Seventeen-year-old Yanky Stein was at his best, energetically assisting in the massive cleanup at the Brooklyn Armory after thousands of Satmar chassidim had celebrated the group’s yearly Yom HaHatzolah the previous evening. But something went terribly wrong

T

hroughout the ages Jews have experienced events that clearly superseded the limitations of physical nature; they’ve performed boundless chesed — people superseding their limited selves to bestow goodness upon others; and together they’ve formed a metaphysical entity we call Klal Yisrael a confederation of souls that often appears fractured but is never more than moments away from a wondrous unity of spirit. The following lines tell a tale of all three.

The days leading up to Chanukah are always filled with anticipation but those days are doubly special in Williamsburg’s Satmar community because it is then — on the 21^st of Kislev that the kehillah comes together to mark the deliverance in 1944 of the Divrei Yoel ztz”l from the Nazi inferno. After a brief sojourn in Eretz Yisrael the Rebbe Rav Yoelish Teitelbaum made his way to America where he established his Chassidus anew with a literal handful of broken survivors.

Each year since then on the evening of the Yom HaHatzolah — the Day of Salvation as this day is known a seudas hodaah is held at which the Satmar community now large and burgeoning gives thanks to Hashem for what He did for its beloved rebbe. This festive gathering also serves as the annual dinner of Satmar’s sprawling network of chinuch institutions known by the shorthand acronym of UTA which together educate 9 000 talmidim and talmidos.

This year’s seudah held on Motzaei Shabbos Parshas Vayeishev marked 67 years since the Rebbe’s escape to freedom but it was auspicious for another reason too. This was the first time in 15 years that the seudah was celebrated in the cavernous expanse of the Brooklyn Armory perhaps the only Brooklyn venue that can comfortably accommodate the crowd of between six and seven thousand attendees.

It is an especially poignant venue for those Satmar chassidim old enough to remember the famous Keren Hatzolah event convened there in 1978 by Rav Yoelish on behalf of the various mosdos in Eretz Yisrael that on principle did not take government funding and thus relied heavily on their American compatriots for financial support. The Rebbe declared that the “heilige Avos themselves had descended to behold the kinus l’Sheim Shamayim” and the princely sum of one million dollars was raised that evening.

Graced as always with the presence of Rebbe Zalman Leib shlita this year’s seudah was a moving display of common purpose in a Jewish world so greatly in need of achdus. But what the multitudes present that evening could not know was that one young man among them Yaakov Meir Stein a 17-year-old talmid of the Satmar Yeshiva in Queens New York was destined less than 24 hours later to become an unwitting vehicle for a modern miracle.

Early Sunday evening found Yanky, a lively bochur always ready to pitch in when needed, with energy and good cheer, back at the now nearly empty Armory, assisting a team of some 25 to 30 volunteers in clearing out the electronic equipment and the innumerable tables, chairs, and massive makeshift bleachers from the previous evening’s event in the mammoth hall.

Yanky was up in the basket of a “cherry picker” in an effort to dismantle one of these bleachers when sudden, unspeakable tragedy struck: the machine lurched upward uncontrollably, lodging firmly, immovably, underneath a balcony beam descending from the Armory ceiling — 15 feet up in the air. Yanky’s neck was caught in a vise-like grip between the underside of the balcony and the upper rim of the metal cherry-picker basket he’d been riding in. The two dozen or so people down on the Armory floor, hearing the sound of metal grinding into concrete, gazed upward and froze in horror at what they saw.

Reb Yitzchok Sholom Wertheimer, the indefatigable facilities administrator of the Satmar schools, who had coordinated the massive event down to the minutest detail and was now overseeing the post-seudah cleanup, recalls what happened in those critical first moments — the moments that were instrumental in saving Yanky’s life.

