The Chabad Couple Who Rescued Me

Chana Chava Perton – N’shei Chabad Newsletter

Some people will swear by luck.
Good luck, bad luck; that sort of thing.
Me? I don’t believe in luck. I believe in hashgachah.
If it is meant to happen, it will, and there is no force on earth that can stop that. I have given up stressing over getting places on time, and have learned to enjoy the ride.

It began when I was about thirteen. I had never really traveled alone before then. Our family had moved several times and we had gone on countless car trips, but solo flight for me did not begin in earnest until I turned thirteen. My family was then living in Ottawa, Canada, while I traveled to Denver for high school. On my first flight to Denver, my passport was stolen, and I couldn’t fly home until my birth certificate was mailed out.

The next time I flew from Denver to Ottawa, my flight was delayed for three hours and I barely made my connecting flight. My luggage wasn’t as fortunate – my bags arrived the next Wednesday. It seems as though I have an effect on planes and airports. You might want to check if I’m on your flight before you book. If you are, plan for delays, turbulence, cancellations, detours – you name it and it will happen.

But I do not believe it’s my bad luck. It’s my opportunity. Over the past six years of traveling, I have met incredible people from all branches of Judaism and learned many interesting things in the process. However, there is one particular family that is always mentioned whenever I start telling my airport adventures. In fact, this family shaped my entire traveling philosophy. We lost the slip of paper with their name and address long ago, but maybe they will read this story and remember me: the lost little unaccompanied minor they rescued five years ago.

It was during our Chanukah break, and I headed to the Denver airport for my flight home to Canada, with a stopover in Washington, D.C. I got there only to discover that the flight was canceled. Nothing new for me. The next morning, my dorm mother drove me to the airport for Round Two, helped me check in, and turned me over to a flight attendant. I look much younger than I am and the airlines insisted on keeping me as an unaccompanied minor until I was a little over sixteen. I think their logic was, if they couldn’t tell how old I was, then the people who stalk airports preying on little girls wouldn’t be able to figure out that I was a big girl either.

The attendant introduced herself, brought me to the gate and then told me that although the monitor indicated that we were scheduled to leave on time, a short delay would soon be announced. I wasn’t surprised. Twenty minutes later, the monitor told us that we would need to be patient for another 20 minutes. A small defect had been discovered during the airplane’s routine between-flights check. Forty minutes passed. An hour.

“Flight 1450 scheduled to Dulles has been rerouted. All passengers of Flight 1450 are asked to please make their way to Gate B34.”

Well, it was to be expected, I guess. I sighed, shouldered my carry-on and followed my friendly flight attendant to the new gate. We boarded, took off and were served our complimentary drinks. I settled down to watch the lights sparkle down below. That was the only redeeming factor of flight, in my fourteen-year-old opinion – the view from an airplane window.

While I was enjoying the scenery, my mother, down below and far away, was on the phone. She had taken to tracking every plane I boarded (or didn’t board!) so that she could clean up any messes I left behind at airports. When she realized how late my first flight had left, she knew there was no way I would be able to catch my connecting flight from Washington, D.C., to Ottawa. First she called the airline to find out if there were any other flights that night. There were none. Then she called our family’s rabbi in Baltimore, which was nearby, to see if he could arrange for someone to pick me up. He found a girl from Silver Spring who said she could drive down and get me. Fifteen minutes later, though, it turned out that she couldn’t. My mother called the airport again.

“My fourteen-year-old daughter is arriving on flight 1450 from Denver and she is going to have a panic attack when she finds out she is stuck overnight in Dulles International.”

She was exaggerating, of course. I did not have panic attacks. Not really.

“Ma’am, one of our representatives will meet your daughter at the gate and will accompany her to a hotel. They will stay with her overnight and bring her back in the morning for a new flight.”

“That’s fine, then.”

No, it was not. I deplaned and this short little lady with big teeth and frizzy hair threw her arms around me and gushed, “Darling! You’ve missed your plane, you poor, poor thing! But don’t you worry. You know why?” She looked at me, nodding her head as if I really knew the answer, but was too shy to say it. So she helped me out.

“Because you and I are going to spend the night at a hotel, and pop popcorn and watch movies all night long! And then tomorrow we’ll put you on a plane back home! Isn’t that great!?”

I think that is when I started crying. I demanded to speak to my mother (all prisoners get one phone call, right?). When my mother heard me crying, she told me to put my flight attendant on the phone. My flight attendant deflected the call to a tall, blonde attendant with a strong British accent. “No, we cannot release her. No, we are her guardians right now. No. No. We have a responsibility, you understand. No. Well… if they are her grandparents…Yes. I see. Here she is.” Tall blonde flight attendant handed me the phone. “Chana Chava, I need you to listen to me, okay?” I sniffled. My mother continued, “I am going to call Chabad of Virginia. I am going to see if I can get someone out there to pick you up. When they come, you need to pretend that they are your grandparents; otherwise the airline won’t let you go.”

Less than an hour later, a couple showed up. I hugged the woman fiercely, smiled, and waved goodbye to the attendants and the lady with the frizzy hair and popcorn plans. I got into their car.

Does that make sense to you? Fourteen years old and smart enough to know that I did not want to spend the night with some strange lady, even if she was an airline employee hired for just that purpose. Yet, without a question, I got into the car with a random couple, because they had been sent by my parents and they were Chabad.

