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f you want to understand who I am, and what gave me the strength to do the things I’ve done, I have to tell you about my parents and my childhood home.”

I feel the history as soon as I step into the Lau home in Tel Aviv. The living area is spacious, a delicate iris blooms on the porch, but it’s the past that envelope me. From the pictures on the walls — numerous portraits of distinguished ancestors — to the mirror-backed mahogany display case filled with tiny silver miniatures collected from all over the world.

I stare into the glass doors; among the silverware is an old iron key. “What’s that?” I ask.

She waves a hand. “Ah, it’s nothing.”

“Come on,” I coax.

“Ah, nothing. Just that one time, we’d planned a trip, all eminent personalities, to the kever of the Vilna Gaon. We had arranged for the key-holder to meet us there, but we had managed to get hold of a key, just in case.”

“And?”

“And no one could get the key to turn.”

“And?”

“And then I told them, ‘Give it to me, I’ll try.’ I put in the key and it turned. And I said, ‘I’m keeping the key.’”

I take out the key, hold it in my palm. It’s heavy, solid, dark with age.

The Rebbetzin’s nimble fingers fitted it into the lock, turned, and the gateway of history swung open. As we sit together, conversation flitting between centuries and continents, I feel the same deftness. The same determination. And the same ability to fling open the gates of history for us so we can peer, wonder, feel, live.

Ticket to Freedom

Rebbetzin Lau’s eyes soften as she thinks back to her childhood. Her parents’ presence fills the room: twin portraits of her mother and father straddle the silver cabinet; on one wall is a copy of the street sign honoring her father — Rechov Yitzchak Yedidya Frankel. If Rav Frankel’s name graces the street where he served his many children, for his only daughter, her father’s name is an internal touchstone for the values she passes onward.

Her birth was heralded with joy and song. Not only was baby Chaya-Ita the fifth and youngest child of her parents, Yitzchak Yedidya and Chana Leah Frankel, she was the first girl in five generations. Her father adored her, and everywhere he went, his little daughter trotted by his side. “I even went along on his visits to Ramle prison.” The prisoners sewed the little girl a leather satchel. “How proud I was of that satchel — I took it to gan every day.”

Rabbi Frankel and his rebbetzin were young but determined when they arrived in Tel Aviv from Poland in 1935. Rav Frankel, acclaimed as a gaon in his teens, became rav in Rypin after his marriage. In 1933, the 20-year-old rav had to travel to Gdansk, then part of Germany and known by its German name of Danzig. It was a small incident: three Hitler youths accosted him on the streets, refuge sought in a Jewish store. But Rav Frankel felt the seismic tremors beginning to shake Europe’s soil. With the brachah of the Gerrer Rebbe, he applied for immigration papers to Eretz Yisrael.

“The family thought they were crazy,” Rebbetzin Lau says. Months later, one Shabbos morning, an official envelope was thrown outside their front door. After Shabbos, Chana Leah mentioned it to her husband; something had arrived, “eppes a cartel — perhaps a certificate.”

“Eppes a cartel?” he exclaimed. “This will change our lives.”

In Tel Aviv, the young family — their eldest, Aryeh, was a few months old — rented a tiny apartment. “My father had a deep love for Eretz Yisrael,” Rebbetzin Lau says. “When marrying us off, he wouldn’t consider a shidduch with someone from chutz l’Aretz, because he didn’t want ‘paper children’ — envelopes and photographs.”

Indeed, Rav Frankel wrote to his family: “I live in a palace!”

Years later, Yaakov Koenig, Rav Frankel’s teenage cousin, arrived in Eretz Yisrael after the war. Interned in Atlit, he managed to get a letter to Rav Frankel through the Agudas Yisrael representative. As soon as he received word of his cousin’s arrival, Rav Frankel gathered a suitcase full of clothing and arrived at Atlit.

“What are you going to do when you get out?” he asked his cousin.

“I’ll find a place to stay,” Koenig said.

“You have a place in Tel Aviv,” Rav Frankel told him.

“My parents closed in the porch and brought in a bed,” Rebbetzin Lau describes, “that’s all there was room for.”

When Koenig had acclimated, he joined the Lechi. “You’re putting yourself in danger!” Rav Frankel protested.

Koenig insisted. “If my father and mother were alive and here today, I’d do the same thing.”