“With huge siyata d’Shmaya and maintaining my presence of mind, I directed one guy to call Hatzolah and another one to form a makeshift ladder by stacking a couple of metal police barricades left over from the previous night. I clambered atop this ‘ladder’ and into the basket alongside Yanky. The fear was that a glut of blood was blocking his airways and perhaps even the carotid arteries, depriving him for far too long of precious air, which would lead to irreversible brain damage. I began blowing into Yanky’s mouth in order to get some desperately needed oxygen to his brain. Once, twice I blew hard, with no sign of life. On the third try, a large amount of blood came cascading out of the boy’s mouth into mine and down my throat. Then on my fourth attempt, I felt a drop of warm air coming forth from Yanky’s mouth, and I shouted ‘He’s back!’

Meanwhile, a group of Hatzolah members were just then finishing Maariv at the group’s Williamsburg garage just blocks from the Armory. One of them, an experienced medic who lives in Monsey, but happened to make a rare Sunday afternoon trip in to Williamsburg for his business, describes what happened next:

“I was standing with three other medics, discussing a particularly difficult call I had handled earlier that day, when an urgent call came in for a ‘Code One, Medic Needed,’ at the corner of Harrison and Heyward. That’s the Armory, and we were there within 60 seconds. Coming upon the scene, I must tell you that what I saw was a boy no longer among the living; I still can’t believe he’s with us, that’s how bad it looked. He had the look that’s called Hangman’s Syndrome; the name speaks for itself.”

Later that evening, as this same medic traveled home to Monsey, another driver saw him shaking to and fro as he drove along on the Palisades Parkway. Pulling him over, he asked what was wrong, to which the medic replied: “I’m just coming from a call the likes of which I’ve never seen before; I just can’t get back to myself.”

Another medic, a two-decade veteran of many accident scenes, continues the narrative: “I directed everyone within earshot to jump up and grab hold of the crane under the cherry-picker basket, which was only six and a half feet from the ground. The idea was that their combined weight would pull the basket down ever so slightly, creating a space through which we could slide the victim out. We had 15 to 20 fellows hanging on to all sides of the crane, including a few 300 pounders. It was the first time I can remember that a Hatzolah member weighing that much was a blessing.

“We managed to pull the basket down about three inches and extricated him through the opening onto a long board and then down onto the Armory floor, where another medic intubated him and suctioned his trachea. We feared a broken neck, so we stabilized him, but he made an involuntary movement, which was a welcome sign that he was, baruch Hashem, still among the living.”

A decision was made to take Yanky to Bellevue Hospital, located at First Avenue and 27^th Street in Manhattan. It was by no means the closest hospital, but it had what was now desperately needed: a topflight trauma center. Reb Yanky Itzkowitz, Shomrim’s Williamsburg coordinator, described the amazing teamwork that unfolded over the next few minutes:

“With a traumatic injury of this kind, every second counts. I went on the radio and within one minute, we had one member blocking off every street from the Armory to the Williamsburg Bridge — ten to 15 blocks in all. Two minutes before the ambulance arrived at the bridge, members were already there, blocking off the entire inner lane of the bridge leading into the city, allowing the ambulance to speed unimpeded over the East River into Manhattan. It rolled off the bridge onto Delancey Street, then six blocks to Allen Street, turning from Allen onto First Avenue. From that point until 27^th Street, we had every single side street opening onto First Avenue blocked off.”

As the ambulance pulled into Bellevue’s emergency room entrance, a Hatzolah medic aboard glanced at his watch: from the time he’d arrived at the scene one minute after the accident occurred, a mere 20 minutes had elapsed.

Yanky’s father, Rabbi Boruch Stein, is a tall, dignified looking chassidishe yungerman. Hailing from a family with deep roots in Mesivta Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin (his uncle was the legendary Rav Shlomo Freifeld), Reb Boruch has spent decades immersed in learning at Mesivta Tiferes Yerushalayim under the tutelage of the Rosh Yeshivah, Rav Dovid Feinstein shlita. Reb Boruch recalls the harrowing first hours, when everyone braced for tragedy.

“Sunday night, I got a call during the 6:15 Maariv, that ‘something happened with Yanky, it’s very serious, and go immediately to Bellevue.’ Rabbi Spiegel, a rebbi in MTJ’s high school, insisted on driving me to the hospital.

