Back in the day, a letter was something to be treasured, a tangible medium of interest, hope, and love

As told to Riki Goldstein

Project Coordinator:Rachel Bachrach

Nowadays, when our communication often takes the form of emoji-splattered text messages, it’s hard for us to relate to the import of what we sometimes derisively call snail mail. But back in the day, a letter was something to be treasured, a tangible medium of interest, hope, and love.

A Final Missive

From: My grandfather, Rabbi Aharon Berek, Vilna

To: Rebbetzin Basya Bender, New York

Date: 1941

I was born in Shanghai, where my father had joined the Mirrer yeshivah in their escape from Europe. In 1946, we arrived in America. About 50 years later, Rabbi Yaakov Bender phoned me. His mother, Rebbetzin Basya Bender, had been a friend of my mother’s, and had been very close to the Berek family in Vilna. Now he’d found a letter among her papers. The letter was from my mother’s father, Rav Aharon Berek of Vilna, who was Rav Chaim Ozer’s private secretary and the secretary and bookkeeper of the Vaad Hayeshivos, and was written to Rebbetzin Bender. Dated September 1941, it read as follows:

“My daughter Rashel has left here with her husband, who will be a very fine talmid chacham. I do not know where they are, but maybe, from America, you can find out.”

My parents got married in Vilna in 1940, against the backdrop of crisis and uncertainty. But the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Germany and Russia had left Vilna temporarily safe, and Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzensky had invited all the yeshivahs to take refuge in the town. The Mirrer yeshivah, which had also relocated to Vilna, was planning their escape. Although my father was a talmid of Kletzk, not Mir, he wanted to go along with the Mirrer group.

My mother, though, didn’t want to leave her family to travel across the world. So my father went in to the Brisker Rav and told him that his wife didn’t want to escape. The Rav sent his daughter, Lifsha (later Rebbetzin Feinstein) to call my mother in. “Go,” he said. “You will be saved.”

My mother didn’t dream that the Rav meant she would be the only one of her family to survive. But with his instruction, she said goodbye to her parents, and my parents joined the Mir group, together with some 11 other  Kletzker bochurim, some talmidim of Lublin, and some Chabad bochurim who joined the Mirrers on their miraculous journey. Soon after they left, the Nazis came to Lithuania and wiped out 90 percent of its Jews. No one remained from my mother’s family, nor my father’s.

Heartbreakingly, my grandparents didn’t know that my parents had reached safety, while likewise my parents didn’t know how their families were faring in Lithuania. In fact, when I was born in Shanghai, my mother did not give me her mother’s name, because she did not know that her mother had been killed.

After the war, Rabbi Pinchas Teitz told us he saw the grave of my grandfather, Rabbi Berek, in Vilna. He died very young, but just before the Germans liquidated the remaining Yidden, and so he has a proper grave. My grandmother, aunts and uncles were all killed in the Vilna ghetto — and only later, when my mother was in her eighties, did an eyewitness tell her that her younger brother Avrohom died of starvation. This person didn’t realize what pain he had caused her; for a while she couldn’t put food into her mouth.

When I got the letter from Rabbi Bender, I read it to my mother. She found it deeply painful but very precious. My mother was not even aware that her grandfather had a second name, Mordechai, until I read her the letter, where her father signs Aharon ben Nochum Mordechai HaKohein. It brought back a flood of memories, and the bittersweet touch of her father’s love and concern for her, across a painful chasm of separation and suffering.

Rebbetzin David is the wife of Rabbi Hillel David of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah, and daughter of Rav Mendel Krawiec ztz”l, the rosh yeshivah of RJJ. She teaches classes on sefer Tehillim and is also the English principal of Yeshiva Tiferes Elimelech.