Deeply pained, Rav Frankel cried out, “Hashem left us a single survivor from our family. Just you! And you’re putting yourself in danger?”

It wasn’t only family they helped. As survivors trickled into the country, Rav and Rebbetzin Frankel formed an ad hoc absorption committee, even renting a room in a nearby apartment to house the olim. The Frankels served meals, bought clothing, found jobs, listened, counseled, and married off hundreds who passed through their caring hands.

Saved from the inferno, Rav Frankel never forgot the smoldering embers of family, community, and nation. Twenty years after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, he was invited to join a commemoration ceremony in Warsaw. He wasn’t asked to speak, but nevertheless took the microphone, and recited Kaddish. Unknown to him, the Jewish community, who hadn’t been invited to the event, were hidden in the foliage of the surrounding trees. When he paused, voices from the treetops declared, “Amen, yehei Shemei Rabba…” He wrote home to his family: “I said Kaddish. The minyan was the surrounding trees.”

Years later, when his grandson Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau was leading a trip in Poland, this story flickered back to life. At a mass grave in a forest near Tarnow, Rav Lau was deeply saddened to see that there was no memorial, no marker, nothing to indicate the lives lost. Worse, he realized, that, without a minyan, he couldn’t say Kaddish. “We don’t have a minyan to say Kaddish,” he addressed the crowd, “but like the treetops answered Amen to my grandfather’s Kaddish, so here, let the trees be our minyan.”

On the Cusp of Change

The 1940s was a decade of noise — impassioned voices raised in debate, gunfire, the low roar of ships slicing through the ocean, radio broadcasts, the lament of survivors, the air infused with the crackle of change. And through it all, Rav Frankel’s sweet baritone soothed and advised, offered prayer and pronounced rulings.

“It was kol dichfin all year around,” Rebbetzin Lau reflects. “When you grow up in a house like that, you absorb ahavas Yisrael. Imagine: my father is inspecting a chicken in the main room, in the back room there’s a man running from the British, in the kitchen, my mother is serving food. It was Toras chayim, a living Torah. Alive. My father was called ha’abba hagadol, because he was a father to everyone.”

The British Mandate was nearing collapse; it was a time when dreams became hope and hope became a tremulous outline of the future. The Frankel home was a hub for the many factions fighting to establish a Jewish homeland. “It was the only place where Haganah, Lechi, and Etzel would put aside their differences.”

In 1943 Yellin-Mor Freedman, then Lechi leader, dug a 73-meter tunnel and, with 19 other prisoners, escaped from jail. His first stop was the Frankel home. When the Aliyah Beit ships docked, Rav Frankel could be found down at the port, engaging the British in elaborate discussion and debate. While the officials were distracted, the olim would try to enter the Holy Land.

Though a cornucopia of Jews passed through their door, young Chaya-Ita felt secure in her identity. “We were the children of the rav. It didn’t matter how everyone else behaved. What mattered was that we were b’seder.”

Live to Give

In his later years, as chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, Rav Frankel had a special place in his heart for almanos and yesomim, and he worked tirelessly for agunos. Rebbetzin Lau tells of a woman who had been an agunah for 40 years, when Rav Frankel assembled a beis din and issued an ultimatum: “We’re not leaving this room until we find a solution for this woman.” After many hours, they found a halachic solution, and received a telegram from Rav Moshe Feinstein concurring with the psak.

On another occasion, Rav Frankel enlisted the help of a secular judge in Communist Russia to pressure an errant brother-in-law into performing chalitzah, freeing an agunah of 17 years.

With all his love of community, Rav Frankel’s family was very dear to him. Three times a year — on his birthday, anniversary, and engagement anniversary — he gathered all his grandchildren around him. Whenever people brought gifts, Rav Frankel gently corrected them. “I’m not doing this for me — I’m doing this so the children and grandchildren should be connected.”

It was this emphasis on family that gave rise to his initial reluctance to promote his daughter’s shidduch with Rav Yisrael Meir. Rav Frankel traveled to Ponevezh to discuss the suggestion with Rav Kahaneman and to Yerushalayim to question Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach about the young bochur. He’d heard sterling reports as to Rav Lau’s scholarship, yiras Shamayim, and middos. His yichus, too, was impeccable. “Rav Moshe Chaim Lau, his father, was a byword in rabbanus,” Rebbetzin Lau says.

