Berel Ainhorn grew up in Selish, a city about an hour away from Munkacs, and not far from Satu-Mare (Satmar), and today called Vynohradiv in southwestern Ukraine, near the borders of Romania and Hungary. But by the time he was born in 1948, the tzaddikim and rebbes and crowds of Jewish townsfolk had long been deported, these once-bustling chassidish enclaves abruptly decimated.

From the end of World War II in 1945, the Soviets took advantage of their victory against the Germans to extend their sphere of influence into Hungary, Romania, and the rest of Eastern Europe. Selish, and the rest of the Carpathian region, was absorbed into the USSR, although the KGB control there was looser than in Moscow and other central cities. Religion was suppressed, milah and shechitah frowned on, and teaching Torah to children was a crime. But somehow, in the cold and gloom of the Communist wasteland, the light of Yiddishkeit burned on; it’s a little-known story of how a tiny nucleus of frum families trapped behind the Iron Curtain managed to raise their families in the spirit of Torah.

And for Mr. Ainhorn, it’s really a story that begins with his parents, who refused to budge when it came to halachah and mesorah.

“My father, Reb Mordechai Ainhorn, came from a town called Tetsh in Hungary (today Tiachiv in Ukraine), where he married and had four children,” Reb Berel relates. “During World War II, he was sent to a labor camp in Ukraine. When he came back home in 1945, he waited for his wife and four children to return, too, but they never did.”

The young family had been killed in the death camps, together with the rest of the townspeople. After he mourned, Reb Mordechai picked himself up and prepared to go forward. They had taken his precious family, but they would not win his Jewish spirit. He would build another shtib.

Berel’s mother, Gittel née Leibowitz, suffered through Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen as an 18-year-old. “They asked her, ‘Can you sew?’ so she said yes. ‘Can you cook?’ and she said yes. Although she couldn’t, really, that was her path to survival,” says Reb Berel. “The Nazis kept her alive and found work for her. When the British and Americans freed Bergen-Belsen, she was sick with typhus and had to be hospitalized for four months.”

Doctors from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee asked the young survivors where they wanted to go. While Israel, America, and Sweden were the most popular options, Gittel only wanted to go back home, to her childhood town of Sokyrnytsya, near Chust. After fruitless attempts to persuade her of the benefits of leaving war-ravaged Europe, the committee representatives shrugged their shoulders and gave her the bus fare.

“My mother sat on buses, going from Prague to Budapest, and then home. And there she found her sister, who had also come back from the concentration camps, and soon her father Leib Lebowitch returned,” Reb Berel says. “Their hearts had told them to go home.”

The homing instinct had reunited the family, but by the time they realized that the Russian occupation meant a normative Jewish life wasn’t possible, the borders were locked, and the Leibowitz family was trapped under Soviet rule.

“By the time they realized that the Russians were against everything Jewish, against kashrus, Shabbos, everything, it was too late,” Mr. Ainhorn continues. “But meanwhile, my mother had an uncle living in Tetsh — her father’s brother — and he came up with the shidduch, since he knew my father, who had lived in Tetsh before the war and was a shochet. My father was thirteen years older, but that is how things went in those days.”

On the day of the wedding, in 1946, Mordechai Ainhorn borrowed a rekel from a friend to walk down to the chuppah. He didn’t own one himself. But he was a practical man, and with the little bit of money he scraped together, he bought a cow, so they would have milk to sell as a source of income. Gittel milked the cow daily, and the couple lived off it.

And then, in the barren, gloomy landscape of Communist-ruled Romania, in the aftermath of the Holocaust which had ripped away his young family, Reb Mordechai Ainhorn experienced a rebirth of hope.

“In 1947, my sister was born. It was two a.m., and my father was so happy that he went around waking up all his friends and neighbors to tell them. They said ‘Is it a boy?’ ‘No.’ ‘So why are you shouting!’

“My father replied, ‘Why am I shouting? Baruch Hashem, after the milchumeh, we are having new families, new children….’ ”

After a while, the Ainhorns heard that the Jews in Selish needed a shochet, and they moved to the larger community of Selish, 100 kilometers away. Pre-World War II, Selish was a hub of frum life, but postwar, it had none of that grandeur. Mr. Ainhorn remembers there were four minyanim active during the week, but not because there were so many people davening — the shul building in Selish had been closed down by the government. The small minyanim were a safety precaution, because it was considered safer to avoid gathering in big groups in central places. Small minyanim here and there were far less conspicuous to the KGB. Children never joined; they were forbidden to go to shul.

