By Mendel Super – Chabad.org
Rachele Kilgore, a new mother in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, called the local Chabad Rabbi Zalman Bluming to schedule a bris milah for her newborn son.
It would be a small, intimate affair, with just her parents attending, she informed Rabbi Bluming, co-director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Durham/Chapel Hill, with his wife, Yehudis.
The ceremony was scheduled for 12 p.m. on Wednesday, December 22.
Noon came and went, and Kilgore and her family were nowhere to be found. At around 1 p.m., the family arrived. Before the bris, the baby’s grandmother, Dorothy Lipsky, asked to say a few words about the name the baby was about to receive.
Shmuel, she explained, was the name of her late father, Shmuel Goldwasser, who had been a Holocaust survivor.
“When I gave birth to Rachele, it was January 18, at 1:31,” said Lipsky. Her husband, Richard, called her father to tell him the news. “My father threw the phone away. I called my mother. ‘Mommy, why did Daddy not speak to Richard?’ And she goes, ‘You speak to him.’ I got on the phone and my father was crying, and he said to me, ‘January 18, 1945, at 1:31 PM, is when I was saved from the ovens of Auschwitz.’ ”
Shmuel Goldwasser was born in 1912 in Poland. He watched as the Nazis threw his 18-month old son in the air and shot the child, and then killed his hysterical wife. “How did you keep living after that?” his daughter once asked him. “I had to stay alive for my younger brother Srulick,” he said.
Srulick Goldwasser survived the war, thanks to his brother’s persistence. Shortly before he was slated to be killed in Auschwitz, chaos broke out. With the Red Army approaching, Shmuel’s captors ran for the hills and he survived.
At first, Rachele Kilgore wasn’t sure she wanted a traditional bris done by an observant mohel, but, she told her mother, “I’m doing it for Grandpa. It will be a kosher bris,” as the devout Grandpa Shmuel would have wanted.
The bris went ahead, and the moment the baby was named Shmuel, for Dorothy’s father, Rabbi Bluming glanced at the clock. It was 1:31 PM.
“I have a funny feeling my father is around here somewhere,” Dorothy said as the bris took an even more poignant turn.
