“We can no longer depend on our counselors to be mentors for our children”

Not Such an Oasis [Bitter Blade / Issue 1025]

Your fascinating article on the tragic fate of Attila Petschauer caught my attention. His name is familiar from my childhood because of a funny anecdote my father told me about him.

Petschauer was in Spain at a diplomatic reception after winning an Olympic gold. He was on a receiving line being introduced to numerous high-ranking Spaniards. They usually have several first names, followed by their father’s surname, followed by their mother’s.

He had a sense of mischief so he introduced himself to the next person on line in Hungarian as follows: “I am Petschauer Attila, go bust, you fat little twerp.”

He was quite shocked when the man answered him in Hungarian, “My boy, I am the Hungarian ambassador.”

Many Hungarians are anti-Semitic, so it was no surprise that once Horthy and his successor Szalasi came to power, things went rapidly south.

My father served for four years in a forced labor battalion and owed his survival in part to the commander of his unit who was a Seventh-Day Adventist and treated his Jewish “soldiers” as well as possible under the circumstances. His “reward” at liberation was execution by the Soviets in spite of the testimony of the Jews in his favor.

In postwar Hungary, you found Nazis in two places: jail or the Communist Party.

People say that today Hungary is an oasis of tolerance because of Prime Minister Orban. I wouldn’t hold my breath that it will remain that way, because if Orban and his regime went, so would the tolerance.

Name Withheld

Our Campers No Longer Have Mentors [Inbox / Issue 1025]

I share the reader’s frustration that mesivta camps are taking away staff from old-style camps. I have been on the Jewish camping scene for a long time (from camper to staff to head staff, both in day camps and overnight camps) and have witnessed the gradual decline in the quality of staff members watching and influencing our children.

I grew up with counselors who were dedicated to helping our children grow in ruchniyus and middos tovos. Some of my counselors and camp rebbeim went on to become rabbanim and ramim. As staff members, we were dedicated to raising our campers to be real bnei Torah, leading by example, keeping in contact after camp, especially with those who struggled.

I even watched the amazing Metzger twins in action and remember well the time that they influenced a camper to crack his secular CD collection. And as staff members, we grew not only by taking achrayus for the campers, but also by realizing the effect that we had on children and learned overall responsibility.

But now there are very few such counselors available, and we are forced to lower our hiring standards as we struggle to find counselors who will not influence our boys negatively.

I understand that it is hard for bochurim who are required by almost every yeshivah to stay in yeshivah for 11 months or go to their yeshivah’s learning camp for half the summer to give up their minimized bein hazmanim to help others.

I’ve heard that this point was brought up when Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz wanted to obligate the boys in Yeshiva Torah Vodaath to spend a month in Camp Mesivta.  A camp director asked him, “It is nice that the bochurim will learn, but from where will we get the next dor? Who will be their mashpi’im?”

Rav Mendlowitz agreed, and for years some of the greatest mashpi’im were counselors in camps.

We can no longer depend on our counselors to be mentors for our children, showing them how a ben Torah reacts when he’s not happy with a ref’s call or with losing color war, how he’s careful to come on time to davening, show kavod hatefillah, or say al hamichyah, how he stops to catch his yarmulke on the way to first base or chooses to listen only to Jewish music. We can only turn now to our siddurim and Tehillim and beg Hashem to guide our precious children to serve Him properly.

Another Concerned Head Staff Member, NY

We Owe Them All Respect [Second Thoughts / Issue 1024]

I very much appreciated the message in Rabbi Emanuel Feldman’s article about respecting the elderly. It’s so easy to become desensitized to the respect we’re supposed to have for the elderly the Torah commands us to have, and this was a helpful reality check.

If I may add another angle, Rabbi Feldman addressed the fact that elderly people often still have their cognition intact and deserve our respect for their wisdom. Permit me to remind my generation of the respect due to elderly people of our nation who did in fact lose their cognition.

Having worked closely in health care for about a decade with elderly people from the general population, I’ve seen up close what a person without the gift of Torah and mitzvos, who has never worked on their character or connected with Hashem, and has lived in a filthy society their whole life, looks like when they lose their cognition and therefore their filters. This is not the forum to describe what kinds of behaviors they engage in, language they use, or impulses they have. I see this in such sharp contrast with the elderly Yidden I have been zocheh to learn about and know.