The Ukraine region was less tightly controlled than Moscow and other central cities, where KGB agents stalked the synagogues and trumped-up charges sent so many Yidden to the Siberian gulag. A simple person, a tailor or baker, could get away with a bit of religion in Selish during that time, although the higher a person rose in Communist society, the more he would be scrutinized, and the less able he was to practice Yiddishkeit openly. In the Selish of his youth, Mr. Ainhorn estimates that around 60 Jewish families built succahs.

“The other families were afraid, or they had good jobs connected to the regime, so they couldn’t,” he says.

The family continued to buttress hope amid desperate poverty and official harassment. When Berel Ainhorn was born on Lag B’omer, the poverty was so great that his father had no idea how he’d pull off making a bris.

“An acquaintance came over and asked my father, who looked visibly worried, what the matter was,” Mr. Ainhorn relates. “When my father told him that he had to make a bris but had nothing to make it with, this Yid offered to lend him five kilos of flour to make a seudah. My father brought this flour home, and my mother baked challahs and mezonos, which they served at the bris with herring. In order to give back the five kilos of flour he’d borrowed, my father went to serve as baal tefillah over the Yamim Noraim in Dibover, 130 kilometres from Selish — my father was a Vizhnitzer and had learned in Visheve before the war, so he knew the Vizhnitzer nusach, which they wanted to hear. With that money, he could finally repay five kilos of flour, six months later.”

Two younger brothers were born after Berel, and the family’s economic circumstances continued to be precarious. While Reb Mordechai Ainhorn was a baal tefillah and a sought-after mohel and shochet, his son explains that these were not roles he performed in order to make money.

“It was in order to uphold Yiddishkeit, in order that Yidden should have kosher meat to eat. He would go around to people’s houses to shecht meat for their families.” Meanwhile, the cow that Gittel milked daily continued to bring in some parnassah. “Very shvach parnassah,” he laughs, “but it was enough.”

Enough? Well, enough to pay a melamed so that their sons should not grow up Jewishly illiterate. Elementary school finished at 1 p.m., and the Ainhorn boys would go home to eat, then run to a rebbi to learn for a few hours.

“My public-school teacher would accompany me home, telling me all the way, ‘You shouldn’t pray, you shouldn’t waste your time, there is no G-d. Don’t listen to your father, he’s old-fashioned.’ I’d put down my schoolbag, have something to eat, and go to learn. But as a little kid, I remember sometimes thinking, Who is right? The teacher or my parents and rebbi?”

Every day, Berel’s mother sent along two liters of milk with him as payment. With warmth and nostalgia, he shows us a picture of Reb Shmuel Yankowitz, hanging on the wall. “Ooh! This is my rebbi, Reb Shmiel. A few other Yiddishe kinder came along, and we learned quietly in his house. He was so poor that you could almost touch the poverty in his home, and his payment was the milk I brought.”

The lessons began with alef beis and lashon kodesh, going on to Chumash, Rashi, and Mishnayos. Since Reb Shmiel was a learned man, he was viewed as the local rav, and the boys also ran to him when their mothers had sh’eilos.

Once, two burly KGB men burst in as the little group sat around Reb Shmiel’s table. In front of the children, they grabbed the rebbi, shook him, and threw him down on the floor, then ordered him to confess in writing that he was teaching Zionism. Then they turned to ask each boy his name.

“One boy said ‘Gutman,’ to which the KGB men responded, ‘You father is the manager of a factory?’ ‘Yes.’ Well, Gutman’s father lost his job right away. The KGB went off to the factory to demote him from his role and humiliate him by making him clean up the factory. That was how it was — if you had a good job, you had to be more careful not to get on their wrong side,” Mr. Ainhorn relates.

The attitudes around them varied according to the strength of individual Communist ideologies. The children had to go to school on Shabbos, yet parents were able to bribe the teachers with gifts so they shouldn’t have to write.

