By N’shei Chabad Newsletter
Readers all over the world loved Mrs. Winnie Gourarie’s stories in Part 1 (Nissan issue, N’shei Chabad Newsletter). The eagerly awaited second and final installment of her memoirs is now complete, and includes stories of her visits with Rebbetzin Chaya Moussia and her views on marriage, tznius, and other topics.
It will appear in the Tammuz issue. Pick it up on Kingston or subscribe here.
Excerpts:
My husband had many yechidusen with the Rebbe as a bachur. We also merited to go in together for yechidus a few times. I don’t remember all of them. My husband did most of the talking but one yechidus stands out clearly in my mind. At the end of that yechidus the Rebbe gave us a brachah that we should have nachas from all our children and take them all to the chuppah. Many years later, in his late 50s, my husband suddenly fainted in the shower. I called our family physician, Dr. Rodney Unterslak, immediately. He came within minutes and on the way he called the Rebbe’s office and an ambulance (there was no Hatzola in those days). My husband was rushed to the hospital and the doctors said his condition was serious. My parents were devastated and everyone was very worried. I was the only one who was not worried at all. I was certain that he would fully recover because our two youngest children, Avremi and Chana, were not yet married, and the Rebbe had blessed us that we should take all our children to the chuppah! After extensive tests it turned out to be a middle ear infection and he was back at work within a few days. … I was very nervous the first time we went and I think my husband was too. We rang the bell and the Rebbetzin herself came to the door and with her beautiful smile asked us in, took our coats and made us feel at ease. She led us into the dining room where the table was set as if for royalty—beautiful dishes, crystal glasses, cakes, fruit, chocolates, ice cream for the children and a large pot of tea. She poured tea for my husband and me. The children were offered cakes and ice cream and they all enjoyed some of the delicacies except for our daughter Esti. Esti decided that she was on a diet. To everything that was offered to her by the Rebbetzin she politely said, “No, thank you.” I thought my husband was going to faint. However, the Rebbetzin understood young people well. She turned to Esti and said, “Esti, have a strawberry. It has no calories!”
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I have very old-fashioned views about marriage. The basis of a truly
beautiful Jewish marriage is love and respect for one another. Although I had many interests, my first priority was my husband. I wanted him to be
happy, and he felt the same about me.
Today it’s a completely different world.Very few couples can manage on one income and it seems both partners have to work. But everything depends on attitude. I once heard a newly married girl say, “I must be crazy to make breakfast for my husband—he can make his own breakfast!” This does not sit well with me. There is nothing wrong with a husband making his own breakfast and even making breakfast for his wife if he has time. But the attitude of each partner being out for himself or herself is a death sentence for a marriage.
My husband was very careful about tznius, not only in dress but also about the avoidance of public displays of affection for one’s wife. The last three words of the Torah are “le-einei kol Yisroel,” in front of the eyes of all of Israel. My husband used to say, “le-eineikol Yisroel” is “sof kol haTorah.” This play on words indicated that when things that are meant to be private are displayed in front of everyone’s eyes, it is the end of Torah, chas v’shalom. Many
people noticed the love and respect we had for each other. But tznius was always scrupulously observed.
CHAYA CHAZAN
In the upcoming Tammuz issue of N’shei Chabad Newsletter, his daughter Chaya Chazan remembers her father, Rabbi Menachem Aharon Hakohen Rodal, z”l:
…my father encouraged his students to hold a bike-a-thon to help fund-raise for their class trip to Niagara Falls. The results were uninspiring and did not cover the trip. One of the students, when handing over his envelope with the small amount of cash he had raised, asked, “Rabbi Rodal, can I keep this as my personal spending money for the trip?”
My father looked at him sternly and said, “No, these funds are needed to cover the basic cost of the trip.” The boy was disappointed but he accepted the answer. When the trip was underway, my father took him aside at a rest stop and handed him back his own envelope with all the money in it. “Use it as spending money; I only said no to you before because you asked me in front of all the boys and it wouldn’t be fair to let only you keep your money.”
