Despite a life laced with hardship, Perela Widenbaum never stopped believing in blessing

As told to Rivka Streicher by Perela Widenbaum

Both their parents were non-practicing but proud Jews. But somehow, Perela Widenbaum and her husband Dovid found their way to Yiddishkeit--and from there, overcame the challenges of infertility, of raising children with special needs, of a cancer diagnosis. Despite hardship and heartbreak, they never lost faith that Hashem would give them strength to face each new day

Back home in Southfield, Michigan after seminary in Israel, I found myself one day, climbing onto my mom’s 80s station wagon. I leaned back on the warm metal of the large, flat roof.

“Hashem,” I murmured, eyes closed against the sun. “My formal education is over. But with my non-frum parents, I have no idea how to find a shidduch. When You find him for me, will You let me know?”

It felt natural to do that. I was flummoxed and overwhelmed; why not give it to G-d? Despite coming from a secular home, I’ve always been an intuitive, “sixth sense” sort of person. Connecting to Hashem came naturally to me.

My parents, Sidney and Toby Lantz, were proud, if nonpracticing, Jews. At some point, each of them was president for the Jewish War Veterans, publicizing the contributions of Jews to the US military service. My father was a medic during World War II and volunteered for the Peace Corps. He was a councilman for the city of Southfield for almost 40 years. He had grown up frum, on the Lower East Side. But when his own father passed away, his mother, who was blind, couldn’t afford yeshivah day school for her sons. Without a Jewish education, my father drifted away.

Perhaps that was why my father was amenable to the efforts of local askanim, who encouraged him to put his daughters in a frum school. When I was in fourth grade, I switched from the local public school to the Akiva Hebrew Day School in Detroit. For high school, my sister, Philicia, and I went to Bais Yaakov of Detroit, under the leadership of the inimitable Rabbi Shalom Goldstein.

Rabbi Goldstein had a daughter in my class, and he became a frum father figure to me. He sparked a spiritual revolution in the American Midwest: first as a teacher in the boys’ yeshivah and then as head of the girls’ Bais Yaakov. Within two decades, it became the norm for BY Detroit girls to spend a year in Eretz Yisrael. Invariably, seminary graduates wanted to marry bnei Torah. Rabbi Goldstein often had to mediate between parents and daughters who wanted to be more religious.

Philicia and I were two of those girls. We weren’t comfortable at home on Shabbos and Yom Tov as Mom did her weekly shopping and the TV blared. So we’d join the large Goldstein clan instead. We felt like part of the family.

At the same time, we were teens growing up in a secular home. We attended baseball games and parties with dancing and drinking. Somehow, I managed to stay out of trouble. My parents sheltered us, but I also felt, even as a young teen, that “G-d was tapping on my shoulder.” I can’t explain it, but there was this sense I’d have, almost as real as a physical tap, to leave a place before things got rough. I’d be somewhere and suddenly, inexplicably, feel that it was time to go.

At the end of 12th grade, each student had to write something in the school yearbook. I closed my eyes and  wrote straight from my heart. Hashem, lead me on Your path, stay with me….

And lead me on His path He would. To a new place, and to challenges — and joys — I couldn’t fathom. And through it all, He was there, a steady, guiding Presence at my shoulder.