“I had peyos, and so did other frum children,” Mr. Ainhorn says. “But when my little brother came in to first grade, his teacher wrote home a letter ordering that his peyos be cut off. When they weren’t, the teacher got angry, took my brother and me to the teachers’ room, told us to turn around, and cut them off.”

On the other hand, he remembers another teacher who came over to the Jewish boys to warn them that they’d be having a vaccination the next day and should take off their tzitzis so the other boys wouldn’t see them. “Still,” he says, “I’m not looking for zechusim for them.”

The Communists punished harshly even for small offenses. Yeast was in short supply and badly distributed, and there were Yidden in Selish who earned some desperately needed parnassah by finding out where it was available and reselling it on the black market.

“They just sold fifty grams here and there, they got one warning, and these Yidden were jailed for three years, to scare everybody else,” he relates.

A Jew with a better job or government position had much more to lose. When the Jewish director of a factory in Selish had a baby, Reb Mordechai Ainhorn knew he would be performing a secret bris. The plan was that the father would pretend not to know anything about it, and the bris would get done while he was out at work. On the designated day, though, just as the bris was about to happen, the father came back into the house and saw what was going on. He was too afraid, and sent the mohel away. No bris.

Because mohelim who were prepared to do brissim under the Communists were in very short supply, sometimes Reb Mordechai was called as far as Lemberg (today Lviv), about 245 miles away, to do a bris.

“My father would receive a telegram, obviously not mentioning a bris, but instead a birthday party or something like that, and he would leave town on the 6 a.m. train. Since it was risky to send an address, someone would meet him when the train arrived and take him to the bris,” Reb Berel relates. When he was older, Berel sometimes went along with his father on these trips. “Once, the police asked us for our papers on the train. My father thought the KGB had found out about the bris, and he became so scared that he couldn’t speak. The policeman turned to me and asked, ‘Is he a stutterer?’ ‘Yes, he is. He can barely get a word out,’ I said. So they left us alone. But that time, nobody came to meet us off the train. We weren’t sure what to do, but we waited outside the station, and later, the Yid who sent the message came to get us.”

Once, a Yid sent a horse and wagon to pick up Reb Mordechai to perform a bris in a village that was about 12 miles from Selish, but it was close to the Romanian border. He set out from Selish, but when they reached the border town close to their destination, they were stopped by border control. The guards were not satisfied with Reb Mordechai’s papers and didn’t grant him entry. Still hoping to perform the bris, Reb Mordechai left his bag of milah instruments in the wagon and told the driver, who was also a Yid, although without a beard, to drive on to the village. Reb Mordechai himself went to Munkacs, which was nearby, and shared his predicament with the local rav, Rav Yosef Mordechai Kahan.

“You will still make it to the bris today,” Rabbi Kahan reassured him, “but you have to shave off the beard.” And so he shaved, right then and there, and easily found another wagon driver to take him. From then on, he continued to shave his beard, which made it easier to travel and perform brissim without attracting unwanted KGB attention.

IN around 1964, when Mr. Ainhorn was a teenager, the Jews living in the Carpathian region became aware of the Ribnitzer Rebbe, Rav Chaim Zanvil Abramowitz, who became a source of comfort, hope and inspiration for many of them.

“A Yid named Avremele Markowitz had been in the Ribnitz area, which is in present-day Moldova, where he had seen a Yid make a hole in the ice to toivel in the river. He came back and told my father about this heilige Yid, the Rebbe of Ribnitz,” Mr. Ainhorn says, stressing the excitement that spread among the Jewish households as the Rebbe’s fame spread. “You have to understand that there were hundreds of small towns and shtetlach in our region in the 1950s and 1960s. There were still Carpathishe [Carpathian region] Yidden living all over, from Rachov to Ungvar. Before the war, the Yidden in this area were chassidim of Satmar, Belz, Zidichov, Vizhnitz, and Munkacs. Now, the ones who were left were hungry for a rebbe. The Ribnitzer Rebbe soon heard that the Carpathishe oilem wanted him, and he started to come there.”

A large map is spread out on the table, and Mr. Ainhorn uses a magnifying glass to point out the different shtetlach in what was the USSR of his childhood, and is today southern Ukraine, on the border of Hungary, Romania and Moldova. We can see Ungvar, Munkacs, Belz, and Selish, and a long way away, the big city of Lemberg, now Lviv.