In his effort to reach out to as many people as possible, humor was the tool most often used. He deeply appreciated a good joke and almost never had a conversation, even a short one, without sharing a witticism or two of his own. Not everyone appreciated, or got, the sometimes-corny humor, but everyone felt the deep love of his fellow where it emanated from. I remember once accompanying my father on an errand to the bank, when he stopped to tell the security guard a joke. “What is the strongest day of the week?” At the guard’s blank look, he answered, “Saturday. All the other days are weak days.” The guard must have been trained in Buckingham Palace; his expression did not change at all. Undaunted, my father repeated the joke and even tried to explain it, determined to bring a bit of joy into an otherwise boring day.
On another errand, this time a late-night shopping trip to a supermarket, my father began removing the price signs from their places and sticking them under the products instead. When a worker rushed over to ask what he was doing, he replied with a twinkle in his eye, “I wanted to see the prices lowered.”
Almost the only times when my father would be completely serious, without any jokes, was when he was talking about the Rebbe…
LUBA AHUVA PERLOV
Our cover artist, Luba Ahuva Perlov, grew up in Communist Russia. When she and her fiancé, Baruch Perlov, wanted to get married, they encountered a serious obstacle. Because Baruch’s USSR citizenship had been taken away (which was standard procedure for anyone who expressed a desire to emigrate in the early 1990s), they were unable to have a civil marriage. Yet, for Luba to be able to leave the USSR together with Baruch, she had to be his legal wife. The winding path that led them to accomplish their goals (to get married and to leave Russia) is full of unexpected twists and turns that make our own engagements and weddings seem like a walk in the park.
A turning point was meeting Rabbi Dovid Karpov. Luba writes, “He listened attentively to our story, asked some questions, and then told us that it’s not even a question: he’d make a chuppah for us, even though it was against the law. He explained in a firm voice, ‘It’s important to me what Hashem wants. I do not care if it’s against government policies.’ To us, who didn’t have the strength to say word ‘Jew’ without lowering our voice, Rabbi Karpov’s words were absolutely shocking. He was living in the heart of a brutal communist country, under the same regime as we were, but was freely talking about Hashem, about things that really matter, and he wasn’t afraid!”
Luba’s riveting story along with her magnificent cover will remain with you long after you’ve turned the final page.
RABBI LEVI HEBER
Rabbi Levi Heber recruited Agudath Israel of America and Satmar, among others, and created a coalition to fight those who wanted to undo the millennia-old traditions and commandments associated with bris milah.
During the battle to save traditional milah, Rabbi Heber met with the Deputy Mayor, Lilliam Barios-Paoli, a former nun and the most senior member of the NYC administration. Barios-Paoli told him, “I went to the Health Department at the height of the flu season, when we were spending millions educating people on hand-washing, vaccines, etc., and told them that in church people still drink out of the same communal cup.” She asked the Department of Health (DOH) leaders why they weren’t regulating that.
Rabbi Heber recalls, “Lilliam Barios-Paoli told me that there were some very important things for the Department of Health to address that they turned a blind eye on. But they chose to spend money and resources fighting metzitzah b’peh.”
During the brouhaha, there was a non-Jewish man who worked in the DOH who eventually moved out of state and became a ger tzedek. Years later, he sought out Rabbi Heber and said that he had known at the time that the case was highly unusual; he knew that conclusions were being drawn with almost no investigation or elimination of possible causes. “The only motivation was a witch hunt designed to overrule a religious practice,” the man concluded.
Interested readers are invited to visit Rabbi Levi Heber’s website, circumcision.net. There are many Chabad minhagim (for example, to have candles lit in the room when a bris is performed) that may have been forgotten. These should be studied and implemented.
All this and more in your super-size Tammuz issue!
I’m so grateful that this quality Chabad content exists