Even after loss, Rebbetzin Shterna Wolff is determined to spread light

It’s a summer evening in Hanover, Germany. Although the coronavirus lockdown is easing across Europe, some of the heaviness remains.

It’s just over a month since the petirah of Rabbi Binyomin Wolff, and I’m expecting my conversation with his wife, Rebbetzin Shterna Wolff, to be somewhat subdued. I’m assuming that the buzzing Chabad house they built together will have gone quiet, and we’ll talk in hushed tones about the loss to the family and the community.

But when the Rebbetzin manages to squeeze in my call, it sounds like she has a lot going on there in the Beit Chabad. It’s hectic, with family — there are eight Wolff children — guests, and deliveries clamoring for her attention.

“Everyone is helping us,” she explains, immediately upbeat.

Our conversation in Hebrew about the couple’s shlichus and the community they’ve built up gets off to a good start, but then the Rebbetzin excuses herself for a few minutes to speak warmly in Russian to a couple who have just walked in. Tones of surprise and excitement float over the phone as she exclaims and hugs.

“It’s a couple who’ve been coming to us constantly for six years,” she explains to me when she gets back on the line. “They were in a relationship when they first came to us, and four years ago we married them off. Now they just stopped by to announce that they’re expecting their first.”

A Life of Service

The Wolff home, adjacent to the Beit Chabad of Hanover, is the heart of a growing community. It houses an active shul, with full services and a weekly community kiddush. The Rebbetzin hosts women’s evening programs, “baby café” mornings for young mothers, and programs for children and college students. She’s an experienced counselor too, the natural address for marriage advice and family issues.

“For fifteen years, people have been coming to pour out their hearts and to get support. A rav and rebbetzin in a small community deal with everything you can imagine. Our job begins with news of a birth, bris, continues through the bar mitzvah and chuppah, and of course we’re called to attend sickness and death.”

Shterna was raised in Eretz Yisrael in a Chabad family, and always dreamed of outreach. Four months after her marriage to Rabbi Binyomin Wolff, the couple left Eretz Yisrael on their first mission: shlichus to Odessa, in the Ukraine. They worked there as assistants to the city’s main shluchim, Rabbi Avrohom Wolff and Chaya Wolff. The two men were cousins, while Chaya and Shterna are sisters. They spent five years in Odessa, engrossed in helping the community and learning, hands-on, how to live for a shlichus.

“From my sister and brother-in-law, we learned that the sky is the limit, and what it really means to be dedicated to a community,” Shterna says. When they felt ready to move on, the younger Wolff couple specifically sought a city that did not have a Chabad house yet. They wanted to be pioneers, trailblazing the foundations of their own community.

Requests had come in to the international Chabad headquarters, asking for shluchim to come to Hanover, a medium-sized city in Northern Germany. Since the 1990s, Germany has become home to large numbers of Russian Jews who fled Communism and poverty looking for a democratic society and higher standard of living, so the German Jewish community is largely Russian speaking. When the Wolffs arrived from Odessa, they spoke fluent Russian, which would stand them in good stead, but not German.

The city already hosted a traditional Jewish community, and a liberal community as well. In fact, almost every sizeable city in Germany has a synagogue, but the levels of observance vary. Hanover’s shul was considered pretty traditional. It had separate seating and minyanim on Shabbos and Yom Tov. Rabbi Wolff built a friendship with the community’s rabbi, then, once the other rabbi retired, the Chabad shaliach ended up unofficially fulfilling rabbinic duties for that small community as well as his own. Today, there’s a Bukharian shul too, and Chabad functions in harmony with these kehillos.

There are an estimated 8,000 Jews in the city, mostly unaffiliated. The young couple had to start from scratch, to build a community without knowing anyone in the city or speaking the local language. Rebbetzin Shterna goes back to those early years and reminisces.

“We used to take a local phonebook and call families whose last name sounded Jewish. We also went out with our kids to public parks and spoke in Hebrew. That got people to come over to us, curious, and we’d start a conversation. My husband went out on the streets and to stores with his yarmulke and beard, so of course that sparked curiosity.” Till today, the Rebbetzin loves to speak Hebrew in the streets, and it still attracts people to come over and chat.