“To get to the Ribnitzer Rebbe, we would travel by train from Selish to Lemberg, to Czernowitz, and finally on to Ribnitz,” he recalls of the 11-hour trip.

The visits stand out in Reb Berel’s memory as special times, when the local Yidden, who had difficult lives of poverty and suppression, who usually davened in small minyanim so as not to attract attention and who had to send their children to school on Shabbos, got to bask in the glow of a chassidishe rebbe once again. Their gloomy days were lit by the rays of light and holiness of the Ribnitzer, whose spiritual strength made him fearless against the Soviets and whose personal tzidkus they could sense.

“I was 16 the first time the Rebbe came to Selish, and I remember he stayed with a family called Wolcowitch. But everyone wanted the privilege of hosting the Rebbe, so he moved around. Soon the Rebbe came for a few months a time, staying in Selish, Dibover, Apshe, and all the communities in our area. As soon as it was known that he was in town, people came together to see him and be with him. How did everyone know? They ‘smelled’ it — you could smell the fragrance of such a tzaddik. Although the gatherings could not be too big because of the police, there were tishen and Melaveh Malkahs with singing. We were living in a poor area, but some people came to the Rebbe with money and so there was food — kugels and mezonos — which was also something special for us. One time, the Melaveh Malkah was held in our house. We didn’t usually have much for Melaveh Malkah, but people came with the Rebbe and they brought the food along. The Rebbe fiered tish that night in our home from six at night until six in the morning. I’ll never forget it.”

For nine years, starting in 1961, the Ainhorns applied for exit visas from Russia, but they were constantly turned down. Years before, when Reb Mordechai refused to sign a KGB document stating he would not perform bris milah, the family had been blacklisted.

“From time to time,” Mr. Ainhorn says, “people got papers to leave the USSR, and their first step was to run to the Ribnitzer Rebbe to ‘bentsh the papers,’ so that they should actually leave the country smoothly without any problems.”

Although the Ainhorns’ requests to leave Russia were repeatedly ignored, finally, in 1968, Berel’s sister, Sarah Yehudis, received permission to leave. Like many Yidden, she took those precious exit papers to Ribnitz to get the Rebbe’s blessing.

“The Rebbe fell asleep while my sister was there,” Reb Berel relates. “She knew that she had to catch the train for the journey back home, so she took her papers and left. Yidden were waiting outside the Rebbe’s room, in the corridor, and as she left, she said, ‘If the Rebbe asks, tell him I had to go.’ Half an hour later, the Rebbe asked where my sister was, and was told that she had had to leave quickly for the train. ‘She will soon come back,’ the Rebbe said, and a half hour later, Sarah Yehudis indeed came back. Flooding had cancelled the train service. The Rebbe bentshed her papers and she traveled home the next day, so that she could submit the papers to the government office.”

Two years later, when it was finally the Ainhorns’ turn to leave Russia behind, they traveled to Budapest, made a stop in Vienna, then the family went on to Eretz Yisrael.

Mordechai Ainhorn had done forced labor during the war and had defied the KGB hundreds of times to perform milah in atheist environs. He was eagerly anticipating living openly as an erliche Yid among erliche Yidden in Eretz Yisrael, but stepping off the El Al plane was jarring.

“My father looked around for the frum, bearded Yidden he had expected to see around him, and he said, ‘Kinder, I think we stopped off somewhere else,’” Mr. Ainhorn recalls. “He assumed that in Eretz Yisrael everyone would be frum, we’d be surrounded by Yidden keeping Torah and mitzvos, and the atmosphere he found instead was a total shock to him.”

The Ainhorns were given an apartment in a religious section of Rishon LeTzion. But a year later, when Reb Berel’s maternal grandfather came out from Selish to Eretz Yisrael, he was not so fortunate.

“We all told my zeide that when the aliyah authorities ask what he does, he should say he is a rav or a melamed, so they would send him to a frum neighborhood,” Reb Berel relates. “He said he could not tell a lie, yet we were sure he would do it when it came to the question — but he didn’t. He said the simple truth, ‘Ich bin a shuster [I’m a shoemaker].’ I have his immigration document: ‘Yehuda Leib Lebowitz, shoemaker.’ So they sent him to Tel Aviv, instead of maybe Bnei Brak.