Yet her father was worried that, as a young survivor torn away from his family in early childhood, Yisrael Meir had not seen the norms of family life, the hundred unnoticed interactions between husband and wife that subconsciously mold expectations and character. “But because he didn’t have it, his family was the most important thing in the world to him,” says the Rebbetzin in retrospect.

As a young mother, the Rebbetzin found work that allowed her to be home when the children returned from school: “I don’t want latchkey children,” the rav had told her.

Rav and Rebbetzin Frankel opened their arms to their new son-in-law, treating him like a cherished son. He, in turn, treated his in-laws as venerated and beloved parents. “Every time he speaks, he mentions something of my father,” says Rebbetzin Lau.

“Are you serving him nutritious food?” Rebbetzin Frankel would question her daughter. “He’s a milchamah kind, you need to take care of him.”

Rebbetzin Lau grows pensive as she thinks about her mother. “My mother was so quiet, so tzanuah, that until my father was niftar, we didn’t realize her strength and wisdom.” She was a woman of prayer, of Tehillim, of quiet fortitude. She loved licht bentshen and kindled lights for all her children and their spouses, too. To supplement the candlesticks, she used a silver menorah they’d received as a gift. “On the night before my parents left to Eretz Yisrael, the entire town of Rypin celebrated with him all night. At dawn, his kehillah presented him with this menorah as a token of appreciation.”

One night, all the silverware, including the silver menorah, was stolen. The next day, Rav Frankel addressed the thieves in a radio broadcast. Please, keep all the silverware, he transmitted, but return the menorah. “The menorah is a gift from the kehillah of Rypin. The whole town was wiped out in the war. The menorah is the only remembrance of them.” Unfortunately, the menorah was not returned.

Rebbetzin Lau recalls walking into the kitchen one day and finding the radio on and her mother crying bitterly. “What happened?” she asked.

Her mother pointed to the radio. “A Jew was killed.” She shook her head in bewilderment. “A Yid was killed and you can ask why I cry?”

Rebbetzin Lau has passed this ahavas Yisrael onto her own children. Their family name, Lau, is in Hebrew an acrostic for the phrase L’maan achai v’reiai — for all my brothers and friends. It has become a family motto of sorts. Rebbetzin Lau’s eight children have absorbed this lesson of acceptance, unity, and caring, each in his or her unique way. Whether sporting a spodik or a litvishe frock, they “have such a strong bond. They’re so close and have great respect for each other. It is my biggest pleasure and something I thank Hashem for every day.”

Her children are rabbanim and roshei yeshivah, following the path of their ancestors: the 39th generation of rabbanim on her husband’s side, their yichus marks a thousand years of Torah leadership, piety, and scholarship, tracing back to the Taz and the Bach, as well as the Divrei Chaim of Sanz and other prominent rebbes. “That yichus is an obligation,” she says. “It’s something to live up to.”

The Gates

Throughout the decades of his public service — beginning as rav of a Tel Aviv shul and continuing as chief rabbi of Netanya, Tel Aviv, and eventually, all of Israel — Rav Yisrael Meir Lau has crisscrossed the globe, meeting world leaders and reigniting Jewish communities. And always, the Rebbetzin has been at his side.

“Without a wife, nothing can happen,” Rebbetzin Lau says when she discusses her mother, unaware that she’s articulating her own role in building her husband and family. Rav Lau calls his wife the base of his menorah, from which spring forth the eight lights of his children.

Dealing with everything from lost suitcases to Erev Shabbos scrambles, from receptions with millionaires to encounters with the simplest poverty-stricken Jews, Rebbetzin Lau blends warmth, faith, and humor as she continues to travel the world.

Russia, 1989

“I was all alone. I didn’t know the language. And I was heading into the largest prison in the world,” says Rebbetzin Lau of her first trip into the Soviet Union.

She and her husband were joining an international delegation of rabbis, but Rav Lau had a prior engagement in the US, so the Rebbetzin flew alone. In Vienna, after an all-night wait in a desolate airport for the connecting flight to Moscow, she met Dov Schperling (a refusnik who worked tirelessly for the freedom of Russian Jewry after his own release from the Gulag), who was flabbergasted that she’d been given permission to enter Russia. “It was unheard of then!”

