Episode 36: "Did you hear they're sending shluchim to the Soviet Union?" | With Miriam Moskovitz, Chabad shlucha in Kharkov, Ukraine

00:00 Speaker 1 What is it like to land in a country that was closed off for decades, with tens of thousands of Jews waiting for you? What do you eat for a year in a city without a single kosher kitchen? How do you build everything from scratch? And thirty years later, what is the hardest part of coping during a war in a city so close to the border with the country you’re fighting—and where you hear the boom before the siren? How do you explain the situation to your children and grandchildren when buildings are actually exploding around you? And what enormous message can we take from all this? Join a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law for a conversation about their shared experiences in a basement in Kharkiv, but above all, about shlichus from the depths of the soul. This episode was recorded with the sponsorship of Pninim.com, Israel’s largest pearl importer. On the website and at the store in the Diamond Exchange complex, you’ll find a huge, stunning selection of original, distinctive pearl jewelry, without middlemen’s markups. So if you want to treat yourself to the finest-quality jewelry at the best price, Pninim.com. For details: 058-763-6736. A reminder: if you enjoyed the podcast and found it helpful, you’re warmly invited to pass it on and share it with everyone you care about. Intro, and we’ll begin. How do we turn our lives into lives of shlichus, full of meaning? I’m Chani Moskovitz, a shlucha in Kharkiv, Ukraine. In this podcast, we’ll meet different women who will share their shlichus in a range of fields and, through it, help each of us find and clarify our own shlichus in the world. Because living the lives we were created to live is the best there is. Shlichus as a way of life. Starting now. Hello, hello to a special guest. Yes. What a privilege. After a year of saying, “Now I’m here.” That’s it—people keep asking me, “So when are you doing a podcast with her?” So I need to introduce you in a few ways, so everyone understands. Yes. My mother-in-law—or my mother-in-law, how do you say it? Shvigger. Shvigger. For anyone who, uh, wasn’t sure. So, after, uh,

02:20 Speaker 1 more than a year of war in Kharkiv. Wait—a shlucha, the Rebbe’s shlucha in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Right. For almost thirty-three years, yes. That’s it. I’m saying there’s been a war for more than a year now, and everyone probably thinks we’re going to talk about the war. But they don’t know that Kharkiv was very, very interesting long before the war. Right. So I think we’ll just go back thirty-three years. Can we say thirty-three? Because when did it actually begin—when did you know you were going? Going. Well, we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Go back as far as you need. A little further back. I think it’s important for everyone to understand that Hebrew isn’t my first language. I’m from Sydney, Australia, and by the time I was a teenager... I come from a religious home; my parents are religious, but they aren’t Chabad chassidim. I began studying Chassidus with a Chabad woman. I went to a nonreligious school, so my parents wanted me to have additional lessons. I started learning with her, and what really drew me to Chabad was shlichus. At some point, like any teenager who thinks she can change the world, I saw in shlichus exactly what I imagined for myself: one day I’d go somewhere exotic. I don’t think I imagined... An adventure like this. Yes. And I’d find fulfillment in helping people and changing their lives. I saw that in Chabad—the idea of Ahavas Yisroel, of doing something more for someone else. I don’t think I was imagining the Soviet Union. Not so much. Not so much, yes, but I felt this really was the direction for me. So when I met... I went to study, and I spent two years near the Rebbe in New York, at Beis Rivkah. I studied in seminary. Eventually I met my husband, Moshe Moskovitz, from Caracas, Venezuela. A girl from Sydney, Australia. An interesting combination, but shlichus was the direction. Actually, after the wedding,

04:20 Speaker 1 we were thinking about shlichus in South America. You had English and Spanish between you. English and Spanish, and he really had... Over the years, he’d been to all sorts of places in South America. So I started learning Spanish. I actually bought a book and studied Spanish from it every day. It ended up helping me with my mother-in-law, you should know. Her English is fine, but my Spanish is more or less all right now too. Mendel was born—you know him a little. A little. So we started looking. Looking at all kinds of places. We wanted... How did it work back then? Could you ask the Rebbe where to go, or...? In the Rebbe’s earlier years, it was more common for the Rebbe to write to someone, or tell someone, “Go there.” In my time, in the 1980s, people would generally choose a place, see whether it was suitable, and write to the Rebbe: “I have an offer to go to such-and-such a place. Does the Rebbe approve?” And the Rebbe would answer... Like a shidduch, really. Like a shidduch. And shlichus truly is a shidduch. Every woman listening knows of a Chabad House or a shlucha somewhere—or if there’s a shlucha listening now, she should know that it really is a shidduch. The city you end up in is truly the place for you, like a shidduch: a place that will be good for you and where you’ll be right for that place. So my husband came back. We already had a small child, and every place we tried, something didn’t work out. Maybe we were too... There was one place that was small, and we thought we wanted something big. There was a big place, but there were financial problems to deal with, and we didn’t want to get involved in that. Then suddenly someone said they were opening up the Soviet Union. This was the summer of 1990. My husband

06:19 Speaker 1 came home—it was Friday. He came back from kollel and said to me, “Did you hear, Miriam? They’re sending shluchim to the Soviet Union now.” Did they post it in the WhatsApp groups? So he said—he’d been at kollel, and that was the news going around: people were starting to write to the Rebbe. But the real challenge was that, as I said, everyone would write to the Rebbe to ask whether they could go, and the Rebbe had told everyone with a child, no. How could you take a child there? How could you bring a child there? So I— At first it was only couples without children, basically. Yes. At first it was couples without children. The day before, the Kaminetzky family had received an answer from the Rebbe about Dnepropetrovsk. They’d been married for a year and had no child. So I said to my husband, “Ah.” We don’t stand a chance. “This isn’t for us.” So I had a peaceful Shabbos. A relaxed one. A relaxed one—until Sunday. On Sunday morning, the Lazar family received a positive answer about Moscow, and they had a four-month-old daughter. So my husband came back wide-eyed and said to me, “Well, Miriam, it is possible.” We started making inquiries. Everyone says we were crazy. Maybe we were, but there was something about it: a city in a whole country, and the opportunity to do something there really had... So much potential. So much potential. Now, after all these years, we can see that potential—what an empire of shlichus it truly became. Even though now we separate Russia and Ukraine. Wait, but were you talking about Kharkiv specifically, or did you say the Soviet Union in general and they suggested Kharkiv? What happened was that Moscow was the capital. Dnepropetrovsk was the city where the Rebbe had lived. That’s why those were chosen. So why Kharkiv? Because that very month

08:14 Speaker 1 they were supposed to get the shul back. It had been closed for seventy years and used as a sports hall. It was built in 1913. Ten years later, the Jews wrote that they didn’t need a shul.

