The Other Day of SalvationEytan Kobre | Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Throughout the ages, Jews have experienced events that clearly superseded the limitations of physical nature; they've performed boundless chesed — people superseding their limited selves to bestow goodness upon others; and together they've formed a metaphysical entity we call Klal Yisrael, a confederation of souls that often appears fractured, but is never more than moments away from a wondrous unity of spirit. The following lines tell a tale of all three.
The days leading up to Chanukah are always filled with anticipation, but those days are doubly special in Williamsburg's Satmar community, because it is then — on the 21st of Kislev, that the kehillah comes together to mark the deliverance in 1944 of the Divrei Yoel ztz''l from the Nazi inferno. After a brief sojourn in Eretz Yisrael, the Rebbe Rav Yoelish Teitelbaum made his way to America, where he established his Chassidus anew with a literal handful of broken survivors.
Each year since then, on the evening of the Yom HaHatzolah — the Day of Salvation, as this day is known, a seudas hodaah is held at which the Satmar community, now large and burgeoning, gives thanks to Hashem for what He did for its beloved rebbe. This festive gathering also serves as the annual dinner of Satmar's sprawling network of chinuch institutions known by the shorthand acronym of UTA, which together educate 9,000 talmidim and talmidos.
This year's seudah, held on Motzaei Shabbos Parshas Vayeishev, marked 67 years since the Rebbe's escape to freedom, but it was auspicious for another reason, too. This was the first time in 15 years that the seudah was celebrated in the cavernous expanse of the Brooklyn Armory, perhaps the only Brooklyn venue that can comfortably accommodate the crowd of between six and seven thousand attendees.
It is an especially poignant venue for those Satmar chassidim old enough to remember the famous Keren Hatzolah event convened there in 1978 by Rav Yoelish on behalf of the various mosdos in Eretz Yisrael that on principle did not take government funding and thus relied heavily on their American compatriots for financial support. The Rebbe declared that the ''heilige Avos themselves had descended to behold thekinus l'Sheim Shamayim,'' and the princely sum of one million dollars was raised that evening.
Graced as always with the presence of Rebbe Zalman Leib shlita, this year's seudah was a moving display of common purpose in a Jewish world so greatly in need of achdus. But what the multitudes present that evening could not know was that one young man among them, Yaakov Meir Stein, a 17-year-old talmid of the Satmar Yeshiva in Queens, New York, was destined, less than 24 hours later, to become an unwitting vehicle for a modern miracle.
