Almost Getting a Shliach Arrested

From an article by Nechamie Margolis published in Binah Magazine:

The thoughts of Yosefa Bankholter, formerly known as Jill Bankholter, reach back in time to when she was a freshman at the University of Massachusetts.

Chatting with her friend, she suddenly became aware of a knocking on the door. A Rabbi appeared at the doorway and asked her if she was Jewish. He pulled out a metal menorah from his jangling bag, and set up the candles.

“Lighting these candles will bring light into the darkness,” said Rabbi Chaim Adelman, as he showed Yosefa how to light the candles and make a brachah. Yosefa’s friend was urgently motioning her not to light the candles, to send the Rabbi away.

“Are you crazy?” she burst out when he left. “There is so much anti-Semitism on campus. Why stand out? And anyway, how do you know he is a real Rabbi?”

Yosefa was gripped by fear. She called her mother, waking her up from a deep slumber, and told her about the Rabbi in her college building. Her mother called the campus police. Rabbi Adelman barely made it down to the third floor when the police surrounded him. They pushed him up against the wall, frisked him, and led him away in handcuffs.

Even after the dust settled, the image of the eight candles burning against the huge picture window, the light contrasting with the blackness outside, and the Rabbi’s words,”We’ll bring light into the darkness,” lodged in Yosefa’s mind.

She signed up for a course in Judaic studies. She took off a semester to learn in Israel. And she started working for Rabbi Adelman in her last semester in college, becoming a part of his family.

She finally had a chance to ask the Rabbi what brought him so suddenly to her college, to light the Chanukah candles that had ignited the spark in her soul.

“The Rebbe sent a fax to all the campus shluchim asking them to light menorahs with the campus students,” said Rabbi Adelman. “He wrote that we must bring more light into the darkness.”

Fifteen years later, Yosefa’s story has come full circle. She is passing on the light as a shluchah in Manhattan (co-director of The Chabad Loft), inspiring others to take on a life of Torah and mitzvos as she once was inspired. There is the actress she inspired to lead a frum life. There is the couple that met at her Shabbos table and is now shomer Shabbos. There is the girl who lit Shabbos candles for the first time in Yosefa’s home… and countless other lives Yosefa has impacted.

Yosefa is far from alone in her spiritual journey. Many others in the banquet room (of the Kinus Hashluchos) have made a similar transformation — like Shira, who sits nearby. She has not crossed continents to live on shlichus. Yet she knows that shlichus is not bound by geography. It is not a career. It is simply the mindset and belief that every Jew has a neshamah that is sent by Hashem to spread Torah and mitzvos in this world. She, too, has her own portion of the world to light up.

Shira thinks of ways she can reach out to another Jew, whether it’s inviting a less-observant family for Shabbos, bringing mishloach manos to her nonfrum neighbor, or giving a half hour a week of her time to learn with a chavrusa through JNet or Partners in Torah. She knows that regardless of religious affiliation, we are all put in this world to spread a little light.

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Other shluchos interviewed and mentioned in the article:
Sara Kaplan of Tzfas, Israel;
Rochel Druk of Cancun, Mexico;
Rivky Shifrin of Little Neck, NY;
Rochel Loewenthal of Copenhagen, Denmark;
Esther Lifshitz of Boise, Idaho;
Sara Bluming of Potomac, Maryland;
Dinie Greenberg of Shanghai, China;
Fruma Resnick, Tri Valley, California;
Shula Kazen of Ohio (now Brooklyn);
Leah Lipszyc of Crimea, Ukraine.