But when Rebbetzin Lau examined the visa she had been given, she realized there was a problem. “What do I know of Cyrillic? But the date of birth was not mine, but the Rav’s.” Compounding the fear over the passport were the contents of her suitcase: 100 siddurim, sugar, stockings (more valuable than money), food, and other items for the Jewish community.

In Moscow, officials opened her suitcase. “What’s this?”

Skilled in the art of diplomacy, Rebbetzin Lau launched into a speech about the cultural items, a gift to the great synagogue from a synagogue in Tel Aviv. They were confiscated.

Then they noticed the incorrect visa. Rebbetzin Lau was subjected to a two-hour interrogation. Again and again, she told them that it was simply a mistake, but the pressure was intense. “At one point, to stop myself panicking, I gave myself a stern, logical talking-to: Will they put you in jail? I asked myself. No, I’m an official visitor. So either they send you straight home or they let you in. I calmed down a little after that.”

They handed Rebbetzin Lau a document, printed all in Cyrillic. “Sign,” they ordered.

She shakes her head at the memory. Did they really think she’d put her signature to who knows what?

“I’m not signing,” she told them.

The officials wouldn’t give in so easily. “You have to sign.”

Rebbetzin Lau refused.

Stalemate.

Eventually, Rebbetzin Lau lost patience. “Is this how you treat an official visitor to your country?! I’m here as a guest of the Minister of Culture and Religion!”

They released her. A weary and drained Rebbetzin Lau dragged her almost-empty suitcase to the arrivals area. There, she was met by an official delegate waiting to greet her, a single rose in his hand.

“I thought — for two hours, more, you’ve stood here with that rose in your hands and it never once occurred to you to find out where I was and how I was being treated?”

When she finally arrived at her hotel in Moscow — a vast, labyrinthine structure, police presence on every floor, Rebbetzin Lau was surprised to see that most, but not all, of the items had been returned, including most of the siddurim. But what of the remainder?

The next day, as the Laus crossed Red Square, they received a clue as to the whereabouts of the missing items. A platoon of soldiers marched across the plaza, and one of the soldiers ducked out of formation and gave the Rav a push. “Mazel tov,” he whispered.

“It was his way of telling us that he was Jewish. And then the Rav realized that the siddurim must have been kept by some of the airport officials.” Like the soldier, their Yiddishkeit consisted of a few standard greetings, but a confiscated siddur was temptation enough.

The Laus were given instructions regarding the pick-up of the siddurim. A bochur, Michoel, would be coming to get them — they were to pretend he was part of the family. When he knocked on the door, Rebbetzin Lau greeted him warmly, acutely aware that their room was bugged. “Regards from Aunt Irena,” he told her, and they continued with “family talk,” all the while transferring the contraband into his bag.

“I stood at the window of my hotel room, watching him. My heart thumped wildly as, bag slung over his back, he passed the soldiers outside the Kremlin. It was only when he was almost out of sight that I felt my breathing return to normal.”

Cuba, 1994

hile each trip came along with its required homework — from learning about the state of the local Jewish community to figuring out how to pronounce the names of the dignitaries they’d meet — for Rebbetzin Lau, preparing for each departure also involved finding just the right gift: a token of goodwill from the Jewish People.

Although a visit with Fidel Castro was not on the agenda of the couple’s trip to Cuba, the Rebbetzin spent long hours finding the right gift — just in case. She located a beautiful shofar, which she had engraved and showcased in a custom-made mahogany and glass case. It was more than an impressive Jewish symbol; the gift would pave the way for Rav Lau’s request that Cuba’s Jews be given the freedom to emigrate.

The trip was a long-standing wish of Rav Lau, whose aunt survived the Holocaust when Cuba opened its doors to European Jews. Rav Lau had been intrigued as to the state of this Jewish community, outlawed by Communist doctrine and sealed off from the wider world by both politics and poverty. “Es achai ani avakesh — I will seek out my brother,” he declared, as together with the chief rabbi and rebbetzin of Venezuela, Rav Pynchas and Henny Brener, they received permission to charter a private jet to Havana.

It was a short trip, but one redolent with meaning: the poverty swathing the country was not merely physical. For Rebbetzin Lau, their visit to the central shul was particularly difficult. Its velvet upholstery had been gnawed by vermin and all was covered in a thick layer of dust. “The worst was seeing a rickety table. I looked down and saw that the table leg was propped up by Gemaras.”

