Hashem has a time for everything, and also a place for everything. Including us

As told to Rivka Streicher by Rivkah Gurewitz

The old woman stepped off the bus that they’d spent a week on, fleeing Ukraine. She caught sight of my husband, his rabbinic look hard to miss. “Ich bin oich a Yid,” she cried, and from beneath her knitted sweater she pulled out a necklace. A Magen David. She was in safe territory now, and we would help her.

Back in 1998, we were newlyweds, just starting out, when we got a call about the need for a couple to go on shlichus in Offenbach, Germany. At the time a shul had been built there by the small Jewish community, but there was no rav and rebbetzin to lead it. We had no idea what to expect — we’d never heard of Offenbach, an industrial town not far from Frankfurt — and we weren’t keen on going to Germany altogether. My grandmother, who had spent time in the DP camps in Germany after the war, was distraught at the idea of her grandchildren going to live in that place of bloodshed. But after a lot of contemplation, we responded to the need. We thought we’d come for a year, help get the shul and community on its feet, and then look for a more conventional shlichus in North America.

It was the end of the ’90s, decades after the Holocaust, but this was the first time since that dark period that there was a rav in the city, so we were still picking up the broken pieces from that time. There were Yidden but almost no Yiddishkeit. We started with rudimentary education and then made it practical, from tefillin to mikveh to Yizkor (which the old people still remembered).

In that first year, we made connections with so many people. There were the Holocaust survivors, and there were also the children and young people who had been born in Germany. It was a challenging first year. We wanted to leave and head back to the States. But we’d set up so much and were in over our heads. How could we go? The people needed us — we couldn’t just up and leave. So we pushed ourselves for a second year. The connection to our people only became stronger. The Holocaust survivors needed us in their last years. The youth needed us. We couldn’t go. We pushed through a third year and a fourth, and for more than ten years we kept thinking, it’s only a matter of time, we’re going to go back soon. At some point, our mindset shifted. We realized we were here to stay.