New Issue of Nshei Newsletter

Communicated

Yud Alef Nissan in the year 1915 was the Rebbe’s bar mitzvah. In the next N’shei Chabad Newsletter, we read Rebbetzin Chana’s diary describing that event:

After my son delivered his drasha, which made a strong impression on all the listeners, he broke into tears.

Many of the guests, seeing him cry, joined in and began to cry as well.

I found out that my husband had asked for a certain promise from our son. I did not know exactly what the request was, but I know that on Friday night, when my son finally agreed and gave his promise, there was great simchah in the house. The dancing lasted until late into the night…

We also read about Reb Levik’s successful campaign to get kosher l’Pesach matzah baked and distributed to Yidden under communism:

My husband achieved this all by traveling several times to Kharkov, where he pressed to obtain the approval of the Narkom, Council of People’s Commissars; the regional government authority of executive power, and then of Kalinin, the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, in Moscow…

Unfortunately, Reb Levik’s own Pesach was spent in prison for his “crimes” of keeping the Torah and spreading Yiddishkeit, as his wife concludes with:

Eight days before Pesach in 1939, my husband was arrested by the N.K.V.D. Knowing full well that he would not be home for the holiday, he asked to be permitted to take along two kilograms of matzah, which lay in a bundle…”
Read all about it in the next issue!

“How did we miss this?” asked Rishe Deitsch, Senior Editor of the N’shei Chabad Newsletter, when she was first introduced to Yanky Ascher and his work interviewing and photographing Jews in Russia.

On the banks of the Don River lies the city of Rostov. It was briefly the headquarters of Chabad-Lubavitch. The fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneerson (the Rebbe Rashab), fled Lubavitch in the wake of World War I and settled in Rostov. He passed away 97 years ago on Beis Nissan and is buried in Rostov. The Jewish community has struggled through decades of communism, leaving only embers—Jewish souls fighting to stay alive. It reached near annihilation during World War II, when 27,000 of its members were murdered in a single massacre.

Today, the community has reestablished itself as a vibrant hub of Jewish life. Under the leadership of Chabad shluchim Rabbi Chaim Danzinger and his wife, Kaila, the community is once again a welcoming home for Jews and Judaism.
As N’shei Chabad Newsletter editor Chaya Shuchat said, “Yanky Ascher’s work is a visually stunning and powerful tribute to Jewish survival and resilience in the former Soviet Union. The quotes of the survivors are brief but deliver maximum impact.”

“Eighty years of communism was unsuccessful in extinguishing the light of Judaism,” Yanky Ascher said. “The project, Souls on the Don, captures the modern-day journeys of Russia’s Jews and demonstrates that, despite the odds, the flame in their souls still shines.”

In the recent Shvat issue, in an article entitled “Is There Life After Death?”

Rabbi Gershon Schusterman addressed the phenomenon of people finding it difficult to remarry after the death of a spouse. People may feel that they are being “disloyal” to their deceased spouse by remarrying. Rabbi Schusterman brings Torah and chassidishe sources to prove that is not so.

In 1963, Mrs. Reisel (Ella) Zimmer, widow of Rabbi Uriel Zimmer, was actively involved in helping a young woman from a non-Lubavitcher family work out some complications in her engagement, which the Rebbe had endorsed, to a Lubavitcher bachur.

Mrs. Zimmer had accompanied them to their yechidus with the Rebbe. When their audience with the Rebbe concluded, the Rebbe asked, “Is Mrs. Zimmer here?”

They answered, “Yes, just outside the door.” The Rebbe asked them to ask
her if she would come in. The Rebbe said to Mrs. Zimmer: “The Chazal say that ‘if one prays for another, and they need the same thing, they are answered first’ (Bava Kama 92a). [You helped this couple, but] you, too, need to remarry [using the Yiddish term shtellen chuppah]…”

Her husband, Rabbi Uriel Zimmer, who had passed away in 1961, was a Renaissance man in ways too numerous to mention in this space. Suffice to say that he was a published author, knew 17 languages, was a translator at the U.N., and translated numerous books including the Tanya into Yiddish for Kehot. They had a wonderful marriage for 20 years, though they were childless.

Now, just 14 months after his passing, she, at age 40, was suddenly challenged
to confront the thought of remarriage.

Mrs. Zimmer was not prepared to see the Rebbe and certainly not to be told
by the Rebbe to remarry, and she became distressed.

She told the Rebbe, “How can I think of remarriage when Uriel is standing before my eyes?!”

The Rebbe responded:
“A spouse who passes away wants what is best for the surviving spouse and
does not have complete and final menuchah until that spouse remarries.”

After reading Rabbi Schusterman’s article, one woman, C. Davidman, whose parent had remarried when she was a teenager, wrote an essay for the N’shei Chabad Newsletter asking remarrying parents to consider the needs of their teenagers. It is the hope of the editors that her essay will provide insights into a teen’s inner life and inspire parents to find ways to make the experience positive for them too. In particular, Davidman pointed out two common mistakes remarrying parents may make. One is the surprise remarriage. As she writes:

I know of a number of cases in which children received phone calls from their parents during sleep-away camp announcing their engagement to someone the children had never met. Understandably, when the children are away the parents find themselves with more available time to invest in dating. The excitement can be overwhelming and the desire to formalize and announce it may be hard to contain. But think about the children! Is it fair to them? Picture your child, immersed in the camp experience, being called away from lunch to take an unexpected phone call from home. By the time he returns to the table, where the cheering and singing continues unabated, his life has completely changed! An entirely new and different reality awaits him when camp ends and he returns home, and he had no warning and absolutely no idea what to expect.

Another common mistake according to Davidman is what she terms “forced closeness.” For example, some remarrying parents insist that the teen must call the new step-parent “Mom/Ima/Mammeh” or “Dad/Abba/Tatteh” just like they called their real parent.

“I couldn’t handle that,” one Chabad rabbi who asked to remain anonymous, now 65, told the N’shei Chabad Newsletter as he recalled what happened when he was a teenager and his mother remarried after the death of his father. “I was fine with the whole remarriage, I liked the man and I was happy my mother now had someone. But when my mother wanted me to call him Tatteh, I just couldn’t. That caused the tension…”

To read the entire essay by C. Davidman, subscribe at nsheichabadnewsletter.com or buy it at any of these fine stores: Postmarkit, Marketplace, Empire Kosher, Koshertown, Flash, Judaica World and Merkaz Stam.