Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis’s last legacy and lessons. Exclusive excerpt

A Childhood Interrupted

The Jungreis family had heard the rumors about the atrocities perpetrated in Poland and Slovakia by the most “enlightened” and cultured nation of the 20th century, the Germans, but like so many of their Hungarian Jewish brethren, they reassured themselves; these rumors couldn’t be true. It seemed impossible. Unimaginable.

But when the impossible became reality, and the Nazis began rounding up and imprisoning Hungarian Jewry, Rabbi Avraham HaLevi Jungreis ztz”l and his wife, Rebbetzin Miriam Jungreis a”h, took their young family and traveled from their hometown of Szeged — where Rabbi Jungreis was chief rabbi — to Nádudvar to visit the family patriarch, Rabbi Yisroel HaLevi Jungreis Hy”d. The Jungreis family had illustrious yichus, tracing back to the days of Dovid Hamelech, and it was the most natural thing in the world to seek comfort and guidance from the previous generation at a time of crisis.

For a young Esther, the trip meant spending time with her beloved zeide in his study, surrounded by his holy seforim, savoring a treat of sugar cubes dipped in tea. But on this trip, as her zeide held her on his knee, she watched in horror as he started crying. Running to her father, Esther alerted him that her zeide was crying. And then her father began to weep, too.

“Come,” he said to her. “Let’s take a walk, and I’ll explain to you why Zeide is crying.” Putting her coat, scarf and boots on for her, he took her outside to the deep snow.

“I’ll walk ahead,” her father said, “and you, my precious child, will follow in my footsteps.”

After walking just a short way, her father pointed to the path he had made in the snow with his footsteps and asked his young daughter if she understood why he walked ahead of her. The perceptive little girl, eager to please her father, responded, “You walked ahead so I could follow in your footsteps and not fall down in the deep snow.”

And for the rest of her life, Esther followed in the footsteps of those who came before her, and encouraged other Jews to do the same.

Her daughter Rebbetzin Slovie Wolff recalls her mother saying how, standing at roll call every morning in Bergen-Belsen — where she and her family were incarcerated after being rounded up and force marched to Germany — she would look at the Nazi guards, and think, Baruch Hashem, I’m not you. Rebbetzin Jungreis knew that as a Jewish woman, she came from a line of prophets and kings, and despite the degradation she was experiencing at the hands of her oppressors, she was still the King’s daughter.

That connection to those who came before was a tangible reality for the Jungreis children. “I was lucky and privileged to have known my zeide, my mother’s father,” Slovie tells me. “I didn’t know my father’s parents since they were killed in the war, but I always felt connected to them. My parents somehow enabled us to grow up in the US, but to feel connected to all our bubbes and zeides from Hungary, and to take solace and comfort and strength from them.”

In the midst of all the horror of Bergen-Belsen, Esther’s father said to her, “Be a blessing, my child.”

It was an incomprehensible statement. How could she be a blessing in a place like Bergen-Belsen?

Her father didn’t leave the statement vague, though, and gave her a difficult, but quantifiable task. “Smile,” he said. He explained that when adults would see her, a child, smiling, it would give them hope. It would imbue them with faith and strength and cause them, too, to smile.

“Throughout her life, no matter what my mother was going through — and of course she had her pressures, like everybody — she never lost that smile,” says Rebbetzin Slovie Wolff.

Her father’s mandate, “Be a blessing,” was one which Rebbetzin Jungreis lived by throughout the rest of her full life. It motivated all her tremendous accomplishments in teaching and inspiring hundreds of thousands of people.

And aptly, her recently published book of wisdom and teachings is titled, Be A Blessing.