08:32 Speaker 2 They were forced to, really.

08:33 Speaker 1 Forced to. It was communism. Even then, they were forced to write that they didn’t want the shul. That was July 1923—exactly a hundred years ago—when they closed the shul.

08:47 Speaker 2 Oh, they closed it.

08:48 Speaker 1 They closed it. It became a sports hall. Now there were some bochurim there on Merkos Shlichus. A few bochurim had been in Kharkiv, and they wrote that Kharkiv needed shluchim. So they asked us whether Kharkiv would be all right. I said, honestly, we don’t know Moscow, Dnepropetrovsk or Kharkiv. We have no idea.

09:06 Speaker 2 Today you can look it up on Google and walk around the streets.

09:09 Speaker 1 Exactly. But it wasn’t just that there was no Google Maps. There was nothing. You didn’t see it on television. It was still behind the Iron Curtain; you couldn’t see what was there. I think the first—and last—time I saw anything from Russia on television was the Olympics. How do you say it?

09:33 Speaker 2 The Olympics.

09:34 Speaker 1 The Olympics in Moscow. And even then, you only saw what they wanted to control and show you, and that was it. So we wrote to the Rebbe that we understood we had a child, and we knew there could be problems with education and medical care there, but we were sure that with the Rebbe’s blessing everything would be all right. Within five minutes we received an answer: “May it be in a good and auspicious hour.”

10:00 Speaker 2 Wow.

10:01 Speaker 1 That really is, like you said, a shidduch. It’s like the Rebbe’s classic answer about a shidduch.

10:07 Speaker 2 Did you change the labels to Russian?

10:09 Speaker 1 Yes.

10:09 Speaker 2 On the...

10:10 Speaker 1 I bought Learn Russian in Ten Minutes a Day. I changed the stickers, and I also had a tape. Those were the days of tapes. I don’t know—do you even know what those are? Okay, so I had a tape.

10:26 Speaker 2 Recordings.

10:26 Speaker 1 Yes, recordings. And I remember the first word was “excuse me.”

10:31 Speaker 2 Izvinite.

10:32 Speaker 1 Yes, right. Izvinite. My husband and I spent ten minutes on that one word. So I said, “All right, forget it. We’ll learn it when we get there.”

10:40 Speaker 2 I think with Russian, the first thing is really to get used to the sounds.

10:43 Speaker 1 The sounds—and I hadn’t heard them.

10:45 Speaker 2 The accent. If you speak with an accent, no one understands you.

10:47 Speaker 1 And you didn’t hear it around you, either. We hadn’t heard it.

10:49 Speaker 2 Yes.

10:50 Speaker 1 Now you walk around in Israel and hear so much Russian.

10:53 Speaker 2 Yes.

10:53 Speaker 1 You hear it so much that it’s familiar now. But back then, in Australia in 1970, there was a girl at school named Olga. That was it.

11:04 Speaker 2 That was all the...

11:05 Speaker 1 That was all the Russian I knew. Yes, that was my Russian. And when some Russian speakers at 770 heard we were going there, they said, “You don’t know anything about the place. Why are you going? They need people who are originally from there.” So I said, “No, we’re taking the leap—lechatchila ariber—for the Rebbe. We’re going.” There were three families preparing together: the Kaminetzkys, the Lazars, and us. They arranged for us to learn a little Russian with a woman: how to read, how to count from one to a hundred, how to say what kind of weather I like best. That was it.

11:50 Speaker 2 Very important.

11:51 Speaker 1 We went shopping on the Lower East Side, and I had no idea what I needed. They said we could take ten boxes. We bought coats, too. We thought it would be like Siberia, that we were going somewhere freezing. And I’m from Australia; I had no idea what a real winter was. We also had to figure out the electrical voltage—in America it’s 110.

12:15 Speaker 2 Celsius.

12:15 Speaker 1 Yes, Celsius.

12:16 Speaker 2 What do they use in Australia, actually?

12:17 Speaker 1 No, in Australia it’s Celsius. But there, with the electrical voltage, we had to change everything. I packed nine boxes, and one box was cholent. A woman wanted to volunteer, so she made a huge pot of cholent and canned it.

12:41 Speaker 2 Oy vey.

12:42 Speaker 1 So I had a box of cholent.

12:45 Speaker 2 You weren’t hungry, then.

12:46 Speaker 1 Well...

12:48 Speaker 2 Maybe you were.

12:48 Speaker 1 We’ll get to what we ended up eating. Anyway, it was exciting. The Rebbe had been sending people on missions since the earliest days, but this really was something new: another country was opening up.

13:06 Speaker 2 And by then there were already shluchim all over the world.

13:10 Speaker 1 Yes, almost all over the world.

13:11 Speaker 2 Except there.

13:12 Speaker 1 Yes. And this was an entire country. They told us it would be a one-year trial, because nobody knew whether it would even be possible. Before we wrote to the Rebbe, we also had to ask our parents’ permission and make sure they supported it. My parents laughed a little and said, “One year, and then you’ll go somewhere normal.” They’re still waiting. But it was harder for my husband’s parents. My father-in-law was from Ukraine. He had been in Auschwitz; he was a Holocaust survivor. For him, everything in Ukraine was still connected to his painful past. The thought of his son going back there was very, very hard. So we gave them time to think. A day or two later they called and said, “We don’t want to stand in your way. Afterward you’ll go somewhere normal—Manhattan, Los Angeles. There are shluchim in those places too. So one year is all right.” But they’re very, very proud of us now. For them, it really was...

