The most moving thing of all is seeing how the children absorb the experience of being in 770. We thought the kids would be excited by the plane trip and new sights, but they actually internalized all the moments of k’dusha. * R’ Yechiel Kupchik relates.
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Our feeling was that the Rebbe was schlepping us to 770,” began R’ Yechiel Kupchik, principal of a Chabad elementary school in Beit Shemesh, describing his family trip to the Rebbe in the Hakhel year.
At the beginning of the Hakhel year, my wife and I knew that we were taking our family to the Rebbe. Since both my wife and I are employed by the Education Ministry, we were very limited as to possible times. Our decision kept on getting postponed, from month to month, and it was already Av and we still did not have tickets.
One day followed another. I knew that the first thing I had to do to get things moving was obtain a bank loan, but work filled all my time. The one who called and offered a loan was the bank! The bank officer told me about a loan with a generous payback plan. Since we were already in the process of switching to a different bank, we told them we had gotten an offer of a loan from the other bank. They promised us a loan with a better rate as a special for those working in education.
It was astonishing. I was busy at work and every day I got calls from both banks, each informing me of lower borrowing rates. When it reached as low as it would go, we took the loan and designated the money toward a trip to the Rebbe.
Then we had to arrange visas to the US. Within two days we had an appointment at the consulate, which was unusually quick. My wife went with the children. She took her salary receipts from the Education Ministry and other documents and told the official she wanted to travel with the children to the Lubavitcher Rebbe for the Hakhel year. He didn’t even let her finish her sentence and told her that the visas would arrive at our house on Wednesday. He wasn’t even interested in looking at any of the papers she brought. Within half an hour she was out of there.
On Sunday, a postman knocked on our door and delivered all the passports and visas and we immediately began looking for tickets for seven people, two parents and five children. The most reasonable tickets were close to 10,000 dollars with a long stopover in Spain or Philadelphia.
We kept nudging the travel agent to find us cheaper tickets. We knew we could not fly with five children and have a ten-hour stopover, but a direct flight at this time of year would be so much more expensive.
In the meantime, I attended an educational conference in Nir Etzyon and hoped for the best. A day went by and the travel agent called me with amazing news. At one o’clock that day there was a direct flight to New York on El-Al with room for our family. The cost? Only five thousand dollars. I was in shock. “You must decide immediately,” he said.
We didn’t waste a moment. We felt that the Rebbe was inviting us with a direct flight and a relatively small expense. I updated my wife and immediately left Nir Etzyon for our home in Beit Shemesh. My wife left her parents’ home in Bat Yam.
At top speed, we packed our suitcases and even managed to load up some extra suitcases that we were given to bring to New York. The money we got for taking the extra luggage covered part of the cost of our tickets.
Although this was something we wanted, we felt that the Rebbe was really seeing to it that we go to him.
In extraordinary divine providence, when we got back home we found a letter from the Education Ministry in our mailbox which said that they had decided to give my wife 3600 shekels. We hadn’t even asked for it. That was precisely the amount we had spent on our visas.
The most moving thing of all is seeing how the children absorbed the experience of being in 770. We thought the kids would be excited by the plane trip and new sights, but they internalized all the moments of k’dusha. We had the z’chus of being in the Rebbe’s presence on 15 Av and the hilula on 20 Av.
Since then, every Motzaei Shabbos, as we watch the video “Lirot et Malkeinu,” I hear the children talking among themselves about whether they were in that corner of 770 and whether they passed through the door the Rebbe just passed through … They ask where the Rebbe stands and where the people at the farbrengen sit.
After we returned home and digested the experience, thinking about how we went to the Rebbe as a family, we were amazed by how divine providence was openly involved in every detail of the trip. It was this that brought us to the Rebbe. Everything went relatively easily and even the cost was way lower than we had expected.