The year was 1992 and Rav Shlomo Wolbe ztz”l and his rebbetzin were seated at the Friday night seudah of a grandson’s aufruf in Brooklyn, with their son-in-law Rav Ezriel Erlanger, mashgiach of Mir Brooklyn, and daughter Rebbetzin Chasya. In the middle of the meal there was a knock at the door.

In walked a well-known personality, a Holocaust survivor, who demanded that all the children leave their seats; he needed to speak to Rav Wolbe. Rav Erlanger directed the children to move away.

In an outpouring of emotion and pain, the man shared his memories of the days of uncertainty and fear toward the beginning of World War II, when thousands of yeshivah bochurim in Europe were trapped by the worsening situation. The gedolim of the yeshivah world were involved in weighty discussions and decisions about who should attempt to escape and how.

Ultimately, while the Mirrer yeshivah and isolated talmidim escaped, the vast majority of talmidim of the other yeshivos remained and were murdered. The elderly survivor became visibly heated as he questioned the decisions the gedolim had made, implying that had they acted differently, millions of lives could have been saved. Those present could sense his deep agitation as he poured out his doubts to Rav Wolbe.

Rav Shlomo had not personally endured the fires of the Holocaust; he had spent the war years isolated, but safe, in Sweden. Faced with the survivor’s pained questioning, he turned to his rebbetzin and said in Yiddish, “Nu, you should answer.”

With great strength and firmness, Rebbetzin Rivka Wolbe, usually a gentle soul, responded to this man. “Do you really believe that if the decisions had been made otherwise one more person would have survived? Does your own survival make sense? Does my survival make sense? Nothing makes sense. Every person who survived, did so because of Hashem’s will. No human effort could have changed anything that happened, because it was all ratzon Hashem.” (Related by grandson Rabbi Yechiel Erlanger of Denver.)

This was Rebbetzin Rivka Wolbe. She lost her mother as a little girl of seven, lost her saintly father to the Nazis, and spent three years in the ghetto and several months in concentration camps. Yet her memoirs of the war years are titled Ve’emunascha Baleilos, (Faith in the Night.) There were no doubts and no questions, for even as she stumbled on the Death March, she was guided by a strong faith, sure that Hashem’s plans were somehow good.

Crossroads

On Friday nights, Rav Avraham Grodzinski, menahel ruchani of the Slabodka yeshivah, gave mussar talks to groups of bochurim in his own home. “You can listen from the door,” he told his daughters.

And young Rivka stood outside, listening and absorbing as Rav Avraham encouraged his students to lift their thoughts higher, to raise their minds from petty considerations and think of worthwhile goals. To become big people. Rivka remembered those shiurim decades after the glorious yeshivah of Slabodka was razed by the Nazis and its holy leadership murdered.

Rivka’s childhood in Slabodka was sheltered, but by no means idyllic. She was barely seven years old when her mother passed away during surgery. Rav Avraham Grodzinsky was left raising eight children alone. The girls were all pressed into service to help run the house.

“Savta’s job was the clothing: laundry, ironing, mending,” says Rabbi Yechiel Erlanger. “She was responsible for it from a very young age and became expert. When we were growing up, Savta came to us every Wednesday and used to help out with the laundry.”

When war came to Slabodka, German barbaric efficiency and Lithuanian peasant hatred combined to form a crushing wave of evil. Some of the shining lights of the yeshivah were brutally murdered, while the remaining Jews were herded into the ghetto. Three years of forced labor and deprivation followed, under constant fear of German shootings and roundups.

When the ghetto was liquidated, Rivka and her best friend Techa were transported to Stutthof, a women’s camp deep inside Germany. Shoeless, inadequately clothed, half-starved, they were forced to dig trenches for their captors. One day, shoes were finally distributed, but there were not enough. The Germans announced that the women who had not received shoes would remain in Stutthof, while the others would move on.

Stutthof was where the crematoria were. It seemed to be a crossroads between life and death. But Rivka’s best friend, with whom she had promised to remain, had not received shoes. A promise was a promise, a word had to be kept. Rivka gave back the shoes she had been handed, and under the incredulous gaze and insults of the Nazi guard, went to stay with her friend.

