IN 1958 A HASSIDIC RABBI moved to Kew Garden Hills in New York. In those days Kew Garden Hills was not a center of Hassidic life. The appearance of the bearded rabbi in his strange dress—fur hat, dark frock coat—struck an exotic note. The fifties were a time of suburbanization and acculturation. For Jews in particular, America was the New World, an escape from the dark shadows of Europe. The world of Hassidism was foreign to these Americanized Jews, and the rabbi seemed as if he belonged to a different place and time. To their surprise, he had arrived to open a shteibl, an old-fashioned synagogue like those in the small townships of Poland and Russia. A young man in his teens, not very religious, was fascinated by the new arrival. Bored by the services at his local synagogue, he decided to pay the shteibl a visit. He found it strange, a little outlandish, but intriguing. After the service ended, the rabbi came over to him. He told him that Pesach was coming soon. And on Pesach you need a child to ask the four questions that begin the seder service. He, the rabbi, did not have a child who could ask. All he had was a baby daughter a few months old. Would the young man be kind enough to join the rabbi and his wife for the seder and ask the questions?
He went. He was surprised to see, between the rabbi and his wife, a large baby carriage. They had brought their daughter, now sleeping, to the table to be present at the recitation of the Haggadah. The seder began, and the young man asked the questions. The rabbi began reading the familiar Hebrew words of reply. Half an hour into the seder, the baby woke and started to cry. The rabbi asked permission of his wife and guest to leave the table for a while. He took the baby in his arms and went into the bedroom. The young man could hear the rabbi soothing her, dancing gently around the room, and singing a song over and over again. The song was in Yiddish and the young man did not understand its words. But soon the baby stopped crying and went to sleep. The rabbi returned and the seder continued.
There the story might have ended, but it didn’t. Intrigued by the rabbi and his tenderness for the baby, the young man began to find out where he came from, what his story was. The rabbi, it transpired, came from Warsaw. He had been studying there when the Second World War broke out and had just married. Like all the other Jews, he and his wife found themselves prisoners in the ghetto. Conditions were terrible and worsened week by week. There was starvation, disease; people lay dead and unburied in the streets. The rabbi was soon transported to Treblinka, and from there he was taken to other concentration camps. He still had his number tattooed on his arm. His wife, too, was taken to a concentration camp, where Nazi doctors used her for their medical experiments. Somehow they both survived.
After the war, emaciated, half alive, they were taken to DP camps, where they stayed until they were able to come to America. Because of what had been done to her, his wife was told by American doctors that she had been made infertile. The couple would not be able to have a child. But they refused to give up hope. They visited specialists, went through years of exploring all medical avenues. More than ten years later, at last it happened. By a miracle she conceived. They had a child. This was the child the rabbi had taken in his arms. But it wasn’t this that changed the young man’s life. What did change it, leading the young man to become religious—and eventually a rabbi, which he is today— was the slow, dawning understanding of the words the rabbi had sung to the baby as he danced with her in his arms, what they meant and what they signified. What were they, the words sung over and over again to a baby by a rabbi who had lived through the Warsaw ghetto and Treblinka and passed through the gates of hell? Es is gut zu zein a Yid, Es is gut zu zein a Yid. “It’s good to be a Jew. It’s good to be a Jew.
