This is a story that I have wanted to tell for years.
In the 1930's in a small town in Northern Germany, there were
two young ladies who were first cousins and also best
friends. They both felt the stirrings of anti- Semitism, in
their attempts at pursuing an education, and decided to go
abroad to further their studies and perhaps find a
shidduch at the same time. They also thought that they
would be returning to their homeland and their family at some
future date. In no way did they envision the storm that would
take over their lives and surely they did not know that the
One Above was sending them forth in order to be able to
heroically save most of their families.
Chana decided to travel to South Africa to which it was
easier to receive a visa. She bid her friend and cousin,
Leah, a fond farewell with promises to write and keep in
touch until they would meet again. Leah was able to reach the
United States and off she went with a light heart to attempt
to realize her goal of becoming a physical education
teacher.
We must leave Chana at this point because I really didn't get
to know her except through her letters which came frequently
over the years of my childhood and into my own young
adulthood. I do know from the results that she married, and
had children and grandchildren who follow in the way of
Torah. Her cousin and best friend, Leah, who eventually
became my mother, arrived in the goldene medina and
went directly to the home of a distant relative as had been
arranged by her loving and efficient parents, my late
grandparents.
Leah placed her suitcase in the hall of the lovely West Side
apartment and went to sit at the kitchen table of her new
family. Less than an hour later, after a short and eye-
opening conversation on kashrus (or the lack thereof),
observance of Shabbos (no need in this country), she picked
up her suitcase and said she'd find her own accommodations.
As she told me years later, she purchased a newspaper and
found an advertisement for a German-speaking female companion
to an elderly lady and went right over, took the job and
stayed there for a few years. No one had bothered to tell her
that there was a Depression on and that jobs were very
scarce, and a job in the field of education of the sort she
wanted was out of the range for the duration. World events
took over her young life and she and my father (she did
manage that goal), while establishing their home and family,
were swept into a number of years of rescue work, which is
another whole story in itself.
The goal of our generations's arch-enemy was to eradicate the
Jews and their religion from the world. The remnants and
survivors of Chana and Leah's families, like millions of
others, went on to foil his plans. On two opposite sides of
the world, in New York and in Johannesburg, another and
another generation was growing up and keeping mitzvos
and getting married -- and deciding that it was time to
return to the homeland. Well, it wasn't the homeland that
Chana and Leah had planned to return to. This was the Real
Thing. From two ends of the Earth, the Jewish children came
home to Jerusalem.
At the beginning of the school year of 1975, two girls were
seated together in a classroom in a Bais Yaakov school in
Jerusalem. The teacher thought it would be nice to place them
together since they were both speakers of English. One of
them had a strong South African accent and the other had a
Midwestern American twang, but to an Israeli teacher, English
is English. The girls became friendly and eventually reported
to their parents that they had made a friend.
The names of the families had been changed twice by marriage
by this time, and so meant nothing to the respective parents
when they first heard it. It was by pure chance that the
father of the girl named Shifra was a well known professional
in the chareidi community and was recommended to the mother
of Idit as being the best person for the treatment that she
needed. I took Idit to this professional, whom she recognized
as her friend Shifra's father. I reported this visit to my
mother who was still with us at the time. She exclaimed, "But
that's Chana's son! I didn't realize he had gotten so
important! I meant to tell you to look him up."
This is a small unimportant chapter in the attempts of our
enemies to put us out of business. They did manage to scatter
the two cousins to far parts of the world. But forty years
later, there they were again -- two cousins who were also
best friends, growing to young womanhood together in
Yerusholayim. The chessed of Hashem took them from
their birthplaces and placed them next to each other on the
schoolbench, by their desks in Bais Yaakov.