The suite in which the Laus stayed was another witness to bygone days: beautifully built, with marble and mahogany that whispered of past luxuries, but furnished with cheap wicker chairs and iron-frame beds. There were no cars on the streets, not even buses. Entertainment, though, was cheap, and Rebbetzin Lau saw workers wearing string vests and baggy pants running to the opera house.

And then the message came, that Rabbis Lau and Brener had been invited to a meeting with “El Commandante” — Fidel Castro. “I bought the present and carried it all this way,” Rebbetzin Lau protested. “I’m coming along to present it.”

“It wasn’t a palace. It was a fortress,” Rebbetzin Lau tells me. The men were searched at the entrance, but no one would search a woman, so they didn’t find the small camera nestling in the Rebbetzin’s pocket. Guards tried to take away the large box containing the shofar, but the Rebbetzin refused to relinquish it.

“We had a fascinating conversation,” Rebbetzin Lau recalls. “Castro is very interested in Tanach. He wanted to know how 600,000 Jews left Egypt, if only 70 entered it. My husband told him that the women had six babies each pregnancy and he was disbelieving. So I took out a photo of my grandchildren — triplets — and showed him [how a woman can have a multiple pregnancy]. He couldn’t believe it. ‘What beautiful babies,’ he said.”

Castro attempted to calculate the population explosion and became frustrated when the numbers refused to oblige. Rav Lau gently suggested he use a calculator. Castro was aghast. “I use my head, not my fingers.”

Rebbetzin Lau stepped forward to present Castro with the gift, and then asked if she could take a photo, “for my children.” Castro was flanked by a man called Armando, his head of secret service, and this man came bearing down on the Rebbetzin. Castro gave a sharp shake of his arm, Armando froze, and the Rebbetzin whipped her camera out of her pocket and began to snap pictures.

But it was not just images that stayed in the Rebbetzin’s mind when she left the beleaguered country — it was a voice. More specifically, it was a Yiddish pronunciation.

Armando accompanied the Laus throughout their stay, and at one point the Rebbetzin turned to him and explained the thrust of their conversation: “We’re talking about the fast day we have in the summer.”

Armando nodded. “Tishah Buv.”

The Rebbetzin stared at him, shocked. Just how many secrets did Castro’s fortress hold?

Japan, 1987

Sitting on her comfortable couch, a thousand miles from Japan, Rebbetzin Lau bows first to the right, then straight ahead, and then to the left, all in silence. She became adept at returning the traditional Japanese greeting decades ago, when she accompanied Rav Lau on an ambitious trip that included a memorial service for the victims of Hiroshima and a meeting with members of the pro-Israel Christian sect, the Makuya.

The commemoration took place on August 6, at 8:15 a.m., the precise moment the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima 42 years before. “Thousands of us were gathered. A gong sounded. Silence.”

The solemnity and horror of the event was appropriate to the time of year: it was the Nine Days, and just a few days later, the Laus joined a communal Eichah in Kobe. Each person present recited one pasuk, in a concerted expression of heartbreak.

And yet, when she later viewed the footage of the commemoration, the Rebbetzin found a moment of humor. To protect participants from the unbearable heat, the organizers had given each participant a bottle of water and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Photos taken from above showed a crowd of thousands dressed strictly according to Japanese protocol; only two of the bowed heads wore the straw hats — the Rav and Rebbetzin.

The trip also included an encounter with the 96-year-old religious leader Etai Yamada. The road to his home was lined with bamboo trees, and monkeys leaped from branch to branch. The image will remain with Rebbetzin Lau as one of exquisite beauty.

“We sat on the floor with him, and with the help of a translator, spoke about matters of faith. He believed that there was a connection between Shintoism and the Ten Lost Tribes.”

Fascinatingly, Rebbetzin Lau discovered that the exit to their temple was graced by a large mirror. Its unspoken message: Look at yourself, look at your frailties, what are you? There is a higher power.

Rome, 1993

It was a 40-minute drive from Rome to Pope John Paul II’s summer residence — located on the shores of Lake Albano, a huge, oval mirror for the deep blue Italian sky. And yet, despite the idyllic surroundings, Rebbetzin Lau felt a sense of disquiet. There was too much history — millennia of bloodshed — for these two leaders to meet with amity. And yet, the invitation had been issued — and accepted.

