He stole my money, I stole his dignity — and then it all fell apart 

As told to Ruti Kepler by Aharon Kliger
Photos: Menachem Kalish, family archives

Chapter 1: Wedding Jitters

I

’m not one of those “sharing” people who tells his secrets to the person next to him on the bus, or whose work colleagues know everything about his personal life. In fact, I’m quite the private type. So the story I’m about to share isn’t about my need to talk things through, or even to clear my conscience. It’s about an obligation to pay back something I stole in the only way I know how — although I’m not sure what I took from another Yid is something that can ever be returned.

I was born 39 years ago in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot Polin (the architectural award-winning hexagonal “egg carton” enclave on the hill that you can see from the Ramot Road and the northern neighborhoods), the oldest of ten closely spaced children, in a house well-acquainted with poverty. Abba was from the old-timers, the holy men of Jerusalem whose world contained nothing but Torah and avodas Hashem. Ima was a hard-working, resourceful homemaker who knew how to stretch whatever we got — the Bituach Leumi stipends that helped us scrape by through the month, the weekly Yad Eliezer food packages, the occasional tzedakah coupons we’d apply for — and that’s just how it was, all through my childhood.

That’s not to say we weren’t happy. We’d slide down the angled, peeling walls of our “egg carton” apartment, root around for treats in the food packages we received, and read lots of books, borrowed from neighbors or from the library (but never actually spending money to buy them for ourselves).

Over the years, our neighbors started normalizing their apartments, straightening the angled walls, adding extensions. We had no money for renovations, but it didn’t really bother us that our neighbor laid his steel reinforcement beams across our ceiling, or that chunks of plaster from our ceiling occasionally fell down on our heads because of the construction on top of us.

Ramot Polin was exposed to the winds, and on blustering Jerusalem winter days, it was freezing. The central heating was rarely turned on, as the building superintendent, an elderly, frugal Holocaust survivor, wouldn’t waste a drop of fuel, and as long as it wasn’t really cold, he sagaciously explained, there was no reason to turn on the heating. I remember freezing through the long winters, covering our broken window with blankets to keep out the cold. The cold got in anyway, but along with the cold, there was plenty of warm simchah in our house.

I went to a standard cheder and learned in chassidish yeshivos.

When I turned 21, Abba and Ima sat me down for a talk. They asked for my consent to hear shidduch offers for my sister, who was next in line. By our kehillah’s standards, I was pretty much an older single. I was already working a bit as a newspaper writer, and my shidduch hadn’t yet turned up. I gladly agreed to allow the next sibling in line to skip me. I didn’t want to hold anyone back.

Not long after, my sister got engaged. We made a small, simple vort, just for close relatives. Everyone was smiling and showering the chassan and kallah and their parents with brachos, and of course the older brother as well, who had been willing to let his younger sister go ahead.

It was a happy night. But Abba was afraid.

This was the day he feared, the day he would start marrying off the children. Much as he’d hoped and davened for this moment, it filled him with anxiety. He couldn’t even muster up a full smile. I saw his hand trembling when he signed on the shtar hatena’im. He looked like he was stepping into a minefield.

Abba, a masmid, a chassid, an oved Hashem who ran from gemach to gemach just to survive everyday life with ten children, had just made a financial commitment that was impossible for him to meet.