The Last Carriage

Batya was born in 1936 in Kiev, the youngest daughter of Reb Leib and Alter Baila Meislik. She had six brothers and an older sister, Lifsha. When Batya was six years old, she got sick with pneumonia and had to be hospitalized. The hospital was on the other side of the vast Dnieper River that cuts across the city. Her parents took shifts to be at her bedside. At one point, one of her parents came to take over the vigil from the other, meaning that for a short while, Batya and both her parents were together on one side of the river, and the rest of the family were on the other side.

That was the night that German bombs began to fall on Kiev. The bridge was bombed and it was impossible to cross the river. The hospital authorities ordered all patients to be evacuated to a safe place, and so Batya and her parents were put on a train to Uzbekistan, to safety.

“Only two years later, when the war ended, did they find out what happened to the rest of the family,” says Rav Tzvi Patlas, a Russian-born historian, Torah teacher, radio personality, and filmmaker whose family had a family-like connection with the Rebbetzin that spanned decades, and who’d made it his mission to spread her remarkable story. “The six boys, who Alter Baila called her shishah sidrei mishnah, had been taken to Babi Yar, where they perished, and Lifsha, who was trained as a nurse, died a hero’s death as a medic in one of the battles,” Rav Tzvi recounts.

“What did Alter Baila say about her children? Hashem, You took the ‘holy books,’ so keep them close to You.”

Their little girl, Batya, just short of her ninth birthday, was her parents’ consolation, the only one left.

They had to keep going, keep building. They returned to Kiev, where they found their home had been occupied by strangers. When they applied to the state for new housing, Reb Leib requested just a basement.

“In the oppressive Communist regime, an underground abode was a boon,” Rav Tzvi explains. “If they were out of sight — literally — then perhaps their religious activities could go unnoticed.”

Batya looked up at the small window in the apartment. “I can only see people’s footsteps,” she complained.

Her father, the gaon, the one who realized the role he had to play with the shearis hapleitah in Kiev, said, “But look, from here we can also see the stars.”

For a short time, there was a possibility of obtaining a Polish passport and using it to leave the Soviet Union, which many Jews made use of, but not Reb Leib Meislik. He saw that he was needed in Kiev, and from the humblest of dwellings, he rose to the occasion.

In that basement, he built a mikveh, using snow for kosher waters. It was covered with a trapdoor made of wood.

Everything had to be done in utmost secrecy. To practice religion was to rebel against the deity that was “Mother Russia” (and Father Stalin).

The Meisliks had a minyan in their home for Shabbos. People came from all over the city by train before sundown on Friday and they’d stay on for Shabbos. They needed food, but those were hard postwar times, and the Meisliks barely had enough for themselves. To add to their meager supplies and ensure her mother could make a cholent for their minyan, little, lithe Batya would rummage in the streets or the garbage heaps for a fallen potato or a leftover onion.

Watching her forage, the other children would laugh at her. Her mother said to her, “I understand that it’s hard, but I need to make my cholent.” She’d add, “L’fum tzaara agra — the hardship is what gives the mitzvah more worth.”

“You know how deep that went for young Batya?” asks Nina Patlas, Rav Tzvi’s wife. “Weeks later, when someone chastised the children for poking fun, and Batya didn’t have to contend with their taunts anymore, she said to her mother, ‘but now I don’t have the l’fum tzaara agra anymore.’ ”

The Meisliks had to maintain an outward appearance of Soviet secularity. Batya, who attended public school, couldn’t miss school on Shabbos. She knew it wasn’t permissible to write on Shabbos, and she asked her father what to do. He didn’t give her an outright reply, but said, “Your soul and mine were together at Sinai where we received the Torah.”

That was all the response she needed. She took it on herself, and she’d resort to things like hurting her hand, cutting until it bled, so that she could wear a bandage and be exempted from writing.

While her conviction was strong, none of this was easy on the young girl. At the end of one Shabbos, she said to her father, “Baruch Hashem there’s an end to the Shabbos.”

He shook his head and said, “You know what you did today? You added one more Shabbos to the chain of Shabbosim that Jews have been keeping for thousands of years.”

These were Batya’s foundations, the outlook she absorbed from her parents in their underground enclave. Her father meant it with every fiber of his being. And while she was being moser nefesh at school, particularly around Shabbos, his Jewish activities risked his very life with the authorities. He found a way to obtain matzos, and somehow for several years they celebrated the Yom Tov of freedom properly, and maintained a minyan in his home, week after week.