14:27 Speaker 2 It really was unthinkable back then.

14:28 Speaker 1 Yes.

14:28 Speaker 2 It was...

14:29 Speaker 1 Yes.

14:30 Speaker 2 Extraordinary, going so far away.

14:31 Speaker 1 And with no... The truth is, to call home back then, you had to book the call forty-eight hours in advance.

14:44 Speaker 2 Wow.

14:45 Speaker 1 So on Monday I had to say that I wanted to call Australia on Wednesday at 12:40. I’d book the call, but if the time came and no one answered, or the line was busy, I had to wait another two days.

15:01 Speaker 2 Wow. Wait, did you have to go somewhere special to make the call, or...?

15:04 Speaker 1 Yes. So we were cut off from everyone. At first there was Ezras Achim, an organization based in Crown Heights. For years they had provided assistance and sent people there—not shluchim in the sense of families going long-term. That was new. But for years Chabad had been bringing things into the Soviet Union, siddurim, and sending people, including bochurim. Ezras Achim was very involved in that, and at the beginning they helped the new shluchim travel. I remember there was a huge map of the Soviet Union, and they said, “Okay, Kharkov is over there.” And we were like, “Okay, fine.” My husband said, “We have just one request. We want a telephone, so we’ll be able to call.” They said, “Oh, you’re already starting with...”

15:58 Speaker 2 Requests.

15:58 Speaker 1 Requests. “If you have requests, this isn’t for you.” “No, no, no, it’s fine. We don’t need a telephone. We want to go.”

16:04 Speaker 2 Wait, at that time, did people in the United States already have telephones in every home?

16:10 Speaker 1 Yes, yes. Everyone had a telephone, but the Soviet Union was...

16:14 Speaker 2 Right, right. Let’s go back a few decades.

16:17 Speaker 1 There were telephones, but calling abroad—that was the problem.

16:21 Speaker 2 Oh, right, right.

16:22 Speaker 1 That really was the problem. So we traveled with our ten boxes and suitcases. There was real excitement in Crown Heights when we left. You couldn’t fly straight to Moscow; you had to go through Finland, then on to Moscow. Moscow was the capital. I remember when we landed. I was with Mendel, who was nine months old, about the age of my grandson now, who’s crawling. It was my first time in Russia. We were at customs; my husband was trying somehow to manage all ten suitcases on a cart. And when I saw customs, I thought of all the stories I’d heard and read about chassidim—stories of someone’s luggage being opened, tefillin being found and thrown to the dogs. Suddenly I saw a dog, and there I was with ten boxes and my Joint supplies.

17:23 Speaker 2 Oh my, oh my.

17:24 Speaker 1 My husband said, “You go first. You have the baby, and you know a little more Russian.”

17:29 Speaker 2 Wait, did the authorities know you were coming? Was it arranged with anyone, or the opposite?

17:34 Speaker 1 No, no. I was a tourist. We arrived as tourists.

17:37 Speaker 2 With ten boxes.

17:38 Speaker 1 With ten boxes.

17:39 Speaker 2 So there was reason to worry.

17:40 Speaker 1 Yes, there was reason to worry. Everything was still very, very new, and I didn’t have anything official explaining who I was coming for or why. So there I was with ten boxes. I came up with Mendel while my husband was still figuring out how to move all the suitcases. The customs officer asked me something in Russian. I said, “Da, da, da. Khorosho, khorosho.” He put the... what do you call it?

18:04 Speaker 2 Stamp.

18:04 Speaker 1 The stamp on it and said it was fine. So I said to my husband, “It’s fine.”

18:10 Speaker 2 So bring the...

18:12 Speaker 1 He kept going with the suitcases, and he started saying to me—well, it really was a problem, but it was too late. I had already gotten the stamp, and we ran. Someone was there, a driver waiting for us. I remember it was raining, and everything was gray. A Pizza Hut had just opened, the first one in Moscow. On the way, I saw a line literally a kilometer long of people waiting to buy pizza. After an hour in traffic, we arrived at Marina Roscha. Marina Roscha wasn’t like it is now. Now it’s seven stories, something huge and expensive.

18:50 Speaker 2 Wait, just explain what that is for anyone who doesn’t know. It’s in Moscow.

18:53 Speaker 1 It’s the Chabad shul in Moscow.

18:57 Speaker 2 The huge one.

18:58 Speaker 1 The huge one. We arrived in the morning, and our train to Kharkov was at nine that night. So from nine in the morning until nine at night, we had to be in Moscow, and they brought us to the shul. I’d heard of it. Actually, I’d heard there was a place called Marina Roscha—that’s the name of the neighborhood, but they call the shul that too. It was a wooden shul. We thought we’d get a welcome now: the shluchim who’d come from America with mesiras nefesh to save everyone. So we walked in with my sweet little boy, and everyone saw us and lowered their heads like this. I said—

19:39 Speaker 2 So these were Jews at the shul.

19:40 Speaker 1 Jews at the shul. So I said, “What’s going on? Nobody’s smiling here. Is there a funeral? What happened?” Later I understood that, after communism, they were still afraid to talk and commu—to connect—

19:54 Speaker 2 Communicate.

19:54 Speaker 1 Communicate with someone from abroad, with strangers, in case it caused them trouble. And my son Mendel was going up to everyone, trying somehow to... and they were all afraid of him. So I said to my husband, “How are we going to work here? How is this going to be? People are so sad. Everything feels so heavy.”

20:14 Speaker 2 Gray, like you said.

20:15 Speaker 1 Gray. It was gray and rainy. We went to someone’s home for lunch, one of the local shluchim there. I remember it was the first time I saw—what do you call it—carpets?

