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Weekly Chasidic Story #931 (s5776-03 / 14 Tishrei 5776) Two Rickety Sukkahs As winds howl outside, the fatherreassures his family that the holiday candles
will not blow out and the sukkah will remain standing. Connection: Seasonal--festival of Sukkot
Two Rickety SukkahsThe year was 1927. The place was Simferopol, southern Ukraine, then part of the USSR. Rabbi Peretz Mochkin was a marked man. As a devoted follower of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, and vigoriously active in Chabad's underground network of Jewish institutions, he lived his days in constant fear of the secret police and their proxies. Just before the joyous holiday of Sukkot, Rabbi Peretz fell ill with typhus; he felt that his days were numbered. But then, there was a knock at the door. His old friend, Rabbi Yankel Maskalik, from the town of Zhuravitz, had made the 1,200-kilometer (750 miles) journey to visit and bring the Mochkin family some much-needed holiday cheer. Rabbi Peretz's daughter, Guta Schapiro, later would recall to her grandchildren that "The sukkah was very small and very poorly built - we did not want the KGB to know about it - and Rabbi Yankel was a large man, so when he sat in the sukkah with my father, there was no room for anyone else." The men began singing "A Sukaleh a Kleinier," a Yiddish folk song about a Jewish family in a rickety sukkah. As winds howl outside, the father in the song reassures his family that the holiday candles will not blow out and the sukkah will remain standing. As the two rabbis sat and sang, and the makeshift sukkah swayed back and forth with their every movement, the children knew in their hearts that no one - not even Stalin - could extinguish the flame of Judaism. Rabbi Peretz eventually recovered and escaped the Soviet Union in 1947. Rabbi Yankel was arrested in 1937 by the KGB and shot for his "counterrevolutionary" activities. Surely it is appropriate as well as divinely ordained that Rabbi Yankel's great-granddaughter, Chanie Galperin, married Rabbi Peretz's great-grandson, Rabbi Chaim Lazaroff. The Russian communists are long gone, but the rabbis' lineage is going strong. Nearly 90 years later, Rabbi Chaim and Chanie Lazaroff,
co-directors of Chabad of Uptown Manhattan (New York City) have made it a tradition
to host 100 people in their gargantuan sukkah every year on the first
night of Sukkot as a tribute to their forebears and the triumph of the Jewish
spirit. "It is a heartwarming celebration of unity, with so many Jews of
different levels of observance, all packed into one sukkah together,"
proclaims Chaim Lazaroff.
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Yerachmiel
Tilles is co-founder and associate director of Ascent-of-Safed, and chief editor
of this website (and of KabbalaOnline.org). He has hundreds of published stories
to his credit, and many have been translated into other languages. He tells
them live at Ascent nearly every Saturday night.