When my mother said goodbye, I knew she was making the biggest sacrifice of all

I was 15 when I left behind everything I knew growing up in Poland, and came to America to learn Torah. When my mother said goodbye, I knew she was making the biggest sacrifice of all

If you’d see me today, a standard-looking 30-something avreich with a big black yarmulke and a guitar, singing my compositions together with my dear friends Eitan and Shlomo Katz and others, you’d probably never guess the turns my life has taken.

While you might be familiar with my music, if you listen carefully to a single I released a few years back, called “Akeidah” — produced and arranged by Eitan Katz — it might give a hint. The words are from the Torah section of Akeidas Yitzchak, but to me they carried a very personal message as well. In fact, I wrote this song as a dedication to my mother, Halina (Chaya Ita) Wasilewicz a”h, who to me represented so much of what the Akeidah meant for Klal Yisrael — a parent endlessly and unconditionally sacrificing for her child.

You see, I was born in Czestochowa, Poland, in 1988, the only child of a single Jewish mother. Since there were no Jewish schools in Poland at that time, I was sent to a local public school. When I was about six years old, I came home from school and I told my mother what the teacher told us that day:

“Mommy, tomorrow we can’t eat meat. We are going to church, and the priest is going to pour ashes over our heads.”

My mother looked at me and said, “If you don’t want to eat meat tomorrow, no problem, but you will not go to church.”

“Why not?” I asked.

My mother answered, “Because you’re a Jew.”

That’s when I found out for the first time that I was Jewish. But I didn’t understand what it meant to be a Jew.

My mother was a child of two Holocaust survivors. After the war, it was very hard to be observant, but my grandparents tried to hold onto what they could. And whatever knowledge my mother had, she relayed to me and to the Jewish community of Czestochowa. But for me, that wasn’t enough. I needed to learn more. And so, when I was 15, I asked my mother permission to go to America to learn Torah. As difficult as it was for her to separate, she said, “You should go.”

“Vayisa Avraham es einav, vayar es hamakom merachok… vayomer hineini beni… vayelchu shneihem yachdav — and Avraham lifted his eyes and saw the place from afar… and he said, ‘I am here for you, my son,’… and they went forward together….”

That was my mother’s Akeidah moment. But of course, that’s nothing new for the Jewish people. She sacrificed for me her entire life, giving up her own comfort so that I could learn what it means to be a Jew.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.