This year, even though our lone voices might not swell with the same intensity and volume of the throbbing, sweeping, all-encompassing Meron music, we will bow in humility to the Divine conductor, wherever we are

Photos: AP images, Flash 90

IF you don’t live in Eretz Yisrael, it might be hard to understand this mysterious Yom Tov of Lag B’omer, where the entire country seems to revolve around the festivities of the holy day and every bus line is commandeered to transport throngs to Meron. This year though, enemy missiles threaten to change the landscape. But didn’t Rabi Shimon bar Yochai alone teach us about the capacity to bow our heads to a greater force, to concede our smallness in the face of His infinite power — and then find and embrace a different script, learning new lines and raising our voices in a humble song of submission, even if that’s not the tune we’d originally planned?

This year, even though our lone voices might not swell with the same intensity and volume of the throbbing, sweeping, all-encompassing Meron music, we will bow in humility to the Divine conductor, wherever we are

Mission to Meron

by Gedalia Guttentag

Global conflagration was only a few months away but the darkening horizon in Europe seemed to belong to a different universe as the Karliner Rebbe, Rav Avraham Elimelech Perlow, arrived under a blue sky in Tel Aviv’s port in May 1939.

Hundreds of chassidim were on hand for the occasion. As the ocean liner approached, they began to sing in welcome. Knowing of the Rebbe’s passionate longing for the holiness of Eretz Yisrael that found expression in his regular letters to them, they were sure the joy on his face would mirror that of their own. But as soon as they caught sight of his somber face, they knew that something was off. The song died on their lips when the visitor raised his hand, signaling to them to stop.

As silence fell, the 48-year-old Rebbe began to speak. “We haven’t come to Eretz Yisrael to visit, but to arouse Heavenly mercy for our brothers in Poland and the rest of Europe,” he told his audience. “Black clouds are hovering over the skies of Europe! This is no time for happiness. Every one of us has a duty to cry out bitterly and daven at the holy kevarim for salvation.”

Stunned by the Rebbe’s dark words, the crowd stood silent, unable to fathom what he could be referring to.

Thus began the little-known story of the Karliner Rebbe who predicted the Holocaust and came to Yerushalayim and Meron to try to avert the impending calamity before being swallowed up in the churban that he’d warned of.

The basic outline was something that I learned of a number of years ago while doing kiruv in Tel Aviv. On the wall of a shul that has been used by successive outreach organizations in the city center is a plaque attesting to the fact that under the modern décor lies a Karliner shtibel.

Who was the Rebbe who’d predicted the Holocaust and then went back to face the fate that he’d foreseen? Born in 1891, Rav Avraham Elimelech was the eighth Rebbe of the dynasty founded by Rav Aharon Hagadol of Karlin (now a suburb of Pinsk, Belarus). Rav Avraham Elimelech founded a yeshivah in Luninets, whose co-rosh yeshivah for a time was Rav Shach. Such was the Rebbe’s ascetic perishus that Rav Moshe Mordechai Biderman of Lelov labeled him the “Baal Shem Tov of the generation.”

Knowing what he did, what motivated Rav Avraham Elimelech to go back into the lion’s den, rather than escaping to rebuild the chassidus in safety? Was it really so perilous to reach Meron in those years? And on what felt like a personal level, I wondered whether the Rebbe had visited the very building where I spent Shabbos so many times on his desperate journey around the country.

It turns out that he did. A short item in Haboker, a secular daily of the period, reported on the reception that the Rebbe received in Tel Aviv. “On the Besarabia cruise liner the Karliner Rebbe arrived at 7 a.m. and was greeted with excitement by his chassidim,” the newspaper noted on May 17, 1939. “He was greeted with song, and his chassidim accompanied him to Rechov Dizengoff.”

Accompanied by chassidim, Rav Avraham Elimelech makes his way to the Kosel on Succos in happier times

WAKE-UP CALL

Much of what we know about the Karliner Rebbe’s mysterious pre-war visit comes from the testimony of his chassid, Rav Yisroel Grossman ztz”l (father of Migdal Ha’emek’s well-known Rav Yitzchak Dovid Grossman).

“On Erev Rosh Chodesh Sivan,” Rav Grossman senior writes in Lev Yisrael, “the Rebbe called for a taanis, and hundreds gathered at the Kosel to say Tikkun Chatzos. ‘We need to arouse Heavenly mercy so that the plans of our enemies to destroy the Jewish people should be foiled,’ he told the crowd.”

At a meeting of the community leaders later, the Karliner Rebbe spoke about the way that the Jewish people was sleepwalking into disaster. Face white and head bowed, he cried out in anguish. “How can we wake up Klal Yisrael to cry out to Hashem to avert the terrible decree that has been signed against us?”

Rav Avraham Elimelech’s dire warnings seemed taken from nowhere. Yes, the puzzle pieces of a dreadful world war were falling into place. This was the month when Germany and Italy signed the military pact that undergirded their Second World War alliance. But Britain was still busily practicing diplomacy to defuse German-Polish border tensions and Hitler’s threats against European Jewry seemed fantastical.