20:30 Speaker 2 Rugs.

20:30 Speaker 1 A rug on the—a rug on the wall. A rug on the wall—

20:34 Speaker 2 The first time, but not the last.

20:35 Speaker 1 Yes, yes. A rug on the wall was very strange to me. He gave me two fish patties, and I said, “No, no, I’m not hungry.” The truth is, I was very hungry.

20:45 Speaker 2 You needed the cholent cure.

20:47 Speaker 1 Yes, the cholent is coming soon, but for now, it’ll have to wait. So—

20:52 Speaker 2 Wait, weren’t you on the flight with Lazar?

20:54 Speaker 1 We arrived with him.

20:56 Speaker 2 So where were they?

20:56 Speaker 1 Somehow he disappeared. I somehow—

20:58 Speaker 2 He split off.

20:58 Speaker 1 He split off. Maybe he went straight home. I think so too. We landed with him, but I also remember that by customs we were already... so maybe—

21:06 Speaker 2 Separate.

21:07 Speaker 1 Yes, separate. We got to the train at nine. It was quite a place: lots of people, everyone with suitcases, and it was dark. We got on the train, and we didn’t know how we’d know when we’d reached Kharkov. I was so scared. The map was huge, and if we missed Kharkov, we really would end up in Siberia. We didn’t know how to turn off the light. The radio was very loud, and every hour some woman started shouting. She’d shout and open the door, and we’d say, “Nyet, nyet, nyet.” No, no, no. She just wanted to know whether we wanted tea. She’d say, “Chai?” and we’d say, “Nyet, nyet, nyet.” Chai—I didn’t know what chai meant. I didn’t know she was asking if we wanted tea. I was so scared. Every hour she’d suddenly shout “Chai!” And every so often the train would stop, and I needed to know it wasn’t Kharkov. I knew Kharkov started with an X.

22:10 Speaker 2 A Kh.

22:10 Speaker 1 A Kh, a Kh. So each time it stopped, I’d look and think, no, that’s not Kharkov. The truth is, I didn’t know it was a Moscow–Kharkov train.

22:20 Speaker 2 So it was the last stop.

22:21 Speaker 1 The last stop, and it was twelve hours. We kept asking, “How long is this?” It really was twelve hours. Exactly twelve hours later, we arrived in Kharkov. It was nine in the morning, and Hashem did us a favor: the sun was shining. Someone came up to me and said, “My name is Sanya. I be your friend. Everything be okay.” So he told me everything would be all right. Okay, so where were we going to live? He said, “You’ll be in a hotel a little, a little bit, okay? A little bit.” We’d be in a hotel for a short while. In the end, it was half a year. It wasn’t the Sheraton, and it wasn’t five stars. It cost a dollar a night.

22:57 Speaker 2 Oh my goodness.

22:58 Speaker 1 Yes. I think it was seventy or eighty rubles a night back then.

23:01 Speaker 2 Wait, so it wasn’t Ukraine yet, really.

23:03 Speaker 1 It was still the Soviet Union. This was August 1990. It was still the Soviet Union, and Moscow was the capital. A year later—

23:12 Speaker 2 That was it.

23:13 Speaker 1 A year later, the revolution began. Yes, the revolution. So we arrived in August, Elul 5750, August 1990. We went straight to the hotel, up to the third floor. We opened the window, and the view was of the big square.

23:36 Speaker 2 Oh, that’s on the ploshchad.

23:37 Speaker 1 On the ploshchad, right across from it. Back then Lenin was there; he’s not there anymore. Everyone jokes about Lenin there, that his hand is pointing the way to the shul, right across the street. I remember we were very tired, so we said we’d go to the shul in the morning. In the middle of the night—it was already getting close to morning—at five o’clock, we heard a tremendous noise from that ploshchad, that big square. I had jet lag, and with a little child I’d barely slept. I opened the window and saw the whole square filled with soldiers and tanks, all facing our window. I said to Moishe, my husband, “They found us.”

24:26 Speaker 2 Oh, wow.

24:28 Speaker 1 So he came over and looked—oy vey. In the end it was nothing. They had some kind of—

24:35 Speaker 2 Ceremony?

24:35 Speaker 1 Ceremony, some kind of ceremony planned for the next day. But it really was “Welcome to Kharkov.” We’d arrived on Thursday, and they told everyone to come to the shul on Friday night for a welcome for the new shluchim. So we walked in.

24:54 Speaker 2 Who told them? Who was there?

24:55 Speaker 1 There were two bochurim there, and they told everyone.

25:00 Speaker 2 Did they know Russian, or were they also like you?

25:02 Speaker 1 No, no, no. The bochurim—

25:04 Speaker 2 With their hands—

25:04 Speaker 1 Somehow they communicated with their hands, yes, and they also put up a little sign. This was before WhatsApp. But there, if people came to the park in Kharkov, someone could put up that day’s newspaper, and everyone would stand there reading it.

25:21 Speaker 2 As if every word was interesting.

25:23 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, everyone read it.

25:24 Speaker 2 They drank it in.

25:24 Speaker 1 They read everything. And they say that if you want someone to read something, you have to keep it to three, four, five words at most.

25:32 Speaker 2 Yes.

25:32 Speaker 1 But back then they read it. They put up a sign: “New shluchim of the Rebbe are arriving. Come Friday night for a welcome.” A thousand people were there.

25:41 Speaker 2 Wow.

25:43 Speaker 1 A thousand people, and we were trying to get in, but nobody would let us through. Finally we realized they didn’t understand that—

25:49 Speaker 2 It was you.

25:50 Speaker 1 It was us. What were they expecting? A rabbi arriving—someone with a white beard. My husband was barely twenty-five, and I was twenty. Someone came up to my husband and asked, “Is your wife Jewish too?” They really had no idea what to make of us. So—

26:07 Speaker 2 But you didn’t know what you’d walked into either, because their isolation was frightening.

