That September, the Oslo Accords were signed, and Linda made sure to go rally against them in front of the Israeli embassy in Montreal. Together with a budding politician who would later run for mayor of Cote Saint-Luc, she started an organization called SAJE — Save All Jews Everywhere.

Devoting herself to pro-Israel activism, Linda became so active in the community that she was tapped in her early twenties to host a talk radio show on the local Shalom Station. “I made it their highest-rated show!” she says proudly. “I did it while my children were babies, recording from my home. Sometimes my husband had to whisk the kids out of the room so they wouldn’t be heard on the broadcast.”

She went after an A-list of guests that included John Loftus and Brigitte Gabriel. In the process, she garnered an ever-expanding Rolodex of contacts from political and activist circles. She wrote a column for the Jewish Monitor and published pieces in the Jewish Press and Arutz Sheva.

Spiritual Activism

After high school, Linda had enrolled in Montreal’s Vanier College, bringing her activism with her. Coming from an Arabic-speaking home, she was well placed to unmask the “peaceful” demonstrations of anti-Zionist Arab students by translating the real content of what they were saying to each other. “I was the secret weapon,” she laughs.

But Hashem had other plans for her. “Sometimes Hashem can just pluck you up, and give you an opportunity you never expected,” Linda comments. A cousin happened to call Linda’s mother and mentioned she was taking computer classes at a local seminary called TAV. Linda hadn’t been comfortable with the campus environment at Vanier, and suddenly TAV seemed like an option; it was for women only, and at a time when computers were becoming the next great thing, it offered courses in programming. What Linda didn’t realize was that religiously, TAV was on a level she had never before encountered.

“I don’t know the exact makeup today, but in the ’90s the girls in TAV were mostly from Satmar, Tosh, a few litvish girls… and me!” Linda says. “I walked in with my short sleeves, and Rebbetzin [Sara] Feldbrand took me aside and gently explained that there were certain guidelines for dress. It took me a while to understand completely!”

But Linda, who is convinced she must be “the gilgul of a chassid,” developed a deep bond with Rebbetzin Feldbrand. She still refers to her as “my spiritual mother,” and won’t make any big move without her advice. Rebbetzin Feldbrand proposed sweetly that Linda take a class in Judaism, and Linda claims that’s all it took: “After the first class, I was hooked!”

Linda mentions that a few words of lashon tov from the Rebbetzin did much to propel her transformation. She happened to overhear the Rebbetzin speaking to someone else about her, saying, “Linda metamorphosed into an amazing religious girl!”

“I felt like she’d put me on a pedestal!” Linda says. That made her resolve then and there to go the whole way: “That night I threw out all my remaining jeans. I couldn’t disappoint the Rebbetzin!”

Her family had to get used to the new Linda; she was spending her time listening to tapes from Rav Amnon Yitzhak, and abandoning family TV sessions to immerse herself in Me’am Loez. But in good time, every single member of her family followed her lead, taking on complete mitzvah observance.

Linda credits Rebbetzin Feldbrand with steering her in the right direction when she was ready for shidduchim. “My parents had lost touch with their communities,” she says. “But my rebbetzin knew there was a whole community of Sephardim in New York, and urged me to follow my family’s minhagim and be proud of them.”

She agreed to a shidduch with Jack Sadacka, a surgeon trained in Syria. (He had actually been in medical school at the University of Damascus with Bashar al-Assad in the 1980s.) When Syria allowed some Jews to leave the country in 1991, he was on the first plane out. Jack had hair-raising stories: during his residency, when prisoners were brought to the hospital for treatment, he recognized the Jewish ones from shul. With armed guards standing nearby, he whispered, “Are you So-and-So?” Then he smuggled notes to their families, at tremendous risk to himself. “If the Secret Police had found out, he would have been thrown in prison,” Linda says.

For Linda, who’d been so accustomed to blending into the Ashkenazic world, Jack was a pullback to her roots. “The minute he opened his mouth, he sounded like my father!” she says. “My dad loved him — the two of them would speak in Arabic, and when they were together my dad felt like he’d been brought back to the days when Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East.”

The Sadackas’ wedding was a mix of Jews from every imaginable background: Tosh, Satmar, Chabad, Litvish, Syrian, Bukharian — “all the different legions of the army of Hashem,” Linda says, quoting Rav Amnon Yitzhak. The new couple settled in Brooklyn, where Jack had chosen to specialize in pediatrics. Linda continued her radio show for a few years, but between a growing family and the occasional email death threats from anti-Zionists, she decided it was time to quit.

Medicine and the Moms

As Linda became more observant, she realized activism could be expressed in domains besides the political; they were many local chesed opportunities, and she began getting involved with informal projects. She had no idea one of them would burgeon into a national initiative.