A close example is that of my father-in-law, Reb Yekusiel Charloff a”h, whose  third yahrtzeit is coming up on 22 Av. My father-in-law was a person who worked on himself his whole life and transformed himself over his lifetime into a real eved Hashem. When his intellect started to leave him, we all gained a window into his beautiful neshamah. When Yidden passed by him, he would just want to give them brachos. He would send multiple text messages to his family celebrating masechtos he completed, and tremendous brachos to his children and grandchildren. He wanted to put on tefillin no matter what time of day, and daven even if he had already done so.

When he became more forgetful and started to wander off, he would wander to shul, where he had spent every extra moment for decades toiling over his Gemara. Even when his ability to speak was compromised, he was able to finish maamrei Chazal in Mishnah and Gemara.

I remember one memorable occasion when I was fortunate to host my parents-in-law for Pesach. When my father-in-law saw the Yom Tov table set with matzah, wine and ke’arah, he suddenly exclaimed, “It’s Pesach!” and his face lit up with joy.

This is the lesson I hope my children absorbed, even though they didn’t know him when his cognition was intact. No loss of cognition can reverse the work of a lifetime of polishing his neshamah. This is what we respect and stand up for. May we be zocheh to follow in the heilige ways of those who come before us.

Rivkah Charloff

No Man’s Land [Double Take / Issue 1024]

As I was reading the Double Take about a bunch of sisters’ frustrations that their nephews were being wild and bothering their little girl cousins, I found it very hard to fathom that Nechy or any of the other family members could even think such critical things about any of Hashem’s children, let alone their nephews. As the oldest of a family of all boys, I couldn’t hold back from writing. This is a situation of “no man’s land.” Zevi and Shalom are too old to be with their young female cousins and aren’t old enough to be with adults.

What did their aunts think would happen on a family Shabbos away? Their nephews were behaving like normal boys would, and just because no one else had any boys around doesn’t mean their needs should be forgotten about or that they should be expected to be who they are not.

These boys will iy”H grow up and become bar mitzvah bochurim. Until then, please don’t ever reprimand an eight-year-old boy (or a ten-year-old) for acting the way Hashem created him.

A Boy Who Was Eight Once

Because of Her Mesirus Nefesh [Streetlights and Shadows / Issue 1022]

Thank you for your article on prewar Vienna. It reminded me of my family’s connection to Austria. My father, Moshe Feld z”l, was born in 1929 in Kopyczynitz, formerly Galicia. My grandfather was niftar the year my father was born. When he was seven years old, the Kopyczynitzer Rebbe, who was living in Vienna at the time, brought him and his older brother, my Uncle Yechezkel, to Vienna’s Jewish orphanage. It was with great mesirus nefesh that my widowed grandmother Toibe Gittel agreed to send them there for the sake of their chinuch, as receiving a Torah education was no longer possible in Kopyczynitz after World War I under the new anti-Semitic government.

On Kristallnacht, my then-14-year-old Uncle Yechezkel was arrested and almost deported to Dachau. He escaped and slept on the stairs of the American embassy hoping to get visas to America for him and his brother. There, he met a bochur sent by Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld, who offered them a place on the Kindertransport.

My father and his brother came to the train station unaccompanied. When the Nazi officer on the platform demanded to see one of their parents, a man — who my uncle said must have been Eliyahu Hanavi — stepped forward to claim them, and the Nazi allowed them to board their train to freedom.

My grandmother sent letters to her sons in England from Nazi-occupied Kopyczynitz. We still have those letters. She was murdered in Belzec, but at least she knew her children were safe in England.

Her mesirus nefesh in sending her children away for their chinuch led to her being zochah to doros yesharim.

Yossi Feld

London

Thanks for the Laugh [Kichels / Issue 1022]

What a good laugh I had from the Kichels, as I myself was hospitalized with a peritonsillar abscess three years ago, and I’ve yet to meet anyone else who has even heard of the term.

For those with an earache, fear not. The first symptom is usually throat pain (not like strep, it feels more like there’s a pokey marble in your throat). Only later, as the abscess grows, is that joined by difficulty swallowing and slight ear pain, followed by inability to open your jaw, agonizing ear pain, and later, a complete inability to swallow (even saliva).

So, yes, potentially life-threatening, but if all you’re feeling is slight ear pain, it’s likely something else. (And even with all of this, I had about five days from the onset of my symptoms before I needed to be hospitalized to address it.)

Kol hakavod to Bracha Stein and Chani Judowitz for knowing about this obscure and uncommon diagnosis — and thank you for the laugh!

Name Withheld

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1026)