26:13 Speaker 1 Yes. They—and you can’t—

26:14 Speaker 2 They asked because it really wasn’t obvious to them.

26:16 Speaker 1 It wasn’t obvious to them. They had no... Of course, you can’t say a Jew doesn’t have a Jewish background, but they had no knowledge at all. Apart from matzah on Pesach, they really didn’t know anything.

26:28 Speaker 2 But what about the older people?

26:29 Speaker 1 Not in Kharkov, not so much. Some knew a little Yiddish. They’d stumble through, “Ikh red Yiddish, ikh red Yiddish”—“I speak Yiddish, I speak Yiddish.” Okay, davayte dalshe po-russki—let’s carry on in Russian. So we’d continue in Russian. It wasn’t like Zhitomir and the towns farther west. Those places had shtetls; Kharkov was already more modern.

26:46 Speaker 2 They lived in shtetls, sort of.

26:47 Speaker 1 Shtetls, yes. Kharkov had also been through the war, so a lot of people had left. And then there wasn’t a shul either. Everything was under—

26:58 Speaker 2 Persecution.

26:58 Speaker 1 Persecution. So there were hardly any people left who really knew. There were a few who knew how to daven, but they couldn’t even make a minyan, really.

27:08 Speaker 2 So what made people want to come and see who this was?

27:10 Speaker 1 There was an incredible thirst to know. The gates were opening—not just physically. It was true that from then on people could begin thinking about making aliyah, but it was also about learning more: Where do I come from? What does it mean to be Jewish? And on Friday my husband said, “On Sunday we’ll have a Sunday school. You can send children at ten. And on Monday we’ll start a yeshiva for adults, from nine to four.”

27:43 Speaker 2 And who would teach them, for example?

27:44 Speaker 1 We would. My husband spoke through an interpreter. He spoke English, and she translated. Her name was Batya. She was a granddaughter—a direct granddaughter—of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev. That was what she knew.

28:00 Speaker 2 Ah.

28:00 Speaker 1 Her name was Batya, and that was it. She knew nothing about Judaism, but she translated for us. She was an older woman.

28:07 Speaker 2 What language did she translate from—English?

28:09 Speaker 1 English. My husband spoke English, and she translated for everyone. On Sunday I arrived at ten. I thought, how many children will come? Ten? I brought some markers and paper, and Batya was beside me to translate. A hundred and fifty children came.

28:24 Speaker 2 Wow.

28:25 Speaker 1 So I said, “Wow.” That also gave us a sense that there was something to do. There was a lot to do. My husband already had a long line of people who wanted to talk to him—to talk to the rabbi. It didn’t matter about what. “My grandfather was a rabbi,” one person would say. Others said that if we needed help, they were ready to travel to America to help us do whatever needed doing. That was Sunday. On Monday my husband started the yeshiva, from nine to four, with fifteen young men who came to learn every day. And we were staying in a hotel. So what did we eat? In the morning we had—

29:06 Speaker 2 Oh, this...

29:07 Speaker 1 Yes, a bottle of Pepsi. For lunch we had lavash, a kind of round bread, and in the evening I had cholent.

29:19 Speaker 2 Wow, so that came in handy.

29:20 Speaker 1 Yes, so we put—

29:21 Speaker 2 Really, all the lavash—that was something you...

29:23 Speaker 1 We set up a place to light the fire. I’ll tell you the truth: after a few weeks I was feeling nauseous, and I really thought it was from the Pepsi. It turned out I was already pregnant. But I also think the Pepsi didn’t exactly help. After a few weeks on that menu, we wanted a little change. There was a man named Misha who spoke Yiddish, so he translated for us. I told him we wanted fresh fish. “Thank you for the vegetables and the fruit, Misha, but bring us fresh fish.” He bought me everything except the fish. So I said, “Misha, I specifically asked for fresh fish.” He said, “Yes, I put it in the bathtub.” I said, “What’s in the bathtub?” I opened the bathroom door in the hotel, and there was a live fish in there. I said, “Oy vey.” I called my husband: “Moishe, there’s a live fish in the bathtub. What do we do?”

30:13 Speaker 2 I said fresh, but I didn’t mean that fresh.

30:15 Speaker 1 That fresh. I had no idea what to do with it. Forget about the shower. But what were we going to do with the fish? So he sent me a woman, a babushka, and she made us something with it. It was tasty, actually, but we went back to cholent.

30:29 Speaker 2 How did you make it? Did you have some kind of...

30:31 Speaker 1 I had—

30:31 Speaker 2 A gas burner?

30:32 Speaker 1 A tiny, tiny gas burner. It was one room. One room for a dollar a night. There were about ten boxes, and we had a curtain in the room so we could feel as if we had a bedroom and a—

30:44 Speaker 2 Oh, down the middle, yes.

30:45 Speaker 1 Yes, yes. And my son Mendel crawled all over the place. There were mice, too. The place was really disgusting, but the shlichus was something special, really special. The thirst of the people... At our first Rosh Hashanah, three thousand Jews came.

31:00 Speaker 2 Wow, how did they know?

31:00 Speaker 1 They came, but they thought it would be Novy G-d. Novy G-d, New Year’s on the first of January, is a big celebration in that country. So they thought, okay, now there’ll be—

31:14 Speaker 2 A Jewish one.

31:15 Speaker 1 A big celebration—yes, a Yevreysky Novy G-d, a Jewish New Year. Something interesting. When my husband walked in with a shofar, they had never seen one in their lives. What’s a shofar?

31:23 Speaker 2 Right.