It wasn’t the first time the Rebbe had warned of a black future for European Jews, though. From 1933 onward, he spoke of Hitler’s threat constantly. A full year before the outbreak of war, Rav Zalman Brizel, a leading Karliner chassid from Yerushalayim, had spent Rosh Hashanah with the Rebbe and returned with a disturbing account of what went on.

Although British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had returned from meeting Hitler with a proclamation of “peace for our time,” saying that the German leader wasn’t bent on war, unlike most observers, the Rebbe wasn’t heartened.

Before the tekios began, he addressed the crowd. “We’re faced today with the same threat as in the times of Mordechai and Esther. We need to storm the Heavens for miracles.”

Standing now by the Kosel, one Karliner chassid turned to the Rebbe and asked what was on everyone’s mind. “Why is the Rebbe scaring us so much?”

Rav Avraham Elimelech groaned and answered in a low voice: “Everything that I have said to you is written black-on-white in a letter from the Baal Shem Tov that I have.”

“Can the Rebbe show it to us?” he asked.

“I would show it to you,” came the chilling answer, “but what’s written there is far worse than what I’ve described. The Jewish people are about to endure suffering the like of which hasn’t been seen since the Creation of the World. But what good would seeing the letter do? It’ll only disturb you, so that you can’t find any rest.

“We need to shake the spiritual worlds to beseech Hashem’s mercy,” the Rebbe concluded his terrifying address.

The Karliner Rebbe (2nd right) visiting Sarny, now in Ukraine

BRAVING DANGER

For the next six weeks, the Karliner Rebbe was in contact with many Torah leaders in the country in an effort to generate a mass movement of tefillah. The elder of the Ruzhin dynasty, Rav Yisrael of Husyatin, agreed with Rav Avraham Elimelech that war was inevitable: “The Germans are busy harvesting the wheat crop to store food for the army,” he said when the Karliner Rebbe visited to consult with him, “but when that’s done, there will be a world war.”

As the weeks went by, the Rebbe’s single-minded focus on the fate of Europe’s Jews didn’t waver. Visitors heard him muttering to himself things like, “What will be with Cracow’s Jews?” and “Polish Jewry is lost.”

The climax of Rav Avraham Elimelech’s efforts came in early July when he decided to go to Meron. For the previous three years, the Arab Revolt had raged across the country, as Palestine’s Arab community used violence and economic pressure to convince the British to halt Jewish immigration.

In historical memory, incidents such as the 1929 Chevron massacre loom large, yet somehow, it’s overlooked that between 1936 and 1939 the Arabs killed more than 400 Jews. Pogroms and murders were the order of the day. All over the country — in mixed Arab-Jewish cities such as Jaffa and Yerushalayim, and in outlying villages such as Peki’in in the Galil — Jews were beaten and driven out.

Evidence of the revolt’s savagery is scattered around the country today in the form of the fortified pillboxes and police stations from Yerushalayim to Latrun and Tzfas which the British built to stem the Arab violence.

In the country’s north, that violence was very pronounced. In October 1938, marauders inflicted a pogrom on the Jewish quarter of Teveria. Entering a shul, they slaughtered the gabbai and burned the building. In a 40-minute rampage, they killed 19 Jews, including 11 children, even burning babies alive in acts reminiscent of the scenes we’ve recently endured.

Near Meron, the Jewish settlement of Ein Zeitim was destroyed. The narrow, hilly road leading to the kever of Rav Shimon Bar Yochai was commandeered by Arab snipers. Given the danger in those years, access to Meron was severely curtailed. On Lag B’omer of 1939, the British all but closed access to Rashbi.

So, when the Karliner Rebbe announced that he was going to Meron to daven, his close followers attempted to dissuade him, but he was adamant that he would brave the danger to complete his mission.

“When we got there,” recalls Rav Yisroel Grossman, “we discovered that the almost-abandoned site was covered with dust and sand. The Rebbe asked to go into the mearah on his own to daven. After a while, we went in as well and discovered that his face was swollen with crying.”

Shacharis facing the remote, dangerous hills around Meron was both elevated and frightening. The Rebbe asked the small minyan to daven loudly and cry out to Hashem with all their strength. But his chassidim did so with one eye on the terrain around them, fearful of lurking Arabs.

The next stop was Tzfas, and its ancient cemetery. At the entrance, the Rebbe referred to the kinnos which say that Yirmiyahu Hanavi visited the Avos to warn them of the impending destruction of the Beis Hamikdash.

“We, too, are here to warn the tzaddikim who rest here that they should evoke Divine mercy for Klal Yisrael,” he said.

Despite his herculean efforts to tip the spiritual balance, Rav Avraham Elimelech returned south with a premonition that catastrophe hadn’t been averted. “I thought that we would be able to move something in the Upper Worlds,” he said.