In Russia, you didn’t tell your parents about your problems, because they had enough problems of their own. Children knew to be seen and not heard

"I want to marry a girl who’s exactly like you” my young son once told me. “A girl who’s missing an arm.”

“They’re very hard to find” I replied. “I think you’re going to have to settle.”

Then I asked him why he wants a girl with one arm. “Because people like you have more siyata d’Shmaya” he answered simply.

I was born in 1976 in the city of Ufa capital of the unremarkable Soviet republic of Bashkortostan. Ufa is located in the Ural Mountains about 700 miles (1 200 km) east of Moscow along the Trans-Siberian Railway. At the time Russia — known then as the USSR — was ruled by the powerful Communist regime.

Like most Russian kids I was an only child. You have to understand — raising children in the Soviet Union was not the same as raising children in America. Life was difficult and having multiple children was a luxury most people could not afford. Women who had more than three children were given the title of “Mother Hero ” and awarded a medal.

Often my mother would wake me up in middle of the night to go wait in front of the local bakery. I would take my pillow and blanket and sleep out there in front of the store where lines had already formed in anticipation of the morning’s bread. If you didn’t get there hours before the store opened there would be nothing left.

For many years my family like many people in Russia lived in a communal apartment which we shared with two other families. Each family had one room; kitchen and bathroom facilities were shared. Later we got lucky and received a two-room apartment of our own. We lived in a huge nine-story building with four entrances. In that entire building my father was the only man who didn’t drink.

We were the only Jewish family in the building. We knew nothing about Judaism but we did know that Jews didn’t drink or beat their wives. Our Yiddishkeit may have been stripped away from us but we were still fundamentally different more refined and educated than the low-class Russian peasants all around us. We knew it and they knew it. In our own inadvertent way we were a light unto our community not appreciated by the locals but always noticed. They referred to us derisively as “the intelligentsia.”

My parents who grew up in the second generation of Communism were indoctrinated to believe they owed everything to Communism and Mother Russia. My father became disillusioned with Communism at a young age however and when I was growing up he told me not to believe any of the Communist lies.

Typical of the dominance of Communism over people’s lives the school I attended in Ufa was named after Pavlik Morozov the legendary Soviet youth who denounced his own father to the authorities. This “heroic deed” was held up as a model to subsequent generations of Russian children.

Atheism was a central part of my school curriculum. Our teachers lectured us endlessly about G-d’s nonexistence and we wrote essays trying to “prove” the truth of atheism.

When I was eight my life changed irrevocably.

I had a six-year-old neighbor named Lenna who lived on the eighth floor of my building, five flights above our third-floor apartment. Lenna suffered from growth retardation, probably owing to the fact that both her parents were alcoholics. Since her parents were usually drunk, Lenna spent most of her time out of school in my apartment, eating with us and going home only to sleep. By default, I became a big sister to her, since I was her only connection to normalcy.

In the summer, my mother would take me to visit her mother, who lived in a different city. It was an annual summer ritual, a welcome relief from the doldrums of the city. While we were away, Lenna was home unsupervised. One day she fell off her eighth-floor balcony and plummeted to the ground like a little ragdoll. Because she fell onto soft soil, and because she was so tiny, she escaped, miraculously, with no major injuries.

When I returned from my summer visit to my grandmother, I found that Lenna had already come home from the hospital after her fall, and I was delighted to see her in one piece. My joy was short-lived, however.

Soon after I returned to Ufa, neighbors I knew well and even played with changed their demeanor toward me. People in the street would point to me and murmur things, parents would point me out to their children, and local kids would hit me with sticks, throw stones at me, and call me names. They even tried to hang and drown me.

I had no idea what prompted this persecution, but after a while, the story came to light. A nurse living on the fourth floor of our building had seen Lenna fall past her window and had rushed downstairs to help her and send her off to the hospital. Then, she ran upstairs to call Lenna’s mother. But she found the woman in a drunken stupor, unable to comprehend a thing. Only a few hours later did the mother sober up and grasp what had happened.

Knowing that her husband would beat her furiously if he were to discover that she had been remiss in watching their daughter, Lenna’s mother made it her business to ensure that her husband would not find out what had really happened. And so a story was born, one that reverberated with the long history of the Jews. I, the Jewish girl who had taken Lenna under her wing and cared for her, had thrown the child off my third-floor balcony!