“As soon as I entered the emergency room, I learned just how grave Yanky’s situation was. Yitzchok Sholom Wertheimer told me the doctors had advised him to take Yanky’s blood-drenched clothing with him for delivery to the chesed shel emes; he still has a blood-stained piece of Yanky’s tzitzis. But then I encountered one of the first medics at the scene, who happens to be an old friend of mine. Initially, Yanky’s massive blood loss, collapsed lungs, and blocked airways, and a possible broken neck made his prognosis bleak. But once Yanky was stabilized in the ER, hooked up to a respirator and multiple IVs, my medic friend felt he’d make it. He took hold of me and said ‘I want you to know two things: first, you’ll yet have asach Yiddishe nachas from Yanky, and second, that you’ll yet have asach tzaar gidul banim from this chevraman, too.

That first night, only Rabbi Stein and his wife, Bina, were allowed into Yanky’s room; over a hundred others — family members, cousins, close friends — waited nearby. At that point, everyone thought the worst; they thought they’d be going from the hospital to a levayah.

Right from the start, Rabbi Stein, a colorful, energetic fellow whose friendships span continents, was overwhelmed by the outpouring of caring and concern from so many, many others: “Near our Satmar summer colony are some Lubavitcher families, Shloime Drimmer from the electronics store, Shaya Boymelgreen, and all of a sudden they’re popping up in the hospital. They got calls from mutual friends and they came to be mechazek me, staying for hours. People were bringing food, telling me to eat this, eat that, but who had koach? The Satmar Rebbe called me in the middle of the first night, and sent his son, who is a rav in Boro Park, down to Bellevue the very same night to be with us.

And yet … Yanky remained completely unresponsive. The doctors told the Steins they had no idea what was going on inside the boy’s head. There had been some encouraging signs: some twitching of the foot, a CAT scan at 3 a.m. that showed no cranial swelling, but there was simply no way to know the effect of what was said to have been an initial stretch of 12 long minutes with oxygen cut off to the brain.

Fast forward 24 hours, to Monday evening. What happened then is best conveyed from the perspective of Dr. Gabriel Hershman, a resident in oral surgery at NYU and its Bellevue affiliate, whom Reb Boruch describes simply as “mamash a malach.” Dr. Hershman notes the Providential way in which he came to be involved in Yanky’s care. Like all residents, he rotates through different departments in the course of the year, spending a month in each one. On the fateful Sunday night when Yanky was brought in to the emergency room, Dr. Hershman was on his last shift of the last night of a monthlong stint in the ER. The next morning, he began a new monthlong turn in the surgical ICU on Bellevue’s tenth floor — the same unit to which Yanky was transferred that very morning. And the resident assigned to Yanky’s case? None other than Gabriel Hershman.

The doctor acknowledges that when Yanky was first brought in, he said to himself, “Not again … Just weeks ago, we at Bellevue dealt with the tragic passing of Reb Elimelech Weiss, the Klausenberger chassid who fell victim to a horrific car accident in Williamsburg, and now this … I’ve just seen too many bad things.” He was also effusive in his praise for Hatzolah, whose members, he says, “consistently do more on-site interventions and provide more thorough information about their patients than any other emergency personnel. In this case, too, when the call came in, a team of some 30 doctors and nurses was assembled and waiting in the trauma slot, already outfitted in gowns and gloves, ready to do their assigned tasks. But when Yanky finally arrived, people were so affected by the severity of his injuries, that bedlam broke loose, and the Hatzolah medics kept redirecting the doctors as to what the problems were, until he was finally stabilized with blood product and insertion of multiple lines.”

When Dr. Hershman saw the CAT scan, he couldn’t believe there was no cranial bleeding or objective signs of trauma other than a mandibular fracture. But what he feared was the likelihood of permanent damage to Yanky’s oxygen-deprived brain. The next day, Dr. Hershman received a call from a medical liaison at NYU, Chaplain Yisroel Rosman, a Satmar chassid who both the doctor and Rabbi Stein praise for his phenomenal behind-the-scenes coordination of Yanky’s care. Rosman had a message to deliver: the Satmar Rebbe wanted to come up to visit at 7 p.m. that evening.

