The Ginzach Kiddush Hashem is a Holocaust memorial center and archive in Bnei Brak. They collect testimonials from Holocaust survivors, as well as objects and documents from communities that existed before World War II. One of their most popular exhibits is a collection of miniature shul models, all made entirely of matchsticks. Each model is a perfect replica of a shul that had been used by Yidden in the villages, towns, and cities of Eastern Europe and Germany before the Nazis destroyed them during World War II.

Finding His Match

If you would have asked Chanan Weisman when he was young if he thought he would be an artist, he probably would have laughed. Chanan was born in a tiny village in Ukraine, but he spent most of his childhood in the town of Kapischnitz, Poland. When he was 20, World War II broke out and the Nazis invaded Poland, putting an end to life as he knew it. Chanan miraculously survived the war and then moved to Eretz Yisrael. After he got married, he opened a laundry business.

Chanan discovered his artistic talent in an unusual way. One day, when he was in the middle of serving his customers at the laundry, he suddenly felt ill. He was rushed to the hospital, where the doctors said he’d suffered a massive heart attack. Baruch Hashem, he recovered, but his doctor warned him to close the business and retire.

Chanan took his doctor’s advice seriously. “I realized that I had two choices: either to finish with the business or to let the business finish me! I chose the former.”

One day, Chanan heard that his neighbor had an interesting hobby — building model castles and ships out of matchsticks. He decided to surprise his wife with an original gift, and he ordered a replica of the shul from her hometown in Poland — built entirely out of matchsticks. Chanan took the opportunity to watch it being built. It looked like fun, so Chanan decided to try it himself. And that was the beginning of a hobby that would last over 20 years.

The first thing Chanan did was to go out and buy a stock of wooden matches and white glue. For safety reasons, he first burned all the matches before building with them. That’s a lot of matches to strike and burn, so he came up with a method to burn several packages at a time. When his wife, Lusha, complained about the odor, he went outside. It took him a whole day just to burn all those matches to prepare them for building.

Hard at Work

Chanan worked on his new craft every day until noon while his wife and daughter observed and cheered him on.

After a lot of patience and painstaking work, the first model was finished. Using only an old photo as a reference, Chanan had built a perfect replica of the shul in the village of Wadowice, a town near Krakow, Poland. Chanan’s daughter Shoshana remembers that their neighbor came over to see how his protégé was faring. “He was stunned!” Shoshana recalls. “He said to my father, ‘I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and you just started. But look how far you’ve come!’ ”

(Excerpted from Mishpacha Jr., Issue 737)