Rav Lau and his older brother Naphtali were ushered in first; after their conversation, Rebbetzin Lau was invited to join. “The hall was preceded by a long hallway. The Pope came toward me, hand outstretched. As he neared, he said, ‘Shalom.’ ”

Before the meeting, Rebbetzin Lau had sent a message that modesty prevented her from shaking hands; the Pope had not received it. Momentarily flustered, Rebbetzin Lau quickly folded both her hands over her front and gave a small bow: “Shalom u’vrachah,” she greeted him.

“G-d bless you,” he replied.

He asked Rebbetzin Lau about her children and grandchildren. “I’ve always wanted to meet you. I have been following your progress,” the Pope told the Rav and Rebbetzin. As a child in Poland, the Pope recalled, he had watched Rav Lau’s maternal grandfather “Rabbiner Frankel” walk to shul each Shabbos, surrounded by grandchildren.

“How many grandchildren did he have?”

“Forty-seven,” Rav Lau answered

“And how many survived the war?”

“Five. And two of those are me and Naphtoli,” answered Rav Lau.

And then, the Polish-born leader of the Catholic church addressed the child of the Holocaust: “You are the answer to the Holocaust. You continue. I always say, we are obligated and committed to the continuity and future of our elder brother, the Jewish People.”

“Shalom is a blessing from Hashem,” Rav Lau reflects, when he briefly joins our conversation. “We say Hu yaaseh shalom — He will make peace.” But peace is made by people, too. And who more than Rav and Rebbetzin Lau? As emissaries of our people, and through their dedication to all Jews, they draw peace down from the heavens and, heart by heart by heart, infuse it into our world.

Seder with the Laus

“Boris Kodovitzky.”

“Zev and Yisrael Zalmanson.”

“Dov Schperling.”

“Yasha Kazkov.”

The list of refusniks continued.

“David Markish.”

David Markish stood up.

Intimately involved in the plight of the Russians behind the Iron Curtain, each year, a few days before Pesach, the Laus held a model Seder, both to celebrate freedom and acknowledge those left behind. The names were read out solemnly, a prayer and a tribute. Those who had been freed had the opportunity to relate their personal journey to freedom.

Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau, eldest son of Rav and Rebbetzin Lau and rabbi in Netanya, grows meditative when asked about his childhood home. “This house lives for Klal Yisrael.” Surely, there are innumerable examples, but he highlights Seder night. Each year, Rav and Rebbetzin Lau ran communal Sedorim for thousands — often for soldiers of the IDF.

Rebbetzin Lau explains how the communal Sedorim began. “We were a young couple and we always went to my parents. But then my husband was asked to conduct a Seder for the soldiers of the Israeli air force.”

One thousand two hundred soldiers participated in that first Seder, and it was a triumph — every single soldier stayed until the end, when there was lively dancing.

“There’s no night in the year that more epitomizes family,” Rav Moshe Chaim Lau reflects. “And my parents gave that night over to the klal. I didn’t always love those Sedorim, and when I was a bochur, I asked my parents if I could join my grandparents’ Seder. In another act of giving, they granted me permission to go.”

These communal Sedorim had their roots years earlier, when Rav Lau was a young boy and living in Kiryat Motzkin with his aunt and uncle, Rav and Rebbetzin Fogelman. Erev Pesach, Rav Lau was sent to a nearby  ma’abarah (tent camp), to deliver a package to a relative newly arrived from the ashes of Europe. He returned home, distraught. “How can we have our Seder here at home, when all those people will have none?” he asked his aunt.

That evening, the Fogelmans packed up their Seder supplies and walked over to the ma’abarah, where they conducted a Seder for a thousand people. In a large shed with a tin roof, Rav Lau recited Mah Nishtanah, and then listened to the voices of a thousand survivors who cried out, “Shefoch chamos’cha el hagoyim… Pour out Your wrath upon the nations…”

One memorable year, the Laus ran a Seder for the widows and orphans of the Yom Kippur War. Six hundred people were present, and a somber silence reigned.

Rav Lau attempted to break the tension: “I don’t like this quiet!” he told them. But no one whispered, no one spoke. Eventually, Rav Lau began to sing one of the songs he’d learned as a child on the boat en route to Eretz Yisrael. “Hineh mah tov…” he began. Slowly, his voice was joined by others. The atmosphere was transformed and the Seder continued with warmth and emotion.

(Originally featured in Family First Issue 489)