But one day in 1951, he failed to come home from work.

With sinking hearts, Batya and her mother went to the police station, but  no one could advise them of his whereabouts. They went to the KGB and were told not to bother looking for him.

“That was tantamount to saying that he’d been arrested by the KGB,” Rav Tzvi explains.

Reb Leib was incarcerated for 700 days, just short of two years. The KGB knew he had religious influence, and they kept him that long so as to break him, so that he would agree to become an informant and tell them about the other practicing Jews in the city. In a tiny cell without a window, Reb Leib lost all concept of time. “He would daven and learn the Gemara he remembered by heart. That kept him alive,” Rav Tzvi says.

On Purim, when he’d been imprisoned for so long that all hope seemed lost, Batya told her mother, “We must do shalach manos.”

There was no one to give to or receive from, as the other secretly practicing Jews were frightened to be associated with the Meisliks since Reb Leib’s arrest. “Us two, we will give each other,” she said.

“I have just some cookies,” Alter Baila said. “To do the mitzvah properly, we need two minim.”

Batya said, “We have our tears. They will be the second thing we give, and we’ll send it to the Creator and He’ll see our distress….”

At that, mother and daughter began to cry, tears dampening the sugar cookies.

And then they received shalach manos in return.

The door opened and Reb Leib stumbled in.

It was March 6, 1953, one day after Stalin’s death, and Reb Leib had been let go.

“Reb Leib was ill for a long time, but when he recovered, he resumed his role as secret head of the Kiev community,” Rav Tzvi says. “Batya, meanwhile, had left school and was studying accounting at an institute. She was in her late teens when her father took her to the Dnieper one day, on a boat ride. This was so that they could have a conversation that no one could overhear.”

Reb Leib felt his end was near and said to his daughter, “I have no one to say Kaddish for me. You must be my Kaddish.”

“What do you mean?”

“That you’ll be a steadfast and strong Jewish woman. That your righteousness will be a beacon for others.”

Looking out at the bridge over the river, Reb Leib mused to his daughter, “How can you tell if a bridge is strong? If a train traverses it, and all the carriages make it across except for the last one, the bridge wasn’t strong enough to begin with. You’re the last carriage in this family….”

Refusing to Be Silent

After her father’s death, Batya and her mother put in an application for a visa to leave the Soviet Union. International law stipulates that every person has the right to family unity, and it was under this tenet that they applied to move near Reb Leib’s sister, who lived in Israel. Their application was denied. Desperate to leave, they applied repeatedly, year after year.

In the interim, Batya and her mother continued Reb Leib’s legacy in Kiev. They were known as the widow and her daughter who had the most mehudar kosher food in the city. When the famous Rav Tzvi Bronstein came from America to strengthen Yiddishkeit in various ways, most notably by performing brissim, he would eat at their home.

“You know where he did those brissim?” Rav Tzvi asks. “In the taharah room of the graveyard. The people who were to have a bris would pretend that they were there to visit deceased loved ones. They’d be given some vodka and have a bris performed on them. Afterward, Batya, who stood guard at the door, handed the person a bunch of flowers. Post-bris they had to causally stroll through the graveyard and place the flowers on a grave as though they’d just come to pay their respects. Such were the elaborate ruses that had to be concocted in order to perform the mitzvos,” Rav Tzvi says.

Rav Bronstein came several times for a few days as a time, as a tourist. He brought with him Jewish teaching material — alef-beis, Hebrew reading, instructions on how to lay tefillin, and other things. Since his possessions could be checked, these were on tiny cards that could then be shown via a projector.

By this time, Batya had set up an organization called Al Tidom, Don’t Be Silent, which Rav Bronstein became president of, and she started to teach. She used a projector for Rav Bronstein’s cards and would explain the information in her inimitable way, shining her own light like that projector machine.

“What happened with Rav Bronstein,” Rav Tzvi recounts, “was that, perhaps due to the frequency of his trips, he was eventually suspected of being an American spy. In the context of the Cold War, this meant that he was beaten and tortured by the hyper-suspicious, brutal Soviets. Finding nothing, and not wanting to be charged with his murder, they put him, in his terribly mutilated state, on a flight to London, where he was hospitalized. They said about him that he was so swollen and disfigured, when his wife came to London to see him, she didn’t recognize him.”