“It was hard for my mother to find her place in Eretz Yisrael,” Reb Berel continues. “She had no cow to milk there, and the life was so different. After a few weeks, the Kaliver Rebbetzin, who lived a few blocks away, asked if my mother would like to come and work in her kitchen, helping her prepare Shabbos food for guests. She made it clear that she would pay, and my mother went. I remember the first Erev Shabbos, it was already around noon and my mother hadn’t returned home. I went there and asked the haus bocher to call my mother outside. A woman heard my voice and came out to ask ‘Berele, vus vilstu?’ I stared at her — I just couldn’t recognize her. And then I realized it was my mother. The Rebbetzin had given her a sheitel to wear, and suddenly she looked years younger. All the years we lived in Russia, she only had a tichel, and I had grown up with my mother looking like an old lady. The Rebbetzin then gave her a present of a few sheitels, and also assured her that she would take home Shabbos food for her own family, too. With this love and kindness, my mother began to settle down.”

Mordechai Ainhorn, who had been a Vizhnitzer chassid before the Holocaust, went to the Vizhnitz court in Bnei Brak and reignited his connection. He found work as a gabbai for the Koidenover Rebbe of Tel Aviv, and his children, too, began to settle in to Eretz Yisrael. A while later, Reb Mordechai was invited to join a group of shochtim who were going to shecht animals in Brazil. It seemed like a good parnassah opportunity for an experienced shochet. The family said their goodbyes, imagining that they would wait safely in Eretz Yisrael as Reb Mordechai worked abroad, and he’d return soon. But tragedy struck.

In Brazil, there was a terrible car accident that involved the entire group of shochtim. Some were seriously injured, but Reb Mordechai, who was sitting in the front, did not survive. He was not destined to enjoy the Holy Land for which he had prayed for so long, and his family was left bereft.

“Once again, times were not easy,” says Reb Berel. “My mother was just 50, a new immigrant, and widowed. In 1973, I got married, and then my brothers married, too.” Berel’s wife grew up in Munkacs, where her father, Reb Yosef Meir Friedman, was also a shochet, and she was allowed to emigrate in 1971. “Our families were of the same style, and knew each other in Russia, because there was only a small group of klei kodesh there. We got married in Bnei Brak, and I was zocheh to have the Ribnitzer Rebbe, who had just arrived in Eretz Yisrael, at my chasunah.”

A few years later, Gittel Ainhorn remarried and moved to Bnei Brak, where she would live for the next 20 years. But Berel wasn’t so fortunate. He found himself struggling mightily to earn a living in Eretz Yisrael, and in 1976, when he saw an advertisement in Hamodia that the Jewish community in Vienna was looking for a menaker, he decided to give it a try, since his father had taught him the skill back in Russia.

“And so we came here,” he says. “For fifteen years, I was the menaker and mashgiach in the butcher store. I kept my eyes open and learned the butcher’s job. And baruch Hashem, I was able to buy the store, which I owned for 30 years. Now that I’ve retired, it’s my son-in-law’s business.”

For many years, Reb Berel sent packages of kosher meat to the community left behind in Munkacs (today called Mukachevo, in western Ukraine), and from 1985 until 2000, Mr. and Mrs. Ainhorn would go back to Munkacs every year on Shabbos Nachamu. Although it was difficult for Mrs. Ainhorn to see her old home neglected and abandoned, the couple knew that the Jews there were delighted to see them.

“In our times, every shtetl had some shomrei Shabbos and some who were not, and until 2000, there was a minyan of old Jews in Munkacs,” he explains. “They knew that when Berel was there, there was a hot meal for Shabbos, because I used to bring along meat with me, and they gathered around for a minyan, even though, unfortunately, some of them knew how to shuckel but not how to actually daven. They really didn’t know much, but these were people whom I knew before we left Russia, and as one of them told me, the hot food stayed in their veins until Succos.”

Reb Berel doesn’t do milah much anymore, although he recently made an exception for his first great-grandchild, but at 76, he’s still an active gabbai in the shul. “Here I feel I have a toeles in the town, I’m able to contribute to Yiddishe life, from the milah to the fleish. It’s a long way from the days we did those things in secret, but a Yid can contribute wherever he finds himself.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1042)