It made sense to me. My family moved from city to city every four years or so, and Chabad was a constant of my childhood. We are not Lubavitch, but I had gone to Camp Gan Izzy as a little girl. My friends were usually Chabad girls, because they were the only other religious girls in the small towns where we lived. My father would always tell us that we owe a great debt to Chabad, because they were willing to roll up their sleeves and help the people that the rest of us tend to overlook. So to me, no, it was not weird to trust a couple sent by Chabad. It was in line with everything I had ever known.

It was about midnight when they arrived, gathered my luggage and drove me out to their house in Virginia. I remember that the husband had a great sense of humor. He really helped ease my nerves. The wife was as sweet as any grandmother could be. They served me food – I had pretty much eaten nothing all day except one bag of airline pretzels and a Coke! They also gave me a bedroom, towels, and a shower. The best part of the deal was that I got to sleep with their cat, Einstein.

I remember the wife telling me how Einstein was no Einstein (at fourteen years old and at midnight, that was the funniest joke ever). I love cats, so to sleep with Einstein was a dream come true.

They woke me up at five so that I could eat breakfast and get to the airport in time to catch my next flight. In case it is not clear, this meant that after settling me in at midnight, the wife woke up at 4:30 in the morning, made pancakes, eggs and waffles, set the table as though I were a visiting dignitary, and handed me a bagged lunch before driving me to the airport. Shall I reiterate that she did not know me before that night? Since that day, whenever we refer to that couple in my family, we call them The Chabad Couple. We feel that they truly represent everything that Chabad strives to accomplish.

Right after Shabbos Chanukah, my brother, who was learning in Baltimore, phoned home. “Ima, did Chana have a hard time at the airport again?” “Why, yes; but how could you have known that? She only got in Erev Shabbos and you missed your call this week.”

“Well, Rabbi Tendler [our family’s Rav and the principal of Ner Israel’s High School] gave a Shabbos Chanukah drashah and it was all about ahavas Yisroel. He told a story of this teenage girl who got stuck in Dulles just this past week and was rescued by Chabad… that stuff only happens to Chana Chava.”

“What did the Rabbi say?” “He told us that even though non-chassidim might sometimes have trouble understanding chassidim, we can definitely learn ahavas Yisroel from them. That a couple should come out, in the middle of the night, to help a strange girl – only among the Jews do we see such a phenomenon; and even among the Jews, Chabad is something special…” …So The Chabad Couple did get recognition, not just from me, not just from my family, but from the entire Ner Yisroel Mechinah. Oh, but the story didn’t end there. Because, as I said before, my life is not run by luck, but by hashgachah.

The next year, Yom Kippur was on a Wednesday night and Thursday. I had a flight from Denver that left Tuesday afternoon and would get me home to Canada on Tuesday night around ten. Guess where my connection was? My first flight was delayed and sure enough, ten o’clock at night I found myself alone with a flight attendant in Dulles International Airport. As though Hashem wanted to make it abundantly clear that history did indeed repeat itself, the flight attendant was that same tall blonde British one. Really. I don’t know if she recognized me, but all I could think was here we go again.

“Can I call my mother, please?” She gave me the phone. “Ima, please, please, PLEASE tell me you’ve found someone to pick me up!” “Don’t worry, Chana Chava, I called Chabad and they are sending someone to pick you up right now. They said to pretend they’re your aunt and uncle or you won’t be released to them.”

I am not sure which of us was more surprised: my Chabad Couple from Virginia or me. It was a reunion of sorts. We were soon caught up. They had bought a new car over the last year, their son had become a chosson… Meanwhile, my family had moved to Montreal and I had grown two inches (of which I was exceedingly proud). I got the same bedroom again and Einstein came in to sleep with me. The whole time I was amazed at how calm and cheerful they were about fetching me in the middle of the night – again.

I hate waking up early, and this was the second time in about a year (that I knew of) that the wife woke up at 4:30 in the morning to prepare a whole breakfast spread for me, who was woken up at five.

The next morning they drove me back to the airport. I thanked the couple, found my gate, and surprisingly was able to board on time. Soon we were sitting on the runway. “Is that a fire truck?” “Four! There are four fire trucks!”

“Ladies and gentleman, kindly remain seated. There has been a small engine fire. There is nothing to worry about. Our men on the ground have it under control. In another few minutes we will deplane. We are sorry for this inconvenience…” Five years later, and I still have a hard time traveling. Just this past week, a friend was helping me board a train from Baltimore to New York and she ended up stuck on the train with me, because we could not get my bag to sit nicely. She was just trying to help me, not to stow away! Boruch Hashem, they let her off in Delaware so she could get back to Baltimore, where she belonged.

These things happen. Especially to me. More than learning to simply deal with the upsets that happen, I have come to appreciate them. I have learned to laugh when things do not work out quite the way I had planned, and I try to find a reason behind each situation. Sometimes I believe that the whole point of my being rerouted through who-knows-where is so that when that Israeli woman at Customs is having a hard time understanding the officer, I can step in. To my Chabad Couple: I often think about you while I travel. I wonder how you are doing, if Einstein is still alive, if you still live in that small town in Virginia. I like to think about my two nights in your guest room, because the hashgachah of those two nights was so obvious. You were a turning point, the impetus for me believing in hashgachah protis rather than luck. I will never forget you. I wish I knew your names. I hope that one day our paths will cross again – though hopefully not our flight paths. Wherever you are, I also hope that both of you know that for my family and me, you represent the very best of Chabad. The Chabad Couple._

Chana Chava Perton graduated from Bais Yaakov of Denver and attended Meohr Bais Yaakov Teacher’s Seminary in Bayit Vegan. She now lives in Montreal, teaches in a local day school and is working on a master’s degree in education.

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