The selfless act saved her life. The women with shoes were marched off on a death march. But shortly afterward, the Nazis realized that the Soviet army was close to Stutthof and burned the crematoria to conceal their barbarism. Rivka and her friend were not allowed to await liberation but were forcibly marched in another direction. As the German army fled before the Allies, they still tried to finish off the remaining Jewish prisoners. Rivka miraculously survived a final fiendish attempt of the Nazis to abandon their group on a fire-bombed, sinking battleship.

Years later, Rivka spotted the name of Techa’s husband on a list of survivors. Delighted, she searched the camp to find her friend, but Techa was nowhere to be found. She was hiding, concerned about facing her dear friend Rivka, who had many family members who had perished. Years later, the circle closed when Techa’s grandson married Rebbetzin Wolbe’s granddaughter.

After the war, Rivka found her way to Sweden, where she met the young pedagogue who would become her husband. As she taught in the seminary in Lidingo headed by Rav Shlomo Wolbe, she slowly healed from her suffering.

“No one wanted to talk about their parents or family,” Rebbetzin Wolbe told Family First in a 2012 interview. “It was too big. If we opened the gates to our pain, we didn’t know that we’d be able to ever close them.”

But she remembers finding comfort in the words of her teacher Rebbetzin Jacobson, who reassured the broken girls that their parents were watching over and davening for them in Shamayim.

The Vaad Hatzala sent a relief check to “the daughter of Rav Avrohom Grodzinski,” but Rivka gave it back, not wanting to accept any more than was distributed to her friends. In 1946, Rivka received a visa to Palestine and made her way to join her older sister, who was married to Rav Chaim Kreiswirth ztz”l, who later became rav of Antwerp. (Her last surviving sister tbdlch”t is Rebbetzin Leah Rosenberg of Bnei Brak. Her brother, Rav Yitzchak Grodzinski shlita, also lives in Bnei Brak.)

Sowing Seeds

The young couple started married life in Petach Tikvah, but under the directive of the Chazon Ish, Rav Shlomo went to serve as mashgiach in the nascent yeshivah of Be’er Yaakov.

At the time, Be’er Yaakov was a small farming village, but as the Chazon Ish foresaw, Torah blossomed there. The yeshivah became a force in the Torah world, Rav Wolbe nurtured generations of Israeli and European talmidim, and the Rebbetzin accepted the somewhat primitive conditions — so simple that a visiting American relative began to cry when he saw their home — happily. Self-pity was completely anathema to her. She didn’t expect or feel she deserved anything; “You do what you have to do” was her mantra.

The mashgiach took on some of the burden of fundraising for the yeshivah and sometimes had to travel abroad for months at a time. Rebbetzin Rivka remained home with her children, in an apartment in the fields of Be’er Yaakov. On Shabbos, they recall, she’d sing the zemiros and songs that she remembered the bochurim singing back in Slabodka. When her children began to leave home to attend yeshivah and seminary, Rebbetzin Wolbe took advantage of the long, lonely days — in Be’er Yaakov, there was little company and few distractions — to begin writing her memoirs.

“Savta told me that there were times during those years when money ran short, and she didn’t have money to buy groceries,” says granddaughter Mrs. Chaya Wasserman. “She didn’t tell Rav Shlomo that she had run out of housekeeping money. Why bother him? What could he do — besides be disturbed? She preferred to struggle on and make do with whatever she could scrape together for meals, until the yeshivah had money for their pay check.”

This reluctance to disturb her husband was typical of the great respect between the Mashgiach and the Rebbetzin. Mrs. Wasserman, a marriage counselor, analyzes the dynamic between them. “There was great warmth, respect, and appreciation, great care not to worry or disturb the other. But they also accepted each other’s different roles and personalities.

“Today a woman expects her husband to fulfill all her emotional needs, which leads to the pain of unfulfilled expectations. Savta valued Rav Shlomo for his greatness, but she accepted that he was different from her. He was very much a deep thinker, and less of a talker. She valued and respected him from a place of true understanding and didn’t expect that which he was not. She used to say to me, ‘If spouses understood and accepted how different a man and a woman are from each other, there would be fewer problems.’ ”

Each time the Rebbetzin served the mashgiach, their children and grandchildren heard his warm, unhurried “Thaaank you.” He never took her devotion for granted.

