoy to learn in Yeshivas Tomchei T’mimim by the mashpia, R’ Nissan Nemanov. My father came to visit me once a week and I saw my mother once a month when I went home for Shabbos.
As far as I recall, the hotel had four stories plus a ground floor. On the ground floor and the three lower floors lived about thirty families. On the fourth floor was a shul. I still remember some of the neighbors who lived on our floor: R’ Hillel Pevsner, R’ Hillel Asimov, R’ Nissan Pinson, R’ Eliyahu Haft, R’ Yisroel Noach Blizinsky and his son, R’ Aharon Yosef, R’ Leibel Eidelman, R’ Yehuda Chein, R’ Chaim Lipa Levin, and their families. I also remember Mrs. Roza Kleinman. I may have forgotten someone but that is what I remember.
IMPOVERISHED
HOTEL LIVING
Our family was assigned two rooms, one on the second floor for my parents and me and one additional small room on the third floor for my sisters. Our room served as a living room, dining room, and all-around room during the day. At night, it was a bedroom. I remember that there was a wooden table in the center with four chairs around it. There was no other furniture, but I think there were some crates that served as cupboards and that contained everything we owned.
After supper we would take the folding beds out from under the table, spread covers and pillows that were kept somewhere in the room, and prepare the room for sleeping. We were five people, my father, mother, two older sisters, and me, but we had only four beds (I think those were the beds my parents got from the Joint as soon as they came to Paris and I wasn’t born yet). If we would have gotten another bed from the Joint, for me, there would have been no room to put it.
On our floor there was an icebox that was shared by all the neighbors. The icebox had three levels. In the upper compartment they put a block of ice every day. Food was placed in the middle compartment, and the bottom level was used to collect the melting ice. You bought the block of ice every day from the iceman. It was very smooth and slippery and in order not to have it slide out of your hands, you had to hug it tight. But we improvised a way of holding it with a sort of tongs which prevented it from slipping. We had to clean the icebox every day from the melted ice. We did not use it in the winter. Instead, we put whatever needed to be kept cool out on the windowsill.
Out of one window of the room hung a sack with sour milk in it which my mother used to make cheese. It dripped steadily down into the courtyard and white cheese remained behind. I wasn’t a particularly picky child but I could not eat that cheese. Until today, when I recall the odor that wafted from that bag, it arouses in me a feeling of revulsion.
About ten families lived on our floor but there were only two bathrooms. Can you picture the shouting that went on every morning and the banging on the bathroom doors?
The kitchen was shared by all the families on the floor. On every floor a small room was designated as the kitchen which had two or three gas burners, each one having one or two fires underneath. Every balabusta had to measure, mix and prepare food in a pot in her room and then schlep the pot to the kitchen to put it on the fire. Each burner served several neighbors and there was a schedule of who cooked when. But there was always a line in front of the kitchen of women waiting impatiently to prepare food for their families.
Although we all lived together in harmony and were devoted, heart and soul, to one another, when the older people waited for a cup of tea and babies needed their hot cereal, and the burner was occupied, there was no lack of disputes.
As for hot water for washing, that was unheard of. Once a week we went to the municipal bathhouse where there were separate hours for men and women. The rest of the week we washed our hands and face in cold water. When I look back, it is hard to understand how we lived under those conditions.
IN RABBI SCHNEERSOHN’S NEIGHBORHOOD
In 5717, after my sisters went to the United States and married and my father began supporting himself and earned a bit, we were able to leave the “hotel” and move to our own apartment. It was a five star apartment relative to the times and it was a few streets away from the hotel. My father rented it from the Chassidishe rav, R’ Shneur Zalman Schneersohn who lived in the same house. The apartment consisted of a spacious room which served as the dining room, a bedroom, and a small room that was meant to be a clothes closet but we turned it into a kitchen. We had our own bathroom and even had hot water from the faucet.
I have very pleasant memories of this period of time. I remember the spiritual wealth of those days. I remember some of the stories that R’ Zalman Schneersohn told me and the niggunim that he taught me when I came home. I was the only child there, at that time, and he loved having me around. With my father’s encouragement, I observed and learned from his ways.
R’ Schneersohn was a baal mesirus nefesh. The other person was more important to him than himself and he fully complied with the Chassidic aphorism, “mine is yours.”
He himself was destitute, but whoever asked him for help, got it. To all appearances he conducted himself expansively and on Shabbos he had many guests at his table. His apartment was considered an exclusive one and he had a very valuable library which gave people the feeling that they were in the home of a wealthy man. He gave shiurim in French to scientists, doctors and students, and knew people in high positions in all fields. However, despite his good connections, he did not have parnasa. When someone asked him for a loan and he did not have the money, he would borrow it from others in order to lend it.
BEYOND THE CRACK
IN THE DOOR
It was in the days leading up to Pesach. Yeshiva had ended and I was home. Late at night, about ten or eleven o’clock, I heard R’ Zalman Schneersohn call me, “Zalminka, where are you?”
I left our apartment and went to his magnificent office where he said, “My child, please ask your father to come here.”
I went to call my father. My father treated the rav with great respect, both because he was a rav but mainly because he was from the Schneersohn family. He went to his office immediately. My father wasn’t surprised by the request and the lateness of the hour. He thought Rav Schneersohn wanted to borrow money for Pesach expenses but I sensed that this time, the request was different.