31:23 Speaker 1 And on Yom Kippur someone came up to my husband and said, “You look very pale and weak. Maybe you should eat something.” They had no idea that we were actually... I still remember Sukkos. We were staying in the hotel, so what would we do for a sukkah? We made a mobile sukkah, like the ones you see here in Israel: you put a sukkah on a truck. So we took a truck and put the sukkah on it. We parked it by the hotel so we’d have somewhere to go, and we could also drive around the city a little. A child in Sunday school asked, “How do you make a sukkah if you don’t have a truck?” They didn’t realize that wasn’t how people normally did it. Seeing the Four Species for the first time, our first Chanukah—everything was new. It really gave us the feeling that we were making history. And that place, the whole Soviet Union, all that ground, had seen so much Jewish blood, so many years of suffering, so many years of communism. We truly felt that we were living through a special time of change, when we could now give. The local people’s desire to learn helped enormously, too. After a while we opened a school—a Sunday school, sorry, a regular school. We started with my son, because he needed a preschool—

32:49 Speaker 3 So there was a preschool.

32:50 Speaker 1 So suddenly there was a preschool, because of course he needed friends. His friends were Sasha and Pasha, and they were Jewish. After that came a school. We opened grades one through four, and eventually we had every grade. And just before the war, on February 23, it had been thirty years since our school began.

33:15 Speaker 3 The school’s birthday.

33:16 Speaker 1 Yes. Those really were difficult times.

33:18 Speaker 3 It’s remarkable that you arrived when nobody knew anything, and after thirty years it’s completely different. You’ve watched it happen, year by year...

33:28 Speaker 1 Watched it develop. We see that—

33:29 Speaker 3 By the next Rosh Hashanah, there were probably already people waiting to hear the shofar. At least some.

33:34 Speaker 1 Yes. No, no—they already knew. Even in the early years, people would greet us on the street: “Slava Bogu,” and things like that. “Shalom, shalom.” There were already more children... For the adults, though, it was harder to change after all those years of communism. Sending a child to the school wasn’t easy for everyone at first, either. Now people know it’s normal, but at the beginning, after so many years of not wanting anyone to know they were Jewish, suddenly sending a child to a Jewish school—what would happen?

34:17 Speaker 3 You were essentially giving Judaism a new image.

34:19 Speaker 1 Giving Judaism a new image.

34:20 Speaker 3 From scratch, because it was as if there was nothing there. It was just something people were afraid to talk about.

34:25 Speaker 1 Yes, and everyone had been so determined not to have it written down that they were Jewish. But once they understood, it was—

34:32 Speaker 3 For their own good.

34:32 Speaker 1 In the end, it was for their own good. We also saw how quickly they began doing things. Maybe that, too, came from all those years of communism, when you weren’t allowed to ask questions. You had to listen and accept. So perhaps, in a way, that helped them have the kabbolas ol to do things. At first my husband taught them a Tanya class. Now, Tanya is very deep; it’s really the soul of Torah. A lot of the subjects aren’t simple. He’d teach the class and ask, “Any questions?” No questions. “You can ask questions.” It took time for them to understand that it was good to ask, that they were allowed to ask, that they should ask. That’s what Judaism is.

35:28 Speaker 3 You’re allowed to ask.

35:28 Speaker 1 Yes, you’re allowed to ask. That was the real change. At first, everyone stood quietly through the classes. “Would you like to put on tefillin?” “All right.” They’d do it without questions. In fact, now we can tell when someone has been to Israel or somewhere else. My husband asks, “Would you like to put on tefillin?” and the person says, “Uh...” He’s learned that he can say something back.

35:50 Speaker 3 Right. You really don’t get that in Ukraine—someone starting to say, “Oh, they’re pushing religion in the school.”

35:57 Speaker 1 Not at all.

35:58 Speaker 3 The way it is in Israel, where people are afraid to say the wrong word in case someone complains or sues them, or—

36:04 Speaker 1 There was actually a painful story. At the beginning we also had yeshivah boys with us, and there was one child in our first-grade class who was moving to Israel. One of the boys gave him tzitzis, a siddur and a kippah. A year later, that yeshivah boy was in Israel and wanted to visit the child. The child came with a package and handed back the siddur, the kippah and the tzitzis.

36:31 Speaker 3 Wow.

36:31 Speaker 1 So he said to him—the child’s name was Sasha—

36:34 Speaker 3 Just like that, giving them back.

36:35 Speaker 1 Yes. “Sasha, Sasha, why are you giving these back?” “No, I’ll tell you the truth. I came to school on the first day with the tzitzis, the kippah and the siddur, and they told me, ‘Oh, that’s for Kharkiv. You don’t need that here.’”

36:47 Speaker 3 Wow.

36:48 Speaker 1 So that really was—it wasn’t easy. It isn’t simple here either. Shlichus is needed everywhere, in every corner. So in those first years, we were just doing things. And there was also the collapse of the Soviet Union. After about a year, there was a revolution. Then came the summer of ’91. There was this thing called the putsch, something in Moscow involving Yeltsin, and people thought everything would go back to the way it had been. So everyone who could leave was told to leave. All the organizations and all the foreigners started leaving, and we stayed right where we were.

37:34 Speaker 3 Reminds me of something.

37:34 Speaker 1 Yes. So we asked the Rebbe what to do. We wrote to the Rebbe, and the Rebbe told everyone to stay. People came to my husband’s office and said, “What are you doing? You can get out. Don’t you know what the Soviet Union is? Don’t you know what could happen here? This is serious. You have a chance—leave.” He said, “No, the Rebbe told us we need to stay.” “Okay, you’re crazy, but what about your children? Your wife?” No, we were staying. In the end, everything was fine; it all passed peacefully. But right from the beginning, we truly felt that the Rebbe was with us—and we always felt that. The Rebbe’s brachos and the success of the shlichus really carried us. We had difficulties too, serious difficulties.

38:21 Speaker 3 I’m sure.

38:21 Speaker 1 Of course. There was someone who wanted us out of the shul. There was a fire in the shul. For eight years, someone had taken control of it—there was no heating in the shul, no water in the shul.

38:36 Speaker 3 He took it over completely.

38:37 Speaker 1 Completely. But baruch Hashem, in the end it all worked out—

38:41 Speaker 3 I think that story alone could fill a whole podcast.