This story had many obvious holes, most notably that I was not home at the time of Lenna’s fall. In addition, the nurse who had seen Lenna fall lived on the fourth floor, above our third-floor apartment, and she told people that the mother’s version of events could not possibly be true.

But the story gained credence nonetheless. As with so many other blood libels, “eyewitnesses” magically appeared who had “seen” me push Lenna. And don’t think the plotters were our enemies bearing out a grudge: one of these “witnesses” was an elderly woman for whom my mother always bought groceries.

At one point, a girl from the neighborhood came over to me and said, “I know why you did it. You needed blood for matzah.”

“What’s matzah?” I replied. I had never even heard of it.

The torment went on for two full years, at the hands of my classmates and my teachers, my neighbors and their parents. I was a bright student, but my teachers began to take every opportunity to lower my grades and embarrass me in front of the other students.

This misery was my personal ordeal, one I shared with no one. I never even told my parents how I was being targeted. In Russia, you didn’t tell your parents about your problems, because they had enough problems of their own. Children knew to be seen and not heard.

But eventually my parents did find out about the anti-Semitic tortures I was enduring. My screaming and kicking in the depths of the night clued them in that something was amiss. Then, one day, my mother came home early from work and found me surrounded by a group of kids who were hitting me with umbrellas. This had almost become routine to me by that point, but she was horrified.

My parents tried to move to a different neighborhood, but in Russia, that wasn’t so simple, because the government assigned you an apartment and that’s where you had to live. Finally, after two years of unremitting persecution, we were able to move to a new apartment.

Amazingly, I suffered no emotional trauma as a result of the persecution I experienced. The physical blows may have hurt my body — I actually ended up in the hospital at one point — but the verbal onslaughts didn’t hurt me at all. None of my tormentors had called me ugly or stupid; the epithets they hurled at me all had one theme: Jew!

“Jew, go to Israel!” they would scream. “Reagan is your brother!”

They intended to humiliate and insult me, but instead, they gave me an identity. I was proud to be different from them. I was proud to be a Jew. With every blow I suffered and with every insult I received, I was grateful for one thing: I wasn’t one of them!

From the darkness of my personal Gehinnom grew the sparks of what would eventually become my Yiddishkeit. As a result of the torment, I began to talk to G-d. It was obvious to me that G-d existed, since all we talked about in Russia was G-d’s nonexistence. If people were trying so hard to prove that there’s no G-d, then clearly G-d did exist. My eight-year-old brain understood intuitively that you don’t deny something so vociferously unless it’s actually true. In order to live by this belief, however, I needed an opportunity to escape from the claws of Communism.

The window opened in 1989, the year of perestroika. The Iron Curtain was beginning to fall, and my parents were finally able to leave Russia. On our way to America, we stopped first in Vienna, Austria, and then in Santa Marinella, Italy.

In Vienna, my parents and I were struck by the beauty of the city and the grace of its inhabitants, who were polite and courteous to us, the Russian immigrants. I guess goyim can be cultured, after all, I thought.

One day, as we strolled through the city, admiring its graceful architecture, we found ourselves in the courtyard of a building where a large group of people was gathered. Curious what the gathering was about, we followed the people inside, and found ourselves listening to a fiery speech in German, the native tongue, which we did not understand.

Suddenly, my father turned white. He pointed to the back of the room, where a large swastika was painted on the wall. We had walked right into a neo-Nazi meeting!

So goyim are goyim, I told myself as we hurried out of the building. They may appear cultured and polite on the outside, but inside they’re the same as the drunken Russian peasants.

When we reached Italy, we met representatives of the Vaad L’Hatzolas Nidchei Yisroel, an organization that helped draw Russian Jews to Yiddishkeit. This was the first time I had encountered frum Jews, and my first reaction upon seeing them was, These are Jews and I belong with them.

I already believed in G-d and had a relationship with Him, having spoken to Him regularly for years, but I was unaware that there was such a thing as a Jewish religion. I only discovered that when I began attending the Vaad’s school in Italy for Russian Jewish children.

My parents did not object when they saw me begin to keep some mitzvos; they viewed it as a passing phase.

After five months in Italy, we flew to New York. Upon my departure, a Vaad representative gave me a letter in Hebrew to deliver to a woman in Brooklyn who was heavily involved with the Vaad, together with her husband. I dutifully delivered the letter, thinking I was doing the person a favor. It turned out that the letter was actually a letter of introduction on my behalf, asking this woman to help me.