I remained in our apartment but, as any normal child, I was curious to know why the rav had called for my father at this late hour. After a few minutes I could not restrain myself and went on tiptoes from our apartment toward the rav’s apartment. I lay on the floor with my ear near the crack at the threshold.
My mother realized I had left the apartment and realized where I had gone. She waited a few minutes and when I did not return she went to look for me and caught me snooping. She took me right back to bed, though not before “giving it” to me. My father remained in the office a long time and by the time he came back I was already asleep.
Although I was very curious about why R’ Schneersohn had called my father, it did not occur to me to ask because I was terrified that my mother had told my father about my mischief. If I mentioned one word about that night, I would “get it” again. So I kept quiet.
I was ten years old at the time and typical of children, I forgot about the matter.
A MOVING “DIN TORAH” BETWEEN THE RAV AND REBBETZIN
Quite a few years later, when we were living in New York, and R’ Schneersohn had also moved to New York, my father would visit him often and I nearly always went along with him. One time, on our way back from one of those visits, while extolling the rav, my father told me what happened that night in Paris, in R’ Schneersohn’s office, behind the closed door.
My father entered the office and found not only R’ Schneersohn but also Rebbetzin Sarah. She began by saying, “R’ Chaikel, I want to take my husband to a din Torah and I want to ask you to be the judge for us and pasken who is right.”
My father tried getting out of it by saying he wasn’t a rav, and certainly not a posek, how would he know how to pasken? But the rebbetzin said, “You will pasken better than other rabbanim and poskim. Both of us, my husband and I, rely on you and commit to doing as you say.”
Having no choice, my father agreed. The Schneersohns made a binding exchange as is customary, and the rebbetzin, the plaintiff, began:
“It is before Pesach and we have nothing for Yom Tov, no matza, no wine, no meat, no fish. We don’t even have pieces of bread for the B’dikas Chametz. If I had ten pieces of bread, I would sit down and eat them with a cup of tea!
“Today I asked my husband for money for Yom Tov and he told me that he had nothing. I began to shout, gevald! With my own eyes I saw, a few days ago, someone giving you an envelope full of dollars. What did you do with the money?
“R’ Chaikel, do you know what he told me? He calmly said, ‘I gave the money to tz’daka to those who need money for Pesach.’
“‘What about us? Aren’t we needy?’ I asked. ‘You want to give tz’daka? Fine, but leave a little bit for the household expenses for the upcoming Yom Tov!’”
My father heard her out and thought she was right, but he had to listen to the other side. How would the rav justify himself? What could he say?
R’ Schneersohn began to speak:
“There is a wealthy Jew by the name of R’ Chaim who needed to arrange a heter Meia rabbanim (a halachic means to enable a man to marry a second wife despite the enactment of Rabbeinu Gershom, in the instance where the first wife has gone mad and cannot accept a get. According to Halacha, it is necessary for at least one hundred rabbanim to consent in order to rescind the enactment) and he came to me for my help.
“After exchanging letters with a hundred rabbanim, which took tremendous effort because of the slowness of the mail, until they wrote a letter and until they sent it, and until it reached its destination and until a response was received and the process was started over with another rav, a lot of time went by. On Rosh Chodesh Nissan, I finally arranged the get. R’ Chaim, was very appreciative of the work that I put into this and he brought me $5000 to pay me for my efforts in addition to my expenses.
“While the dollars were still warming my heart and my pocket, a Lubavitcher came to me whose name I cannot disclose, and he told me that he has a large family and there is no bread to eat and no clothes to wear and there is no money for Yom Tov. He told me he makes great efforts so that people will not know of his situation, so people assume he has parnasa, but now, before Pesach, he had no choice but to ask for help. He burst into tears and asked me to have pity on him and help get him on his feet before it was too late.
“So R’ Chaikel, what could I do? Tell me what you would have done in my place? I thought, since becoming a rav, a sum like this has not come into my possession. Was it not for a situation like this that I received it? Wasn’t hashgacha pratis showing me clearly that I had to get this man on his feet?
“I took out the money and right away, before I could change my mind, I gave him all the money along with the envelope. It did not occur to me to take any of the money for myself. If you will ask, how will we manage for Pesach? Hashem will help. In the worst case, I assume that when Chaikel will loudly say kol dichfin, we will join him for the seder and he surely won’t chase us out.”
FATHER’S ORIGINAL P’SAK
My father told me that when he heard this story, he was struck silent. On the one hand, my father admired the rav’s action but, on the other hand, the rebbetzin was right. He decided as follows:
“I, R’ Chaikel, agree to give the rebbetzin the money she needs for the Yom Tov expenses, so that will satisfy her. However, I am giving it on condition that I am a partner in the mitzva the rav fulfilled. I ask that the rav split the mitzva of ‘azov taazov imo’ and Maos Chittim with me.”
R’ Schneersohn and my father made another binding exchange to ratify the new deal and all parties were satisfied. The Rebbetzin, because she had what she needed for Yom Tov; the rav, because he fulfilled the mitzva and without any grievances on the part of his wife; and my father, because he got a share of this lofty mitzva.
When my father told me the story, my admiration for my father went up sevenfold for his cleverness and the original idea he proposed.