Shortly before 7 o’clock, Dr. Hershman turned off the sedation lines in order to ascertain whether a visit from the Rebbe, to whom Yanky felt very close, could somehow stimulate a response in the lifeless young man. A female colleague of Dr. Hershman, whom he describes as a very good physician but a completely secular Jewess, was more than skeptical about what the visit could possibly achieve. Meanwhile, the people at Yanky’s bedside kept telling him “der Rebbe kimt,” but there was no response.

The Rebbe arrived with an entourage of gabbaim, and together with family members and other visitors, there were probably 20 to 30 people in the room. The Rebbe put one hand on Yanky’s head and gave an inaudible brachah — and Yanky opened his eyes. Next, the Rebbe said “Yanky, ich bin duh, gib mir shulem alaychem.” It was hard to tell if the Rebbe had taken his hand or if Yanky had actually raised it on his own, but the Rebbe said “ehr hut mir gegeben shulem.” Just one hour earlier, a similar request from the doctor for Yanky to shake his hand had gone unanswered.

Then the Rebbe offered his left hand, saying, “Yanky, kvetch mir di handt.” The Rebbe then said, “ehr kvetcht mein handt.”

“I thought the Rebbe just wanted to be mechazek me,” says Reb Boruch. “But Dr. Hershman was right next to me, and I heard him say, ‘Wait a second, I must get another doctor.

Dr. Hershman says he ran out of the room to locate his dubious colleague. Finding her conversing with another doctor, he said, “You’ve got to come with me to Yanky’s room.”

“Let me guess,” she countered in a bemused tone, “he moved.” Dr. Hershman replied: “Actually, he’s not only moving, his eyes are open and he’s following commands.” The two doctors entered the room, and Dr. Hershman asked the Rebbe: “Please do it again.” So the Rebbe said, “Yanky, geb mir shulem.” Yanky opened his eyes and did as the Rebbe asked.

“For the first time in 24 hours,” recalls Reb Boruch, “he was responding, picking up his hand … I just started to cry. I couldn’t believe what I saw. Here the whole time he wasn’t responding, they’re telling me they don’t know if there’s brain damage, who knows what’s happening, and he just picked up his hand for the Rebbe. My son says he doesn’t remember anything from the accident. The first thing he remembers is the Rebbe saying to him “kvetch mir di handt” and he was wondering, ‘what does the Rebbe want from me?’ This sudden, stunning turn of events sparked, of course, a flurry of activity as the medical team began conferring on what direction Yanky’s care would now take.

From this point on, Yanky began a slow but steady climb back toward regaining full health. On Erev Shabbos Chanukah, he underwent five hours of reconstructive facial surgery. Yet it was now five days since the accident and he still hadn’t uttered a word. Says Rabbi Stein, “I lit Chanukah lecht at home at plag haMinchah, and Yitzchok Sholom Wertheimer arranged for a police cruiser to take me from Williamsburg to Bellevue before Shabbos. When I got there, Yanky spoke very slowly for the first time, asking me if his name was hanging in batei medrashim. I thought that perhaps he was embarrassed that his name should be all over. I said ‘Yanky, how do I know? I’ve been with you the whole time in the hospital.’

“My other son said he asked him the same question and he told him, ‘Of course, it was in Satmar, in other yeshivos, people were saying Tehillim all over.’ Then Yanky said to him, ‘I felt I was getting frishe koach, but I didn’t know where it was coming from. But when you told me everyone was davening, now I understand where the koach was coming from.’ It was getting close to shkiyah, and Yanky called me over to him and told me he wants me to sing Kabbalas Shabbos, with the nigginim he likes, making an enthusiastic motion with his hands. It was an intense Kabbalas Shabbos …”

And two days later, on Monday, Yanky climbed out of bed, got dressed, and returned home.

He walked out of the hospital on his own power, eight days after entering its doors on that terrible Sunday night on a Code Blue emergency call. Today he has resumed his regular schedule, savoring the opportunity to be, once again, just another bochur in yeshivah. The only hint that he was in a critical accident, fighting what was considered a lost fight for life, is his jaw — still wired with a metal plate.

