By Rabbi Asher Zeilingold, Clear Vision
While we had gone the previous year to Central America, in the summer of 1961 we went to California.
A few months earlier, Rabbi Moshe Feller’s mother had passed away, and he would need to say Kaddish.
The Rebbe told him to go to California where he could find a place to daven and say Kaddish, “But either for the morning services or the afternoon and evening services,” he advised, so as not to take away from our important mission of bolstering Judaism.
One day, while in California, our car broke down in the middle of the street. It seemed it was humorous for others to see a young rabbi, beard and all, directing traffic around a car at a busy Los Angeles intersection. But for us it was not. We had an appointment, and arriving on time was important in encouraging them to accept our message.
I called AAA, and we waited and waited. The hour of our appointment had long passed when we noticed a ten-year-old selling newspapers. It was sort of tragic that such a young child would need to support his family. Approaching, we asked the child if he was Jewish; he said he was. It turned out that he and his brother, who was not far away, wanted to go to a Jewish school, but their parents could not afford it.
They gave us their address, and we went to visit the family. The mother told us how they had come from New York, but her husband had been in a car accident and now could not work. Though they wanted their children to go to a yeshiva, it was not financially feasible. Promising to look into it, we asked at the local day school if they could go and were told by the administration that the children didn’t even know how to read Hebrew; “How would they be able to follow the Jewish studies?”
Before we left, we found a tutor to teach them how to read Hebrew, and they were soon able to go to yeshiva. We never made it to our meeting, but at least we knew why.
An excerpt from Clear Vision: Living by the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Guidance, available at ClearVisionBook.com.