She invited me for Shabbos, and then asked me if I’d like to go to Camp Chayil Miriam, Agudath Israel’s camp for teenage girls. I don’t know what she was thinking, sending a girl who wore jeans and didn’t speak a word of English to a Bais Yaakov camp. But I’m forever grateful that she did.

While in camp, I decided I wanted to be like the girls in the camp. Their caring, sensitivity, and acceptance drew me to them in a way that no kiruv seminar could have. Even though I stuck out like a sore thumb, I knew I belonged.

I left camp knowing some halachah and a bit of Hebrew, and I returned home determined to put my knowledge to good use. That first night, I refused to eat supper. The next morning, I davened for an hour.

Until then, my parents had tolerated my fascination with religion. Now, they realized I was serious, and they panicked. I had fallen prey to the opium of the masses!

My father ordered me to leave the house until I stopped with this nonsense.

When I was in camp, a woman had spoken to the girls about her experience traveling to Russia to spread Yiddishkeit, and when I was introduced to her after the speech, she gave me her phone number in case I ever needed anything. Finding myself on the street, I called her, and she gladly took me into her home. Several days later, my father ordered me to come back home.

The woman who sent me to Camp Chayil Miriam arranged for me to attend Bais Yaakov Academy (BYA) — another perplexing decision, considering that both Nefesh and Be’er Hagolah schools existed in Brooklyn to serve Russian immigrant students. But once again, her decision proved to be a wise one, because I thrived in BYA. My classmates tutored me, invited me for Shabbos, and in general adopted me. My teachers did much more than teach me — they supported and guided me in every area of life. BYA became my second home.

By the time I began tenth grade, my life had finally settled down. I loved school, I had lots of friends, and I was able to cope with the schoolwork. By then, Yiddishkeit had become a way of life for me, even though at home I was still fighting an all-out war with my father, who peppered me with questions about religion that I couldn’t answer.

My salvation from these endless conflicts with my parents came from a source I would never have envisioned. On the afternoon of the Shabbos between Yom Kippur and Succos that year, I was walking back from a nursing home with three friends when a car lost control and jumped onto the sidewalk, hitting a light pole. My friends were fine, but I was not. The car drove over my legs, while the light pole collapsed onto my left arm, amputating it just below the shoulder.

I was flown by helicopter to the hospital, where surgery to reattach my arm was unsuccessful. It took another six surgeries and half a year of hospitalization until I was able to return home, and during that time the community rallied to my family’s aid in every way. Seeing this, my parents gained a newfound respect for my religious observance. “If Yiddishkeit can produce people like this,” my father commented, “then there must be something there.”

I suffered no emotional trauma after the accident, just as I hadn’t suffered emotional trauma during the two years I was tormented in Russia. Perhaps it was because I processed the trauma during the month after the accident, when I was in a drug-induced sleep. My mother told me that during that time, I would feel with my right hand for my missing left arm, and moan, “No, no!” But when I woke up, I had no memories of the accident and suffered none of the grief that people expected me to feel.

In the facility where I recovered, I was in the company of other amputees, and missing a limb was oddly normal. I was one of the luckier ones, having lost “only” one arm, and my left one at that. There was a little girl there named Miracle, who was born with no arms and only one leg. Another teenager there had lost both his arms in a fire. So I discovered that it’s possible to live a normal life even if you’ve lost a limb.

Mostly, though, I attribute my ability to bounce back to the support and caring of the frum community. Having a positive attitude helped a lot, too.

Missing an arm was never an impediment to me. I quickly learned to function with one arm and do everything I had done previously. Other than forgoing shoes with laces, I didn’t change my life in any significant way after the accident. When I was released from the hospital, I went right back to school.

When I was in 12th grade, I would occasionally hear my friends discussing what type of person they would or wouldn’t be willing to marry. “Would you marry an immigrant?” they would challenge each other. “Would you marry a baal teshuvah? Would you marry someone who’s handicapped?”

My friends would sometimes ask me how I felt when I heard their discussions, considering that I fit into all three of the categories being debated. “Don’t worry,” I assured them cheerfully. “I wouldn’t marry any of you, either!”

Then I’d add, “Hashem knows I’m Russian, I’m a baalas teshuvah, and I’m handicapped, and he’s going to send me a shidduch who’s not going to be bothered by all that!”

To everyone’s surprise, I got engaged soon after seminary. In fact, when I called one of my friends to tell her I was getting engaged, she was sure I was joking.

