Shlichus With a Rough Start

By COLlive reporter

All beginnings are difficult, the Jewish sages said. For 2 Lubavitch bochurim who recently ended a Merkos Shlichus visitation to small Jewish communities in Chile the proverb came to life.

Zalmy Shemtov and Yossi Levy arrived in the narrow coastal South American country to help individual Jews reconnect with their heritage.

After meeting with the Chabad Shliach Rabbi Menashe Perman in the 770 lookalike Chabad House building, the two were off to the Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world according to National Geographic.

Locals in the cities of Iquique and Arica told them that “it hasn’t rained here in like a century, if not more.”

But the two had no hopes of influencing the weather. Rather, they quickly got to work – visiting the 40 local Jews offering them to put on Tefillin, hear the Shofar sounds and say a blessing.

Shemtov and Levy organized a special learning and activity program with the 6 Jewish children in the area.

During their stay, the young Lubavitchers also prepared 3 full course Shabbos meals which were well attended and included traditional Jewish melodies and commentary about the weekly Torah portion.

From there they headed south to the cities of Pucan and Temuco, where things didn’t turn out to be as bright.

“We weren’t feeling too good about the situation because we hadn’t gotten a Tefillin in like, 2 weeks,” they told COLlive.com about their search for over Bar Mitzvah age Jews to do the Mitzvah.

But, as they had learned to never to give up hope, on their final day before returning to the Santiago capital they met an 82 year-old Jew.

Extremely delighted to meet another Jewish soul, the two listened to his life story and were shocked to hear that he had, in fact, never put on Tefillin before (a “karkafta” in Lubavitch terms).

As they intended to do, but with even more vigor than before, they took out a pair of Tefillim and celebrated this elder Jew’s Bar Mitzvah.