New World, Old World

In her memoir, Chava describes Zionist immigrants flooding Tzfas with fervor for the Land — absent an appreciation of its holy mitzvos. In 1922, Chava’s father sent a letter with documents and tickets for them to join him in America. Mrs. Weinberg prepared to go to Teveria to take leave of their family, which in those days meant reserving a caravan. The scene remained etched in Rebbetzin Pincus’s memory:
We started out at dawn: Ima on a mule, and we on donkeys. Since Tzfas is on a high mountain and Teveria in a deep valley, the whole trip was downhill and pretty rocky. At one point the donkey I was on became very frisky, prancing around until he threw me off. Luckily, I fell on a grassy spot. A young Arab retrieved my donkey and walked alongside us the rest of the way.
After tearful goodbyes, the Weinberg family boarded a ship in Jaffa and crossed the ocean, eventually reaching New York and settling on the Lower East Side.
Chava’s brother was promptly enrolled in Yeshiva Rabbeinu Yaakov Yosef, but Chava attended public school; in those days, boys and girls went to separate buildings and proper dress and behavior were expected of staff and students alike. There were Jewish studies classes after school three days a week, but Chava’s father wouldn’t let her attend because the teachers weren’t Torah-observant.
When Chava was 12, she reports, her father came home one day highly excited, having just read about the founding of a new “Bais Yaakov” school in Cracow. She writes, “He had received a copy of the ‘Agudah Periodical’ from Poland that contained a report of a fabulous woman, Sarah Schenirer, who started a school.” Her father was ready to ship her off then and there. Her mother, however, had no intention of sending a young child off to a foreign country.
When Chava finished high school, though, the topic was raised again. “My mother got her fearlessness from her father,” her daughter relates. “Both of them were undaunted by difficulties like a new country, a new language.”
When Chava left for Cracow, she brought with her a letter from her father to Frau Schenirer. He wrote:
I am sending you my daughter Chava, and asking that you give her a double portion — pi shnayim b’ruchecha — of your tzniyus, your temimus, your yiras Shamayim. If you ask: How do I have the chutzpah to ask this of Frau Schenirer?, my answer is that Elisha Hanavi asked the same of Eliyahu Hanavi. When he knew Eliyahu would no longer be with him, he asked for a double portion of Eliyahu’s ruach hakodesh, knowing that the generation that followed would be less than the preceding generation, and that he would need it. My Chava will also return to a land and a generation that will be much different from yours!
Chava herself left for Europe with a mixture of excitement and trepidation:
It seems like I must have been adventurous, but in retrospect I must have been scared as well… I agreed to go on condition I would have a round-trip ticket and be allowed to return whenever I wanted. My knowledge of Poland was very sketchy. From stories of the Baal Shem Tov and tzaddikim, I gathered it was a vast land with forests and many goyim who hated Jews, where yeshivah bochurim essen teg and trinken treren…
I was given a storybook sendoff! Bnos girls from Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx came with flowers, knickknacks, and stationery for letter writing.
Her trip involved a six-day sea voyage to Bremen, followed by a crowded train ride to Cracow, during which she was appalled to see the conductor harass a young chassid, assuming the innocent man was the cause of some malodorous vomit in the car. “A spirited, young, liberal American, I stood up and called out to the conductor, ‘What makes you think he did it?’ ” she writes. “I said, ‘I know he is innocent, so please leave him alone!’ ” She apparently shocked him into backing off.
Due to a miscommunication, Chava received no red carpet welcome upon arriving in Cracow. She had to hire a drushka (horse and buggy), with no one to help her. The driver claimed not to recognize the address 10 Stanislawska Street. They therefore drove until she spotted Jews who pointed them in the right direction. Her first impression was disappointing:
I found the building almost deserted. Sarah Schenirer was away working on the establishment of a Bais Yaakov school. Fraulein Doktor [Grunfeld] was away on a mission representing Bais Yaakov in Italy, and the classes were away on a three-day outing. No reception. No welcome sign. No one to greet me except Vikchu, the Polish servant, and a few girls who couldn’t go on the trip.