I like to say that my shidduch happened “by accident,” because it came about through the Hatzolah member who tended to me at the scene of the accident. He remained in contact with my parents and me, and over time I became close to his family.

He was the one who suggested that I go out with a young man who was boarding at his house. Had anyone else redt the shidduch, I would have said no, because I was looking for a boy who was learning, and my soon-to-be chassan was working. But because the shidduch was redt by someone I deeply trusted, I agreed to go out with this young man. As Hashem orchestrated it, it didn’t bother him that I was missing an arm any more than it bothered me.

I didn’t view it as my job to change the person I was going to marry, and by the time we got engaged, I had fully made peace with the fact that I was going to marry someone who was working, not learning. I didn’t mention anything to my chassan about having wanted to marry someone who was learning. Some time after our engagement, however, he confided to me that he had really wanted to learn, but his rebbeim had encouraged him to keep his prestigious job, telling him he would have an easier time in shidduchim that way. Go figure.

Hearing that my chassan wanted to learn, I gave him an enthusiastic go-ahead. “But if we’re going to be in kollel,” we told each other, “we should do it all the way, in Eretz Yisrael.”

My husband took a sabbatical from his job, and I put my college studies on hold so that we could learn Torah in Eretz Yisrael for a year. Fortunately, he had saved enough money in his year of working to get us through shanah rishonah.

And then Hashem opened His hand. We had little financial support, but somehow, we saw tremendous siyata d’Shmaya, and we were able to manage in kollel in Eretz Yisrael without going into debt — for 15 years. Some of Hashem’s agents were revealed to us, in the form of friends in America who helped us throughout the years, but many others remained hidden.

Many times, we thought that we had reached the limit, that we couldn’t manage in kollel any longer. But each time, my husband would approach his rosh yeshivah to discuss the situation, and his rosh yeshivah would find some arrangement that would ease our financial situation and enable us to remain in kollel — whether it was joining a well-paying chaburah, or taking on a challenging limud sponsored by a family l’illui nishmas a loved one.

And then there were the less-hidden miracles: the money we found in our dresser when we were short that month; the loss of a substantial amount of money that was replaced by five times the amount; the slow but steady stream of support from benefactors who helped my husband publish his first sefer; and so on.

That’s not to say it was easy. My third son was born on a Friday, and since we had no one to help us, I signed myself out of the hospital a couple of hours after giving birth. I spent the next week cooking for the bris, which I made in my house in order to save money. (In retrospect, this wasn’t such a good idea.)

Challenging as our years in Eretz Yisrael were, they were incredibly rewarding. It was with a heavy heart that we made the decision to move back to America, after receiving unequivocal guidance from gedolim in Eretz Yisrael who told us it was time for my husband to go back to work.

In a way, leaving kollel and Eretz Yisrael was the most difficult nisayon of my life — and not only because I had a bunch of Israeli kids who barely spoke English and had a hard time acclimating to the American culture and school system.

After 15 years in Eretz Yisrael, where ruchniyus is reality and gashmiyus is an annoying detail, our neshamos felt the loss of kedushah acutely. For my husband, working in a non-frum environment was nothing short of torture, and after several years he quit his job and opened his own business. But his heart is in Torah, not in the business world, and we both dream of the day when he’ll be able to get back to the beis medrash full-time.

The challenges my kids face growing up in America are very different from the challenges I faced growing up in Russia, but no less real. The Communists used force and indoctrination to make us forget the Torah, while the Western world accomplishes that in more subtle ways. Yet along with every challenge comes the siyata d’Shmaya needed to face that challenge, and just as Hashem gave me the siyata d’Shmaya to overcome my nisyonos and manage a busy household “single-handedly,” I know He will give my children the tools they need to pass the light of Torah on to the next generation.

My son was right — I do get more siyata d’Shmaya than other people. Hashem has blessed me with a positive outlook on life. I have been surrounded by wonderful people ever since I left Russia. I am fortunate to be married to a caring, supportive ben Torah and to be raising a frum family. But most of all, I am grateful to have Yiddishkeit as my guide and to live a life of Torah and mitzvos.

When we light the Chanukah candles, I think of the miracles Hashem has performed for me, of the challenges He has helped me overcome, and of the wondrous twists of Hashgachah that have brought me to where I am today. And as I gaze at those little flames, I marvel at the power of the pintele Yid to light up the darkest of nights.

(Originally featured inMishpacha Issue 689)