As we stood at Har Sinai, the experience flooded senses; we saw the thunder, heard the lightning. The lightning fades, but the sudden burst of clarity takes you forward. Six women share a moment that illuminated their path

More than 30 years ago, I was invited to participate in the adventure of a lifetime.

My husband, Abby, came home from shul one evening and told me that the Vaad L’Hatzolas Nidchei Yisroel, an organization sponsored by Agudath Israel of America, was urgently seeking women to travel to the former Soviet Union. The minimum commitment was ten days, and my husband asked if I’d consider it. Oh, and we would be incommunicado for almost the entire time. (Describing this to a generation who thinks “instant” is too long makes me feel prehistoric.)

I swallowed hard and said yes. I spend more time trying to decide what color shoes to wear in the morning than I did on that decision to travel alone to a hostile country.

Rabbi and Mrs. Mordechai and Alice Neustadt ran the problem. My first phone conversation with Mrs. Neustadt went something like this. “You know,” she began, “each of our shlichim has to be prepared to lose a few pounds.”

I offered to stay for a month.

Her enthusiasm was infectious, and I was soon scheduled to leave a week and a half later.

That left me ten days to apply for a visa, take official pictures, sign papers, purchase food and necessary supplies (you cannot imagine what we accomplished with a pack of cigarettes and a lipstick), arrange children’s schedules, juggle client commitments, switch car pools — and tell our mothers. Wanna guess what that conversation sounded like? “What? You’re going where??!!”

We were going to join in a four-week seminar in Yurmala, a vacation resort town on the Baltic Sea outside of Riga in Latvia. The seminar coincided with the Russian universities’ midwinter break, and while the participants ranged in age from seven months to over seventy years, most were in their twenties and thirties. All in all, 181 people participated during the course of those four weeks from twenty-three different cities across the Soviet Union.

That spontaneous decision proved to be just the first in a series of incredible moments where I felt part of something so much bigger. I flew on the wings of eagles (namely TWA) from Cleveland to New York via La Guardia, then switching airports where I met my partner, Mrs. Leah (Ausband) Burstyn, who was expecting her eighth child at the time.

After traveling for 29 hours we finally reached Yurmula with our packed suitcases, weary, but very eager to begin this epoch experience.