One day in 2013, Linda’s sister mentioned during a conversation that her son’s best friend in kindergarten, an adorable little boy named Elisha, was seriously ill with cancer. Linda’s sister lives in Houston, but Linda immediately offered to send his name out to Tehillim groups, and proposed initiatives like hafrashas challah groups, kabbalos in tznius, and other ideas as a zechus for a refuah shleimah.

“I asked if I could speak to Elisha’s mother directly, and my sister was hesitant,” Linda says. “But my son was playing around with syncing our phones and somehow his mother ended up on my contact list. So I called her anyway, and she was very grateful!”

The doctors in Texas had just about given up on the boy, whose now-recognizable name was Raphael Elisha Cohen. They believed his tumor was too advanced. Linda had heard of a doctor in New York who was open to other approaches, and Elisha’s mother had researched new approaches and discovered a promising drug not yet approved by the FDA. That was the springboard that catapulted Linda into medical advocacy.

She arranged for Raphael Elisha to be brought to New York via a medical transport, ironing out all the aviation details. A community member owned a rental house a few blocks from her home, which he agreed to lend to the family. Linda ran around finding furniture, winter clothing, and school placements for the other children. As various friends offered their assistance, they coalesced into a group they jokingly called “Moms On A Mitzvah.”

“Elisha created the Moms’ group,” Linda says wistfully. While they began as a mostly Sephardic group of friends, they’ve since expanded to include Jewish women of many backgrounds, mostly located in the New York area.

When Raphael Elisha first arrived in New York, he wasn’t able to speak, but after the first treatment he began again, saying: “Mommy, I feel the boo-boo in my head melting.” Linda and the Moms decided to launch a petition to push the FDA to authorize use of this new drug. When they easily garnered 30,000 signatures, the FDA upped the requisite number to 100,000. But the Moms managed to hit that goal in just two weeks!

“We put the word out everywhere, and got a big break from social media when some entertainment and sports celebrities got word and posted about it on their sites,” Linda says. “We set up a page, #elishacohen, and it went viral on social media.” In the process, she also contacted many prominent politicians, and the petition went as far as the eyes of President Barack Obama.

Unfortunately, by the time the FDA approved the drug, Raphael Elisha was brain dead, and passed away shortly afterwards. But Linda believes her efforts weren’t for naught. “The drug that was approved is now being used to treat patients,” she says. “If they’re treated early enough, it helps. And Elisha went to Shamayim accompanied by the many mitzvot and kabbalot people did as a zechut for him.”

The Moms’ next challenge came when they learned of a Jewish child in France with terminal cancer. He had applied to the French Make A Wish foundation, but due to his identifiably Jewish name, all his requests somehow fell by the wayside. Linda and the Moms immediately went to work to see if they could take over.

The boy, about 12 years old, was an avid sports fan. The Moms arranged for him to attend a Yankees game, where his face was flashed on the big screen and he was invited to play with the athletes. He went to a Rangers game and toured New York. “When you do things for Hashem’s children, suddenly those iron doors with no keys melt into nothing,” Linda says. “We succeeded beyond our wildest dreams!

“We all got so close to the family; the boy was a really sweet kid. He told us, ‘I want to invite you all to my bar mitzvah.’ He didn’t live that long, sadly, but his parents are convinced we extended his life.”

When the Moms heard about a female IDF soldier in rehab after an injury left her paralyzed from the waist down, they stepped in to cheer her up. “We found out she loved anything with a Hello Kitty motif,” Linda says. “One of the Moms, whose family is well off, happened to own some expensive Hello Kitty jewelry. We sent it to her, and she was thrilled!”

Moms On A Mitzvah continues to aid patients with medical issues, often facilitating medical transfers and transports when other agencies fail. They’ve worked with Chayim Aruchim to prolong patients’ lives. After Linda’s father spent time in a coma, the Moms published a Coma Patient Checklist to disseminate to family members. It includes all the points of proper care a coma patient should be getting, which should be verified by the patient’s advocates.

Social Media for Advocacy

Linda is particularly proud of the Moms’ Instagram site, calling it one of the most powerful Jewish Instagram sites around — because it’s used only for good causes, education, and activism rather than any sort of self-promotion. “We post appeals, and the funds start rolling in,” she says. The Moms are in the process of becoming a 501(c)(3) charity, which gives them greater ability to raise and manage their funds.

When the bochurim Naftali Frankel, Eyal Yifrach, and Gilad Shaer were captured, the Moms introduced a #BringBackOurBoys campaign, modeled after the #BringBackOurGirls campaign launched when 276 girls from Nigeria were captured by the terrorist group Boko Haram. When the Jewish reggae singer Matisyahu reposted their Bring Back Our Boys post on his own Instagram site, it went viral.

When the retail chain Forever 21 began selling costume jewelry in the shape of swatikas, the Moms launched an Instagram campaign to pressure the company to withdraw the merchandise, and prevailed. “Someone called me to report she’d seen the jewelry, and I went to the Manhattan store and verified for myself,” Linda says. “I called the store to complain. Then I posted a picture of the jewelry on the Moms’ site with the Forever 21 number, and the store was barraged with calls. I called them back, and they told me, ‘It must have been a mistake; that’s not our merchandise.’ After that it disappeared from the shelves.”