A Mentor for Life

Things brightened up the following day, as everyone returned and Chava met her new classmates. She would first meet the famous Sarah Schenirer on Shabbos.
Friday evening I joined my new friends and went downstairs to wait impatiently for my first meeting with Sarah Schenirer. When she at last entered, escorted by a group of girls, I saw an average woman of medium height, wearing a white lace apron and looking like a typical motherly woman — until I saw her eyes. Those eyes were mild and loving, and yet they shone with a fiery light.
I was dressed in a light, sand-colored silk dress trimmed with white. The sleeves were tzniyusdig, the hem was long, and I thought the neckline was also fine. Sarah Schenirer greeted me warmly in her deep Galician Yiddish. I didn’t understand all of it, but I felt deeply welcome. Still smiling, she approached me and took a large pin and pinned the neckline of my dress, saying something about how in Bais Yaakov we insist on 100 percent tzniyus and cannot compromise.
My new friends stood aghast. Oddly enough, I felt no embarrassment or resentment. It must have been her unassuming simplicity and obvious sincerity that somehow made her gesture seem natural and appropriate.
Later she would tell her daughters, “I saw such love and temimus and ahava in Frau Schenirer’s eyes that I felt she’d pinned a medal on me.”
Chava adored her studies in Bais Yaakov, and made many dear, lifelong friends. “My grandmother developed her lifelong love of learning, and this fiery ahavas Torah and ahavas Hashem,” says granddaughter Ayala Barnett. “I always knew her with a sefer open on her lap — Chumash, Navi, Malbim. She participated in every conversation that included Torah. She didn’t just daven, she sang her tefillos, and inspired others to join her.”
Chava stayed in Cracow until 1935, the year Sarah Schenirer passed away. In fact, Chava was one of those who had the zechus to see her a day before her petirah.
I broke down at her bedside crying… Only her light-filled eyes remained of her. She caressed and comforted me and asked me not to cry, that all was well. The next day, after she lit the Shabbos candles, she returned her pure soul to its Maker.

Bringing It Back

Chava returned to New York, in her words, “obsessed with the Dream!” She made a list of families with children of kindergarten age and walked up and down the tenements, trying to convince the parents of the importance of a Bais Yaakov school. She managed to get together about a dozen children. “I taught them for a year and hoped they would continue as a first grade,” she writes. “But the East Side was not yet ready.”
Instead, she ended up teaching mornings in a new school in Boro Park called Shulamith, and afternoons in a new Bais Yaakov in Williamsburg called Bais Sarah (after Sarah Schenirer). At Shulamith, she tried hard to implement Bais Yaakov principles, and was soon promoted to head teacher. She also organized a group of teenagers to meet for discussions in the evenings “in the A&P on Lee Avenue and Hooper Street.” They’d debate subjects like what makes someone a gadol, and whether or not the answers to all questions can be found in Torah. When Rebbetzin Vichna Kaplan arrived in America, that group formed the first class that met in her home.
Chava’s grandson Avner, who loves to chat up older Jews about their backgrounds, once met someone on a trip to Montreal who turned the questioning back on him, asking about his mother’s and grandmother’s maiden names. “Chava Weinberg!” he exclaimed. “My uncle Manny dated a girl named Chava Weinberg, and he wanted to marry her. But she told him, ‘You’re an am ha’aretz. You should go to the Mir in Poland and learn more Torah!’
“He answered her — this was around 1938 — ‘I’m not going, there’s a war about to happen!’ ”
The man finished, “My uncle Manny used to tell that story to people, to let them know that even back in the 1930s there was a girl who would only marry a ben Torah.”
In 1940 Chava married Rabbi Avraham Pincus, a talmid of the Mirrer and Kamenitz yeshivos. At first they lived in Jersey City, where Rabbi Pincus was the rabbi of a congregation. Shortly after, he accepted a pulpit in Englewood. The couple hoped to stay on and influence the community to become more observant, but as their children approached school age, they realized Englewood could offer no appropriate social milieu for their children. “The clincher,” recounts one daughter, “was when our oldest sister Chumie, then about four, went to eat Shalosh Seudos at her friend’s house. They were the only other supposedly ‘frum’ family in the community. Well, my sister came home and announced, ‘We ate a fried egg for Seudah Shlishis!’
“The very next day my horrified mother was already making arrangements to move away. The shul offered to double my father’s salary. They even told him they’d give his wife a mink coat. He just laughed at that. He said, ‘You don’t know my wife very well if you think she’d take a bribe like that!’ ”
They gave up the beautiful house they’d been given and moved to a “parlor floor” (basement) apartment in Williamsburg, where Rabbi Pincus had accepted a position as rabbi of the South Fifth Street shul. (He would later become the principal of Torah Vodaath.) By then, Rebbetzin Kaplan had arrived in America and begun training Bais Yaakov teachers. Chava Pincus was her first staff hire.
“My mother helped draw the American girls into Bais Yaakov, telling them, ‘My friend Vichna is coming to New York, and she’s going to start a Bais Yaakov here!’ ” says Chava’s daughter. “She was young and charismatic, she spoke their language.”
Rebbetzin Kaplan recruited Chava to create her Department of Methodology in the Bais Yaakov seminary. She also did student teaching and model lessons in various schools. Chava would spend the next 26 years teaching in Bais Yaakov and raising her family of four sons and five daughters.
Just as she was no ordinary teacher, she was no ordinary mother. “My mother was always ahead of her time,” her daughter relates. “She believed in whole foods — she would feed us raw string beans when nobody was eating vegetables raw. She’d buy pumpernickel bread and give us raisins and cashews for snacks — even if we’d trade them away for Lifesavers candies.”
Friday night was always story night, during which the children would cuddle up with their mother and she’d regale them with tales —many of which she created herself.