Even under the threat of this brutality, Batya continued her mission, teaching others, spreading Yiddishkeit. She was older now, in her thirties.

It was only in 1969, when Batya was 33, that she and her mother finally received the coveted visa they’d sought all those years.

At long last, they were slated to leave the Soviet Union. But then Batya’s mother broke her leg. “This wouldn’t have been such a hindrance,” Rav Tzvi explains, “if not for the fact that the Soviets, mistrustful as they were, were meticulous about checking those who left for valuables. A plaster cast couldn’t be checked, and since there was a chance that people could hide money or diamonds inside it, anyone with a cast wasn’t allowed to leave.”

Alter Baila’s doctor offered an option other than the traditional cast — an operation done under epidural. This was something new in the Soviet Union. It hadn’t been tested there yet, and he would do the surgery for her as an experiment in the interest of medical advancement. If it was successful she would require a regular bandage as opposed to a plaster cast, and could then leave.

Alter Baila took that option, untested as it was. What choice did she have?

After the operation, Batya asked the doctor, “Is my mother alive?”

“And how,” said the doctor, and then he proceeded to ask Batya what Elokah d’Rav Meir aneini means. “You see, she kept repeating it through the procedure, and it was like my hand was guided.”

This from a non-Jewish, utterly secular doctor, who then wanted Batya to write it down in Russian transliteration so that he could say it before each subsequent operation he would do.

When they left, never to return, the Meisliks’ influence in the Jewish community was far from over. Batya hid a list of names of all those who wanted to leave, who would have to be sponsored by people overseas under the guise of family reunification, inside her mother’s crutches.

She hadn’t imagined the authorities would ask to check them, but at the airport, they were asked to hand the crutches over, and out of sheer fright, she mistakenly stepped on her poor mother’s foot. Her mother cried out and, in the commotion, Batya said, “Take pity on a poor woman, just let us go already.”

Thank G-d, they did. Alter Baila and Batya left via Vienna and on to Israel. Later, Batya would help every one of those people listed on the papers to leave, too.

Everyone’s Rebbetzin, Everyone’s Mother

Once in Eretz Yisrael, a shidduch was suggested for Batya with Reb Avraham Barg, who was from the family of Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, and they married shortly thereafter. Batya continued from where she’d left off in Kiev, helping other Jews however she could, this time in the freedom of Jerusalem. Her upbringing and time in the former Soviet Union gave her an understanding of human suffering — and also the ability to look beyond it and see human resilience. People started approaching her with all sorts of issues, for her advice and guidance, for anything from the natural medicine that was her ken, to matters of the heart and the psyche. They started to call her, “Rebbetzin.”

“You just felt that she lived with G-d, that she had the awareness of the thin film of nature that hides Hashem’s Face, that He’s really right there with us,” Nina Patlas says. “She was motherly, warm, eminently caring. Our daughter felt that with her.”

It was their daughter who kick-started the Patlases’ relationship with Rebbetzin Batya.

Tzvi and Nina Patlas were secular Jews from Odessa and Moscow respectively, who’d met and lived in Moscow, and finally got visas to leave Russia in 1979, for themselves and their six-year-old daughter.

“When we left, we had to pay an exorbitant 900 rubbles just to denounce our citizenship,” Rav Tzvi says, illustrating the hostility and hardship of the Soviet bureaucracy.

Wanting to learn about their heritage, the Patlases attended an Arachim seminar. They took their young daughter along with them, and after the Arachim Shabbos, this ardent child said to her parents, “I don’t know what you’re going to decide about becoming religious, but I know I’m definitely going to go for it.”

That clinched it. The Patlas family grew in their observance, had more children, and raised a beautiful, frum family. When that same spirited daughter was about 17, there was a period of inner angst where she grappled with her faith. She did some soul-searching of her own, veering off the path as she went. It was a hard and trying time for the Patlases.

They’d heard about a woman from the former Soviet Union, a rebbetzin who lived in Jerusalem — Batya — and they got in touch. She took the Patlases’ daughter under her wing and warmed her with the fire of her own faith. What the teenager encountered was someone with rock-solid emunah. She took to her as though she was another mother figure, and Batya was there for her, helping her through the tekufah and back onto the path. Years later, their relationship was still going strong, and Batya was like another mother at her wedding. In time, Batya’s husband would be sandek at the bris of the Patlases’ first grandchild.

