When the Whirlwind Hit

Rabbi Zushe Winner is a Chabad emissary in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, as well as the rosh yeshivah at Yeshivas Tomchei Tmimim – Chovevei Torah. He was interviewed by JEM My Encounter in May of 2021.

My mother came from a Munkatcher chasidic family, and a long line of Hungarian rabbis. Both her parents and some of her siblings were killed in the war but she survived Auschwitz and came to the US in 1946. She always was a woman with strong and pure faith. I remember her praying Mincha on Shabbat afternoons for half an hour, all the while wiping her tears with a handkerchief.

She and my father lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where I was born. But after a few years, my father sold our house and moved to an apartment at 848 Park Place, near the corner of Nostrand Avenue, in Crown Heights. At the time, many Jews were living in the neighborhood but they were mostly non-observant. As a result, my mother missed Williamsburg, where the streets felt Jewish and she was surrounded by familiar faces.

One day in the early fifties, she walked up to Eastern Parkway with her baby carriage and was happy to catch sight of a few chasidic looking young men.

“Who are they?” she asked.

“They’re from Lubavitch,” she was told. “The Lubavitcher Rebbe lives nearby.”

“I would like to speak to him,” she said, and she made an appointment to meet the Rebbe.

After explaining to the Rebbe what had been bothering her since the move, she told him that she wanted to convince her husband to go back to Williamsburg.

“One should never go backward,” the Rebbe told her.

“But what about the neighborhood?”

“Your husband can arrange with the owner to get some more Torah-observant neighbors in your building,” the Rebbe suggested.

Following the Rebbe’s advice, my father went ahead and spoke with the landlord. “If there are any available apartments,” he told the landlord, “I’ll find you a tenant.” He posted notices about vacancies in Crown Heights synagogues, and soon enough, the building was filled up with Torah-observant families from various communities. That was my mother’s first connection with the Rebbe.

My father had been born and raised in the Lithuanian chasidic community of Slonim, and spent part of the war in Shanghai. Before coming to America, he had actually been involved in the printing of Yesod HoAvodah, an important work by the first Slonimer Rebbe, and he continued to support the printing of Slonimer books afterward.

The Slonimer Rebbe whom my father had known in Europe, Rabbi Shlomo Weinberg, had been killed in the Holocaust, and for a few years after that, there was no official Slonimer Rebbe. So after immigrating to America, my father was seeking a Rebbe to connect to and for authentic chasidic Judaism, and I think he found that in the Rebbe. People of his generation had known what Judaism was like before the war and were concerned about their children growing up in America. And so my father thought that sending us to Lubavitch schools was the way to go.

My father met the Rebbe a few times, and in one of their audiences, the Rebbe told him to make sure to spend two hours studying Torah every day. Finding that time was hard: My father ran a successful real estate business out of a home office, managing everything on his own without any employees. Still, he would close the door to his office so that he wouldn’t be disturbed, and then he would learn and learn. Two hours was the minimum that the Rebbe expected, even for a businessman as busy as my father was. He even got my mother involved in the project. During one audience with my mother, the Rebbe made sure to ask her, “Does your husband learn Torah every day?”

Once, my father had a Halachic question pertaining to his work. Although he had only been in America for a few years, my father already owned a few mid-rise apartment buildings, one in partnership with a Slonimer chasid living in Israel.

Giving charity was very important to my father, so they wrote in their partnership documents that they would not take home any of the profit from rent until ten percent had been given to charity.

Now, they had bought the buildings with a mortgage, which they were paying off in regular installments. These payments included interest as well as “amortization,” which means paying off the principal of the loan.

The partners had only committed to giving charity on their profits after the expenses had been accounted for. However, my father wondered whether paying the principal could be considered an expense. Since this money just went towards increasing their equity in the building, he thought it might be considered profit and ten percent of it should go to charity as well.

In a letter he had written to his partner, and which I later saw, my father said that the Rebbe had told him to count payment of principal as part of the profit. “And we have to go with what the Lubavitcher Rebbe says,” my father concluded.

But a few years after this, in 1962, my father had a stroke, and he passed away a few days later. The funeral procession was held in front of 770, and the Rebbe – who was in his car ready to go to the resting place of the Previous Rebbe – got out of his car to walk along. I was just ten years old and the loss of my father left our family completely devastated; it felt like a whirlwind had gone through our lives. My mother, a young widow with five children, was left alone, and all my father’s responsibilities had fallen on her.

By this time, the Slonim chasidic court which had been destroyed by the war was rebuilt in Israel; there was a new Slonimer yeshivah and a new Slonimer Rebbe. So after hearing the news of my father’s passing, the leadership of the Slonimer yeshivah sent a letter to my mother, offering to take my oldest brother in to study in their yeshivah in Jerusalem.

My mother went to the Rebbe, and showed him the letter she had received from Jerusalem. “What should I do?” she asked.

“He is already in the Lubavitcher Yeshiva in New York with your other sons,” the Rebbe reasoned, “so let him stay where he is.”

I think that keeping her children in Lubavitch deepened her connection with the Rebbe, which she kept up throughout the years. As a child, I remember seeing her sit by the Rebbe crying about one issue or another. When my father was alive, she had never been involved in the business, so after his passing, she had to face a lot of questions as well as difficulties with the partner. But the Rebbe gave her a lot of guidance, and he invited her to discuss the issues further with his chief secretary, Rabbi Hodakov.

In one audience, my mother was sitting with the Rebbe, handkerchief in hand, asking one question after another. It was the job of Rabbi Groner, one of the Rebbe’s secretaries, to make sure that people didn’t take too much of the Rebbe’s time. But, when he opened the door to indicate that my mother should finish up, the Rebbe motioned for him to leave. The same thing happened a few minutes later when he tried to come in again. Instead, the Rebbe sat and listened to this brokenhearted widow and answered her questions about business, health, and everything else.

During difficult times, my mother turned to the Rebbe as a father figure, but it went even deeper than that. With her simple faith in G-d and, by extension, in His righteous tzaddikim, she truly believed in the Rebbe, and he offered her hope and inspiration, as well as Yiddishkeit for her and her children.