by Elaine Durbach, New Jersey Jewish News
For close to 30 years, Bris Avrohom has performed outreach to the Russian immigrant community, bringing many brought up under communism back to Judaism.
This month the Chabad-affiliated organization in Hillside marked a milestone: the 6,000 britot, or circumcisions, it has performed for boys and even grown men.
Bris Avrohom marked the occasion with a lunch party on Sunday, Feb. 22, at Congregation Shomrei Torah Ohel Yosef Yitzchok, its synagogue on Salem Avenue.
It also celebrated the bestowing of Hebrew names on many women and girls, and, at the lunch, performed a number of pidyon haben ceremonies, a ritual reserved for first-born sons.
Among the guests was Dr. Yussie Deutsch of Brooklyn, who has been performing circumcisions for the organization over the past 25 years. Also present were a number of the infants, children, and adults whose circumcisions were performed under the organization’s auspices.
Bris Avrohom’s religious leader Rabbi Mordechai Kanelsky stressed the courage of those adults.
“The child who has a bris does not himself have an opinion about it,” said Kanelsky, “but for these adults — coming from a communist country to this free country — how much of a brave decision and commitment did that take!”
Yakov Feldman of Marlboro, an honoree at the event, was one of those adults. He underwent his brit 20 years ago. He opened his speech by welcoming everyone to “our home,” as he calls the synagogue. He recalled the day when Kanelsky said to him, “Welcome to our nation.”
“I became grounded — in a good way,” Feldman said. “Before I was light, a poor immigrant without a heritage, and now I felt I was connected with a thousand years of knowledge, with a religion, and so forth.”
Inspired by the work done by Kanelsky and by his son, Rabbi Yossi, in Old Bridge, Feldman established a nonprofit website, TorahEnlightenment.org, which provides free books of Jewish learning to those who ask for them. He said he sends out as many as 100 books a month.
Another honoree, Maya Denisova of Clifton, related how, six years ago, she was to receive a Hebrew name at the same time that her teenage son would have his brit. As it turned out, the Kanelskys’ baby daughter died three days before the occasion. When they came for her son’s brit, her husband, Valeriy, agreed to Mordechai Kanelsky’s request that he also undergo circumcision as a mitzva in memory of little Bat Sheva.
She recalled how the family — her husband and son included — then walked through the deep snow to the Kanelskys’ home to pay their shiva call. The rebbitzin, Shterney Kanelsky, asked them to participate in another mitzva — to be “couple number one” at Bris Avrohom’s annual mass ceremony in which couples married under civil law are wed according to Jewish tradition. Deutsch, who had performed the double brit, stood with them under the huppa.
Their lives changed from that time, she said. She began to light Shabbat candles and stopped working on Shabbat, although she didn’t know where she would find other work. Within minutes of that decision, she said, her cellphone rang and she was offered her old job back — with longer and better hours.
“Since then, miracles have been happening in our family every day,” she said.