In those years, a connection blossomed between the Patlas family and Rebbetzin Batya, nurtured by her warmth and understanding, and the vision they shared for the oldest Patlas daughter. Batya was never taking away from what Tzvi and Nina had with their daughter; she was adding, enhancing. It was an extension of the role she was in for life — someone who strengthened others, practically, emotionally, in their Yiddishkeit. She’d done that back in the USSR, and she continued in Jerusalem, where the Patlas daughter was like one of her many “children.”

Because Batya would have no children of her own. She would be that “last carriage” her father had spoken of. And what a carriage, which spoke of the strength of the bridge of her forebears.

Regarding the fact that Batya, after everything she’d endured, had not had any biological children, Nina says, “She drew on the example she’d seen in her mother; she served Hashem wholeheartedly even like this, in the way He made it. She was a mother in so many senses to so many people.”

“And she saw things differently,” Rav Tzvi adds. “To her it was clear that it was Hashem’s world, Hashem’s way. Shiviti Hashem lenegdi tamid was real to her.”

After their marriage, Rebbetzin Batya and her husband lived in Talpiot, close to where her mother lived in a seniors’ home.

“Their destinies were tied together,” Rav Tzvi says. “She was saved from the war at her daughter’s hospital bedside, mother and daughter then endured and grew and kept giving in the harshest conditions, and they were together for the final stretch in Jerusalem.”

“Batya told us that when her mother first saw the Kosel, she threw herself upon the stones and cried out to Hashem, Alter Baila ba alecha….”

The Tchernobler Rebbe had given the spirited older woman a brachah for a long life, and she lived into her nineties.

“Batya would say that her mother showed her how you could find ways to serve Hashem in every situation, despite limitations,” Nina says. “There were countless stories. One Friday Batya went to visit her mother in the seniors’ home, but it appeared she wasn’t in her room. Batya then realized that the elderly woman was underneath the bed. ‘I’m looking for my perfume, it rolled under the bed. I want to find it. It’s the only thing I can still do to prepare for Shabbos,’ she explained.”

To talk of tied destinies, sometime after Alter Baila passed on, Batya, now in her sixties, contracted pneumonia. She was given medication, to which she had an allergic reaction. She lost consciousness.

Batya was all but gone. She saw the Beis Din shel Maalah, those legendary gold scales, angels bringing in her mitzvos and aveiros.

Suddenly, her mother was there, too, and she began to shout at the angels. “What is she doing here? She shouldn’t be here yet. I lost seven children and I didn’t ask why, but now you bring my daughter up before her time?”

And in her hospital bed in Israel, Batya Barg returned to consciousness and had a complete refuah.

After that experience, she was as resolved as ever to help, give, do all she could. She got involved with a girl’s elementary school in the Bukharan neighborhood for girls underprivileged backgrounds which her good friend had just been appointed principal of. And she became the mother of that school, helping to turn it into one of the best elementary schools in Jerusalem.

When she saw the hunger and pain in the students’ eyes, she founded an organization, Yam Hachesed, to provide these girls with a warm meal, tutoring, therapy, a youth center in memory of her husband — Ohel Avraham — and eventually, as they grew older, a hachnassas kallah fund to help them establish their homes. She went round the world fundraising for them.

Nina says, “At the levayah there were so many women from this neighborhood. Thanks to her, they grew up healthy and whole and happy, not to mention frum. It was because of who she was. Our daughter stayed in touch with her all the years. So did we, until the end. Batya became more than our rebbetzin, she was the mother of us all.”

Listening to the Patlases share her story, it’s clear that they know it intimately. When one segues into an anecdote, the other can finish it. Indeed, they know it as one might know a mother’s story.

They had her book, Voices in the Silence, written by Rav Avraham Barg’s uncle, Rav Shlomo Zalman Sonnenfeld (Feldheim), translated into Russian. Rav Tzvi says, “We felt it was only right that it should be. There were Hebrew, English, and French versions. There should be one in her mother tongue.”

Rabbi Tzvi took it further and had a documentary produced about Batya’s life, in Russian, with Hebrew subtitles. “In every way, she fulfilled her father’s charge, and with her book and the documentary, the story of her mesirus nefesh lives on even after she’s gone. Truly, the Kaddish her father asked her to be.”

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 922)