Linda’s now working on a new project, a social media site called LibertyClicks.com, designed to be a clean, politically-oriented forum for Jews with conservative social values. “This is an alternative to the left-wing, anti-Zionist, often immodest forums that are favored on Facebook,” she says.

The political connections Linda has forged occasionally offer her the opportunity to hobnob with people who are affluent and powerful. It was through her radio show that she first became friendly with Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese Christian and anti-terrorist advocate. Brigitte appeared at an “Evening of Awareness” in Brooklyn sponsored by the Moms, along with Sergeant Benjamin Anthony, founder of Our Soldiers Speak and a lecturer on terrorism.

It was because of Linda’s connection to Brigitte that she received an invitation from a politician to a meeting in Manhattan, attended by people who’d worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations, as well as several counterterrorist experts. Despite being the youngest person in the room, the person at the head of the table pronounced, “Linda, you’re in charge of leading this meeting!”

“He was Jewish,” Linda says, “and I think he felt he could trust me. I try hard to make a kiddush Hashem in these situations. Usually the people I meet say they can’t believe I have six children and still look so put together!” In another setting, she met — under high security — the Duke and Duchess of York.

On the Horizon                     

One of the Moms’ latest projects, Project Exodus, is designed to help French Jews who wish to leave France. A Montreal native with French-speaking parents, Linda has no problem communicating with the French community, and has been seeking endorsements and guidance from gedolim before proceeding further. “The situation in France has gotten terrible,” she says. “Jews are getting beaten up, and they can’t even go to the police because many of the policemen are Arabs. Or the attackers will approach the victims and tell them if they go to the police, they’ll burn down their apartment.”

When the Moms brought the issue to politicians two years ago, asking President Obama to consider granting refugee status to French Jews, his answer was, “French Jews are not refugees; they don’t need asylum.” “You can’t fight with the President,” Linda sighs. “But we have stronger connections with President Trump, so maybe now we can make some headway.”

She’s so incensed by terrorist violence that she had the idea to introduce legislation to the Knesset ordering that the dead bodies of Muslim terrorists be buried with pigs — since pigs are anathema to Muslims, this would possibly be a deterrent to terrorists. After asking approval from a posek, she submitted the idea to influential Israeli people, and a day later the idea was introduced as a bill in the Knesset.

While Linda has forged connections with many politicians, she’s most proud of the connections she’s created with gedolim: the Amshinover Rebbe, the Alexander Rebbe, the Hornosteipler Rebbe, and many Chabad rabbis. In her experience, the great gedolim make no distinctions among Jews, religious or non-religious, Ashkenazic or Sephardi. Who does she reach out to most? “When there’s a crisis, I speak to whoever picks up the phone first,” she says.

She’s big on preserving her own special kesher to Hashem, and is a strong advocate of spending time in “hitbodedut,” communion with Hashem. “All the good things in my life have come out of that,” she says. “On Yom Kippur, my kids know I like to spend hours cloistered in my room, just pouring my heart out to Hashem.”

And surely He listens, because Hashem helps those who do their best to help others.

More of the Moms’ Mitzvos

Support for the police force: During the past two years, as the police force in the US has come under unrelenting attack for alleged abuses of detainees, the Moms decided to show their support for the men in blue by creating a Police Appreciation Day. They asked children in local yeshivos to write letters to the cops. They baked cookies and bought donuts, and presented them at the precinct with a speech and adult letter of appreciation. “It’s important to nurture the connection between the Jewish community and the police force,” Linda says. “Both sides need to know they have someone they can call.”

Individual chesed projects: The Moms help out abused wives and children and single mothers, finding them shelter and clothing, and raising funds when necessary to get them on their feet. They’ve helped place community members in jobs when parnassah has dried up.

The Shabbos Project: The Moms organize the Shabbos Project Challah Bake for the Sephardic community in Brooklyn, bringing in celebrity chefs to head the work stations. Hundreds of women turn out to make dough, take challah, hear speakers, and dance together.

Shidduchim: Project Soul Mate, led by Mom shadchan Margo Levy, has made 20 shidduchim in the past four years through intensive networking, and hopes to make yet more. If a new bride is unable to afford wedding expenses, the Moms raise funds, always with daas Torah and a funds committee.

Community asifahs: When one of the younger Moms was in grave medical danger, the other Moms organized — with breathtaking speed — two asifahs in the Flatbush community as a zechus for her refuah, drawing hundreds of attendees. They also spent hours helping arrange complex insurance coverage in two states.

Projects for local schools: In memory of this Mom, the Moms are in the process of launching Morah Miriam’s Magical Playground at a local preschool, and a library enhancement at an elementary school called Mimi’s World of Imagination.

(Originally featured in Family First Issue 552)