New Heights

Once all their children but three were grown and married, and divided equally between the US and Israel, the Pincuses decided to return to Eretz Yisrael as well. They moved to Bnei Brak in 1976, but Rebbetzin Pincus didn’t stop teaching. When Chinuch Atzmai hired her to supervise several of its schools, she undertook an even more grueling schedule than before.
It was suggested that I go to Teveria to visit its schools and bring back my impressions, and I accepted eagerly. The city was almost unrecognizable. Most of our [her family’s] young people had left, either to Yerushalayim or Bnei Brak. There were still some of the old chassidim, who knew me as the daughter of Reb Matis and granddaughter of Reb Noach. However, to my sorrow and disappointment, most of the Sephardishe youth were completely estranged from Yiddishkeit.
Eventually, arthritis forced Rebbetzin Pincus to leave Chinuch Atzmai, largely because she could not ascend the steps of the schools she taught in. She and her husband moved to the Mattersdorf section of Jerusalem, where she began receiving groups of teachers and students in her home and giving a Shabbos shiur in Neve Simcha; she also went to schools to teach methods of chinuch.
It was during one of their trips to visit their children in the US that their son Rabbi Shimshon first spoke to his parents about a new kollel in Santiago, Chile. It had been spearheaded by businessman and philanthropist Dov Friedberg, who was deeply concerned by the rampant assimilation there. Rabbi Shimshon David proposed to his parents to join him there to help with the kiruv initiatives. The elder Pincuses initially demurred — they spoke no Spanish, and Chile was literally at the other end of the earth.
But Rabbi Shimson persuaded his father to fly out with him, and the elder Rabbi Pincus was so impressed by the kollel and the dedication of its members that, as his wife put it, “He was hooked.” With the assent of his adventurous eishes chayil, he decided to take a year’s leave from his position as menahel of Yeshivas Kamenitz. “When people, even from our own family, heard of our intentions, they thought we had taken leave of our senses!” she writes.
“My mother taught herself Spanish at age 70,” her daughter marvels. “She said, ‘Well, I learned a little French in school, and Spanish isn’t so different.’ She ended up translating my father’s bulletins into Spanish for him.”
They arrived in 1983, to find that promoting Torah in this Andean land was truly an uphill climb. The inhabitants of Santiago were very, very far from Torah knowledge and attitudes: About 80 percent of the small Jewish population was Reform, and intermarriage was rife. Rebbetzin Pincus and the kollel wives prepared their first big event to coincide with the yahrtzeit of Sarah Schenirer. They baked and cooked and sent flyers for a crowd, only to end up with two women besides the kollel wives. Even the indomitable Chava sometimes grew discouraged:
There were periods where I personally experienced deep disappointment with what I was doing. It seemed to me that the many, many hours of teaching and the many revistas, Jewish magazines, that we tried so hard to fill with knowledge of dinim and hashkafah, remained in the realm of theory, not practice. I saw them listening, discussing, enjoying, but change was slow to come.

Keep Them Young

Slowly, however, they made inroads, and when their children began clamoring for them to come home, Rav Shimshon replied, “Do you want our parents to turn into old people? Then bring them home!” A few of their students became baalei teshuvah and some went to yeshivah or to Eretz Yisrael to study. A few were found to not really be Jewish, while others who knew they weren’t Jewish, but were married to Jews, undertook halachic conversions.
The Pincuses returned to Eretz Yisrael after almost five years of dedicated effort in Chile. Her grandchildren remember her at the end of her life as a striking combination of a body weakened by disease, with a mind and will iron-strong in her love for Hashem and His Torah.
It was during the Rebbetzin’s later years that her friend Devora prevailed her upon to set down her memoirs, giving future generations a glimpse of her voyage through history: early Palestine, the Lower East Side, Sarah Schenirer, and building Bais Yaakov. By 2001 Rebbetzin Pincus’s health was failing; when her son Rav Shimson Pincus ztz”l was tragically killed, along with his wife and child, in a car accident in 2001, the family feared too much for her health to tell her.
Rebbetzin Pincus joined her son in the Upper Spheres the following year, leaving a deep mark on the Bais Yaakov movement and the many “daughters,” both familial and spiritual, who were raised — and raised up — by her luminous chinuch.

(Originally featured in Caligraghy Succot 5776)