38:43 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, yes. But afterward, after the fire—

38:49 Speaker 3 Where is he today? It just occurred to me.

38:50 Speaker 1 I have no idea.

38:52 Speaker 3 Disappeared, disappeared.

38:53 Speaker 1 Disappeared. But baruch Hashem, afterward we rebuilt the shul. That same shul, which for so many years had been used for soccer and basketball, suddenly became a shul again. When we were renovating it, we wondered, “Why are we making such a magnificent shul for babushkas who don’t care all that much about how it looks?” But we thought, if we’re doing it, let’s make something beautiful. And truly—I’m not just saying this because I’m from Kharkiv—it’s one of those shuls that is really something beautiful. We didn’t have pictures of how it had looked before, so we could make it the way we wanted. On one side we put all ten mivtzoim, the ten things the Rebbe spoke about. There are 613 mitzvos, and he chose ten—family, kashrus, tzedakah, Ahavas Yisroel, tefillin and so on—the mitzvos we need to—

39:51 Speaker 3 Promote and spread.

39:52 Speaker 1 Spread. So those are on one side, and the Yomim Tovim are on the other. Up above, we also chose some verses to write. We wrote, “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of Moshiach,” and “You shall spread forth westward and eastward,” which is really what Chabad is about: being everywhere. And on the aron kodesh, which is also very large and beautiful, we put the verse, “Those lost in the land of Assyria and those dispersed in the land of Egypt shall come.” At farbrengens, when the Rebbe spoke about the Jews trapped in the Soviet Union, who couldn’t—

40:33 Speaker 4 Openly.

40:34 Speaker 1 Couldn’t openly observe their Yiddishkeit, the Rebbe would cry over it. When would they be able to? When would they really have the chance to leave? I remember, in 1980—I think it was ’88—when the Rebbe began saying that space should be prepared in Israel, because soon Jews would be leaving the Soviet Union. I heard the sicha, and it sounded like the Rebbe wanted to give some hope that such a thing could happen, but it was so far from reality. What did it mean to build for them? So they built one building in Jerusalem. How many would come? A hundred?

41:23 Speaker 4 Wow. And how many came in the end? Maybe a million in—

41:26 Speaker 1 Yes.

41:26 Speaker 4 The nineties.

41:27 Speaker 1 Yes, yes. So very many came.

41:30 Speaker 4 So when you arrived, it was before people started leaving for Israel?

41:32 Speaker 1 They had already started leaving. I remember a journalist came to my husband and asked him, “Is everyone leaving now?”

41:40 Speaker 4 What did he answer?

41:42 Speaker 1 “So how long are you here for? A month? Two months?” My husband said, “We’ll be the last ones here. We’ll turn off the lights in the shul.” We really weren’t for or against leaving. Every Jew could do what they wanted. If someone wanted to make aliyah, we helped them prepare for it and have a good start—to know where they were going in Israel and reach a good place. I remember that at the beginning my husband already had a yeshivah, from nine until four. There was someone who had been there for six months and then made aliyah. He wrote a letter to one of the boys in the yeshivah, who opened it and translated it for my husband. His name was Misha, and Misha wrote, “You should know, not everyone looks like Rabbi Moshe.” He had thought everyone in Israel was religious, that everyone—

42:36 Speaker 4 Walked around in a black hat.

42:37 Speaker 1 Yes. Then he arrived in Israel and suddenly saw that it wasn’t like that. But because he’d been in yeshivah, he arrived with a different perspective. He knew what to look for and how to find the good.

42:49 Speaker 4 It’s painful, though.

42:49 Speaker 1 It’s painful, but you have to find the good. And we were also building a community for those who wanted to stay. So we were there for everyone, to help them with whatever they wanted and needed.

43:01 Speaker 4 Even with all the aliyah, there are always people who stay in the end, even now.

43:06 Speaker 1 Yes.

43:06 Speaker 4 Over the years, many made aliyah and then came back, too.

43:09 Speaker 1 Yes.

43:09 Speaker 4 That happened too.

43:10 Speaker 1 They made aliyah, and even now, during the war, we’re helping more Jews leave. We’ve been there almost thirty-three years. Where were they all this time? Wow. There really are a lot of Jews. We also live in a large city, a city of two million people, so you have to understand the Jewish population there and the intermarriage.

43:31 Speaker 4 Yes.

43:32 Speaker 1 It’s very, very complicated there. Someone named Yaakov Rabinowitz might not be Jewish, while Ivan Ivanovich might be Jewish through his mother.

43:44 Speaker 4 It’s very hard to understand when—

43:45 Speaker 1 Yes.

43:45 Speaker 4 You’re in—

43:46 Speaker 1 Yes.

43:47 Speaker 4 When you haven’t encountered it.

43:48 Speaker 1 When you haven’t encountered it. And not everyone has a certain kind of nose, either. Someone can be very blond and look a certain way, and then it turns out they are Jewish. Appearance tells you nothing.

43:57 Speaker 4 Because of intermarriage.

43:58 Speaker 1 Because of intermarriage. On Sukkos we go out to do mivtzoim, walking down the street with a lulav like people do here in Israel. We do that in Kharkiv too. We ask people on the street, “Excuse me, it’s a Yom Tov for us today. Is there perhaps someone Jewish in your family?” One man said to me, “Oh, I don’t think so.” And then he said, “I’ll tell you the truth: you Jews have something that we Ukrainians don’t have.” He said that Ukrainians have a diaspora too. “There are Ukrainians in Canada who ought to care about us, but they have no connection with us. Jews in America care about Jews in Ukraine; Jews in Australia care about Jews here. You’re all one family.” And it’s true.

44:50 Speaker 5 When was that? At the beginning, or recently?

44:53 Speaker 1 That was about ten years ago, but actually it happened again this year. We also—

45:00 Speaker 5 Right, because now I understand it even more.

