“I knew art was starting to heal me, that the real me — unafraid of expression, of judgment, of being misunderstood — was emerging”

Photos: Naftoli Goldgrab

The dream story begins with Moshe Shain’s grandparents.

His grandfather, Shmuel Levi Yitzchak Wadawski, was a chassid of the previous Skulener Rebbe, Reb Leizer Zusia; in later years he found his way to Chabad. He passed away when Moshe was young, but his grandmother, who lived for 16 more years, was an active part of the Shain family’s life growing up who visited their home often. She was fun-loving, on the ball, even active on the family chat.

In 2000, when Moshe was 11 years old, his grandmother was hospitalized for a minor procedure. She was recovering, she was fine — and then a message came the next morning: BDE Bobby passed away.

“We couldn’t wrap our heads around it,” Moshe, now 35, remembers. “She’d just texted a message seven hours before.”

When her second yahrtzeit loomed, Bobby’s children decided to hold a hachnassas sefer Torah in their parents’ memories, whose yahrtzeits fell out two days apart during the Aseres Yemei Teshuvah. Bobby had always wanted to write a sefer Torah in her husband’s memory, but she never got to it due to lack of money and energy.

Moshe wasn’t very involved in the arrangements. Of course, he and his wife gave some money and planned to participate — it was scheduled for a Sunday when the kids were off — but he wasn’t very into it.

Then, in the early Sunday morning hours, Moshe had an ethereal dream.

To understand that dream, we need to go back a couple of decades, to when Moshe was just ten years old.

IT

was right after the birth of his youngest brother. The Shain kids were farmed out, and his six-year-old sister Shiffy was at a cousin. Suddenly, a fire broke out in the cousin’s home. Panicked and rushing to escape, Shiffy broke her foot, and in those extra moments she waited to be lifted to the window to safety, she suffered severe smoke inhalation.

Shiffy was hospitalized even as the bris for the new Shain baby was held in their Monsey home. Moshe’s brother was named Refael; amid the simchah, there was fervent hope and prayer for a refuah sheleimah. But it wasn’t meant to be. A few days after the bris, six-year-old Shiffy passed away.

To her older brother, the death of his playful little sister was a violent shock, a slap in the face.

“I loved Shiffy,” Moshe says simply. “I used to play with her all the time, preferring her company to that of the brother between us. And then she was gone, with no warning.”

Moshe and his siblings were lost, floundering in emotions that were far too big for them: grief, loss, fear, guilt.

“No one even told us outright,” Moshe remembers. “My mother was postpartum, my father devastated. It just wasn’t spoken about.”

They couldn’t even cry; there was no one to cry to.

“My parents had a new baby, and they were in their own bubble of pain,” Moshe says. “No one else knew what to say. There were no organizations back then to deal with children who’d been touched by tragedy.”