“I’m standing on the land that was Hashem’s messenger to save our lives”

Photos: Family archives

As they said goodbye for the last time in the small Batei Machseh apartment in Jerusalem’s Old City, they must have made an interesting contrast. The sweeping robes and tall, saintly figure of the Yerushalmi tzaddik, Rav Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, and the fashionable modern suit and European air of his young visitor, Herbert Kruskal from Frankfurt.

“Listen to your parents and return to Germany,” the aged rav told the energetic, idealistic young man he’d got to know over the past five years. “But it’s important for you to maintain your connection to Eretz Yisrael — so buy some land.”

The year was 1924, and as Herbert Kruskal, my wife’s grandfather, went off to buy a plot on Jerusalem’s barren hills and give up his dream of settling in the Holy Land, he little imagined the fateful chain of events that the tzaddik’s advice had just set in motion.

A set of giant wheels were now turning that would culminate in one of the most dramatic, little-known rescues of the Holocaust.

In June 1944, at the height of the World War II, a group of 222 Jews possessing British citizenship and land in Palestine were given permission to leave the horror of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in exchange for the same number of Nazi-affiliated Christian Templers from Palestine’s German colonies.

Because of that very land that Herbert Kruskal purchased 20 years before as a bochur, his family — including his children, my wife’s aunts and uncles — would be part of the tiny group that was escorted by their Nazi tormentors, by comfortable railcar, to freedom.

The pieces of the gigantic puzzle that is the Divine Plan are constantly being arranged, but only rarely do we get a glimpse of the picture. Yet as Herbert Kruskal told a friend who found him shortly after the war saying Tehillim on Mount Scopus, “I’m standing on the land that was Hashem’s messenger to save our lives.”

Follow Your Son

The Kruskal family’s dramatic mid-Holocaust escape was actually set in motion in late 19th-century Prussia. Herbert’s grandfather Moshe Eliyahu Kruskal was a Litvish resident of the town of Ritova, near Memel — then part of Germany and now in Lithuania, where he knew Memel’s most famous resident, Rav Yisrael Salanter.

But when the draft for his son Leo (Yehudah Leib) Kruskal (Herbert’s father) loomed, Moshe Eliyahu decided to apply for British citizenship, which at that time could be bought, and which would exempt his son from army service. This British citizenship proved to be the first chapter in the Kruskals’ story, but in the meantime, Herbert Kruskal suffered for his grandfather’s decision. In 1899, his parents Leo and Erna moved to the legendary Frankfurt-am-Main community founded by Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch, and he was born a year later. But despite being German born and bred, and never having visited England, when World War I broke out, the 14-year-old was considered an enemy alien.

“My father had to report to the police every day before school during the war,” says Rabbi Aryeh Kruskal, Herbert’s son, and a longtime resident of Israel. “When he arrived, the teacher would say, half joking, ‘Here comes the dirty Englishman.’ ”

Possibly that sense of otherness, allied with a natural wanderlust that led to a globe-trotting lifestyle unusual for the time, was what brought Herbert Kruskal to the Holy Land for the first time.

Herbert was just 19 when he set sail on his maiden voyage in 1919. His picture, inscribed “C’est moi!,” shows a confident man of the world, his parents’ affluence evident in his clothes and the very fact that he owned a camera.

“He was sent by Agudah leader Rav Yaakov Rosenheim, with whom he was very close, to investigate the situation of chareidi Jewry in Eretz Yisrael,” says Rabbi Aryeh Kruskal. “It was long before the split between Agudas Yisrael and what became the Eidah Hachareidis. That’s how my father ended up being introduced to Rav Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld.”