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There’s an underlying question that jumps off the pages of Rav Yitzchak Zilber’s best-selling autobiography To Remain a Jew. While so many Soviet citizens sunk into the mire of G-dless Communist ideology during the decades following World War I what gave Rav Yitzchak and Rebbetzin Gita Zilber the wherewithal not only to barricade their doors against the spiritual onslaught from the outside but to raise their four children in Communist Russia as if it were Jerusalem?

In conversation with Rav Bentzion Zilber — only son and successor in leadership of the Russian-Israeli kehillah Rav Yitzchak ztz”l built — we get a peek into the seemingly simple but extraordinary home of his parents and hear his own homage to the exemplary fortitude of his father a man named by Rav Elyashiv as one of the 36 hidden tzaddikim of his time.

Rav Yitzchak who passed away in 2004 at the age of 87 was considered a malach among Russian Jews inspiring them with his own mesirus nefesh for half a century in KazanandTashkent and after that as leader of the Russian teshuvah movement in Eretz Yisrael.

In the shadow of the KGB and the Gulag the Zilbers managed to raise their children with similar backbone. When they had to be out of the house little Sarah (Zavdi) and Bentzion already knew how to answer snooping KGB agents. Rav Bentzion who’d managed to learn portions of Shas by heart while growing up under Communist oppression was only 14 when he kept Torah and mitzvos for months alone in a Russian sanatorium — hiding his tefillin in a tree. When Chava (Cooperman) immigrated to Eretz Yisrael and joined an Israeli Beis Yaakov her knowledge of Chumash was on a higher level than her new peers.