Only with Love

When it came to parenting, Mrs. Wasserman says, the Wolbes were not mechanech their children by “being mechanech.”

“They didn’t talk about it much, they didn’t give educational speeches to them. They didn’t explain themselves, nor apologize to their children. Rather, they were mechanech by being who they were. For example, if the children were fighting, Saba would pace back and forward in the room, repeating aloud to himself the words of Chazal describing the praise of someone who doesn’t respond to insult. He never told them what to do — but he learned it to himself and practiced it and they all got the message.”

The Wolbes’ sterling middos and exceptional patience served as guiding lights for their children. Her children recall that when they inevitably spilled some wine on the pristine white cloth on Seder night — and this was long before the days of disposable plastics —Rebbetzin Wolbe would say happily, “Oh, good, now our guests won’t feel bad if they spill.”

Because the Wolbes were deeply understanding of their children, they were able to be firm parents too, and the children accepted their decisions.

“My husband used to say that only with love can one raise a generation,” Rebbetzin Wolbe told Family First. “If a child knows that his parents love him, he’ll try his hardest to live up to their expectations. Of course, there are some children who are naturally more mischievous, and there are other factors involved, too — a good circle of friends, for example. Still, today, if a boy’s not doing well, they ask him to leave the yeshivah. In those days, if a boy wasn’t doing well, they davened for him.”

As a grandmother, Rebbetzin Wolbe was very warm and involved. She went to each married child’s home to spend one evening a week with them. During that night they got quality time, household help, and free math tutoring — and they never heard criticism about “today’s children.”

“Savta never rebuked us, but she did sometimes reminisce very gently about her own childhood: ‘It’s interesting, when we were children we didn’t expect such-and-such.’ And we understood her hint about how we are raising today’s generation,” says Chaya Wasserman.

And Rebbetzin Wolbe was never one to speak about her own greatness or achievements. “I’m a shy person by nature, I never talked too much,” she told Family First. “I was less involved in the futilities; more focused on the meaning, on avodas Hashem. If you want to know more about yiras Shamayim, speak to my husband’s talmidim.”

Yearning for Moshiach

“My grandmother spoke a lot about the Holocaust, educating a generation who could easily forget the past,” recalls Rabbi Yechiel Erlanger, “until Rav Wolbe passed away. From the time he passed away, the main thing she spoke about was the coming of Mashiach.”

The Rebbetzin would quote Rav Wolbe’s comment that Mashiach is already here, just waiting for us to be ready to greet him, and urge everyone to ready themselves for his arrival. Her longing for Mashiach was a constant theme of her conversations, but it had its roots deep within her sensitive soul, from childhood.

Several grandchildren relate the famous story of Rebbetzin Grodzinski’s levayah. The Rebbetzin fell ill when she was a young woman, and the bochurim had carried her bed across the Vilia river near Slabodka to catch the train to K?nigsburg. Tragically, she died there during surgery, in a strange city, leaving eight young orphans. At the levayah, seven-year-old Rivka stood among a crowd of relatives who were wailing and crying bitterly.

“Why is everyone crying like this?” she said to the aunt next to her. “Don’t they know that Mashiach is coming and Mamme will come back?”

These weren’t just the simple words of an innocent child who doesn’t understand death. For the remaining 88 years of her life, Rebbetzin Wolbe lived with the firm belief that Mashiach would arrive any second. In every conversation, she’d mention Mashiach’s imminent arrival: “We just have to open the door for him!”

Lucid and serene until the end, the Rebbetzin’s last words, on the Shabbos she passed away at age 95, were the words of Kedushah in Mussaf, which refer to Mashiach’s coming. “V’Hu yashmi’einu b’rachamav sheinis… —And He in His mercy will once again announce to us, before the eyes of all living, ‘I am Hashem your G-d.’ ”

Those words, along with her deep faith and longing to see Mashiach, escorted her on her journey to the Next World.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 616)