Yanky remembers nothing of the accident, but what neither he nor his family will ever forget are the expressions of caring in word and deed by friends and strangers alike throughout the ordeal, and the volume of tefillos uttered on Yanky’s behalf, all of which were enormous and unending.

Reb Boruch relates that “Yitzchok Sholom Wertheimer came three times a day, constantly bringing Yanky pictures to look at and all sorts of things to energize his brain. He even took Yanky’s crushed eyeglasses to an optician to have him make up a new pair, which he then tried to pass off on us as the old pair. From the huge deliveries of food to our room, I would’ve thought it was Purim, not Chanukah. I had to get a fellow to pick up each day’s multiple deliveries and cart them off for the talmidim in MTJ. Off in California, little Isaac Hershkowitz, son of my cousins David and Dodi, got his whole Pre-1A class involved in saying Tehillim and he himself was saying Tehillim by heart.”

And then there was the ever-present, albeit unseen, role of the Rebbe.

Rabbi Stein relates that he called Rav Yonoson David, rosh yeshivah of Pachad Yitzchak in Eretz Yisrael, with whom he shares a close bond, to tell him what had happened when the Rebbe came to visit. “I told him, ‘here is a Rebbe who fihrs an entire Chassidus, with so much on his head. He called me the first night, he sent his son that night, and Reb Yisroel Rosman said the Rebbe was calling him every few hours to discuss which doctors to use. The Satmar rebbetzin came a few days later, and I asked her why the Rebbe sent their son when Yanky was still in a coma; why not wait until his condition had improved? She said, ‘What do you think? He came to be with you.’

“Hearing from me of the Rebbe’s intensive involvement in our situation,” Reb Boruch continues, “the Rosh Yeshivah observed that Avraham Avinu had a special matbei’a, a coin, with the ability to bring healing to those who looked at it. It’s also brought in seforim that nowadays, if someone goes in the ways of Avraham by doing chesed, this power of healing is infused in him and he gains that koach of Avraham. ‘So if the Rebbe does such chesed,’ Rav David told me, ‘then it’s no wonder that through him came the yeshuah.’ Rav Yonoson also recalled the gathering for Keren Hatzolah many years ago in the Armory, in which his shver, Rav Yitzchok Hutner, had participated alongside the Satmar Rebbe. He felt that the outpouring of chesed that had taken place in this same building all those years ago created merits that stood in good stead for Yanky.”

Reb Boruch repeated what happened when he went back to NYU to personally thank Dr. Leon Pachter, a frum physician of renown, who though not personally involved in Yanky’s treatment, was largely responsible for having topflight doctors involved at every stage of the case. Dr. Pachter’s response surprised him: he said the Rebbe had already called to thank him.

“I was crying, thanking the doctor through my tears,” said Reb Boruch. “But Dr. Pachter said, ‘Don’t thank me, thank the Ribono shel Olam,’ and then quoted Yosef’s response to Pharaoh upon interpreting his dreams: it’s not me, its Elokim.”

Dr. Hershman said the thing that amazed him most was that as hard as the ordeal was for the family, not knowing if Yanky would survive or in what state he’d be left in, the positive-thinking, generous and effusive Stein clan gave as much, or more, support and encouragement to the medical staff than they received.

“They didn’t stop with their profuse expressions of thanks. And, you know, there wasn’t a nurse who wasn’t excited to take care of Yanky. For a whole week after he left the hospital, the nursing staff kept asking after him and expressing how much they missed the family. It’s because this special family took care of them, always thanking everyone, from the doctors to the nurses to the receptionists, and bringing small but thoughtful gifts. For the eight days they were here, there was palpable warmth in the halls, with lots of singing coming from the room; some well-known singers dropped by to perform for Yanky. The first time I heard the singing, I was a bit embarrassed, thinking it was too loud. But then I’d see the nurses tapping their feet to the niggunim, and when there was one quiet evening, a nurse actually remarked disappointedly, ‘What, no show tonight?

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 394)