45:01 Speaker 1 Now, yes. Honestly, now—

45:02 Speaker 5 It’s more noticeable, I think.

45:04 Speaker 1 It’s more noticeable.

45:04 Speaker 5 It was always there.

45:04 Speaker 1 Now, now everyone sees it—the help. But the truth is, the help we’re giving at the shul now isn’t just for Jews. Most of it is to help Jews, but we’re also helping local people. We don’t want anyone to be left without help, and it’s truly a kiddush Hashem. People see that Jews care about everyone, that this is a place where anyone can get help. Anyone who wants a meal can come to the shul; we’ll welcome them gladly. My husband goes to hospitals to bring fresh bread to soldiers. He goes into every room and gives bread to everyone. Then he asks, “Where are you from?” One is from there, one from Bakhmut, one from Lviv, one from Kharkov. After they talk a little, it turns out someone has Jewish family. Sometimes one of them is Jewish. “Yes, my mother is.” It gives you chills to see a wounded soldier who has just been fighting somewhere. He doesn’t understand what tefillin are, but he holds out his arm and puts on tefillin. There was one man who put on tefillin for the first time in his life with my husband. My husband gave him a kippah, and he forgot to take the kippah off. He had come a few days before the Pesach Seder, and at the end my husband told him, “If you ever need anything, we’re always at 12 Pushkinskaya. Whatever you need, there’s the shul. We’re there.” He didn’t come back then, but a few months later, before Chanukah, he came to my husband and said, “I want to thank you for saving my life.” My husband said, “Wow. Remind me how?” And he told my husband, “You were there—you put tefillin on with me and put the

47:09 Speaker 1 kippah on my head. A week later I went back to Bakhmut, and I wore that kippah under my helmet all the time. Whenever there was fighting, I knew I had my kippah and everything would be all right. Once, everyone was killed, and I was the only one who survived. So I wanted to thank you for saving my life.” We told him, “Tomorrow is the Pesach Seder. We’re waiting for you.” So he came to the Pesach Seder. We did—as they say, we needed a Pesach Seder that year, so it was very—

47:54 Speaker 5 Wait, maybe go back a little.

47:56 Speaker 1 Yes, to how we found ourselves in the war.

47:58 Speaker 5 We started in 1990, and now we’re 32 years ahead.

48:01 Speaker 1 Yes. We’re getting to—

48:03 Speaker 5 The community by then—wow, how much it had changed.

48:06 Speaker 1 Yes.

48:06 Speaker 5 There were already more families of shluchim.

48:07 Speaker 1 There were more shluchim—another ten families of shluchim. My son Mendel—

48:12 Speaker 5 Was one of them.

48:13 Speaker 1 And Chani came. But Chani and Mendel already knew Kharkov was an option. They were waiting.

48:21 Speaker 5 We came to see.

48:22 Speaker 1 We came to see.

48:23 Speaker 5 For Pesach and all that.

48:24 Speaker 1 We came for Pesach to see, and I think we put on a good show, because they came.

48:30 Speaker 5 It worked.

48:30 Speaker 1 It worked, worked, worked. You lived with us in our basement for a few months until you found an apartment.

48:36 Speaker 5 Little did we know when we’d end up back in that basement.

48:38 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, we went back to the basement later, but that’s where we started.

48:43 Speaker 5 Yes.

48:44 Speaker 1 And that was it. A school, lots of children, a cheder for the children of the shluchim, for families who had become involved, and for the shluchim’s children. A yeshiva ketanah. Gan Yisroel, a summer camp on a huge, beautiful site, with counselors, boys and girls, every year. Those two weeks of camp change the children’s lives.

49:08 Speaker 5 They really do.

49:09 Speaker 1 And some of our shluchim came from there, too. They were young people who weren’t observant but knew they were Jewish. They began to grow, became Chabad chassidim, and wanted to come back and be shluchim themselves. That really brings us nachas, both in Kharkov and in many other places.

49:30 Speaker 5 They have something that someone coming from outside doesn’t have. Besides the language.

49:35 Speaker 1 Yes.

49:36 Speaker 5 That understanding, that...

49:38 Speaker 1 They understand the people, too. We may understand them as well, but to the local people we’re a living example and yet still very distant, because we’re not from there. But when they see—

49:53 Speaker 5 Here, he did it.

49:54 Speaker 1 Moshe, Yasha, Miriam, and Yaakov, who went to school with them.

49:58 Speaker 5 Exactly like them.

49:59 Speaker 1 Like them, and suddenly they’re shluchim who help so much. It really is something.

50:03 Speaker 5 It becomes something tangible that...

50:04 Speaker 1 It’s something tangible. January, two thou... well, a year ago, my daughter Bracha got married. In case anyone has forgotten, there was COVID, and all that. Everyone was thinking, “Oh, how will we get there?” That was the problem.

50:21 Speaker 5 The biggest one.

50:21 Speaker 1 Yes, that was the biggest problem. There was already talk of war, that’s true, but it was all in the news—only in the news. On the ground there was no panic.

50:32 Speaker 5 That lasted until the very last day.

50:33 Speaker 1 Until the very last day there was no panic. We didn’t feel it. Journalists kept calling us: “How are things there?” And I’d say, “Nothing’s happening.” I remember that two weeks earlier they had taken all the teachers from Israel out. Everyone was starting to... And we thought, what a shame they’re leaving. Really, what for? Nothing’s going to happen.

50:52 Speaker 5 The girls from the seminary.

50:53 Speaker 1 The seminary girls, whom we’d barely managed to bring over. Having them there had been such a joy, and suddenly everyone was leaving. And my husband—you remember—we had a Zoom meeting a few days before the war. My husband called all the shluchim together on Zoom. “Anyone who wants to leave can go. We’re not—

51:09 Speaker 5 Holding anyone back.

51:10 Speaker 1 Holding anyone back.” But everyone stayed. Everyone stayed because it was hard to understand how this could happen. Russians and Ukrainians are really the same. They’re like two brothers.

51:21 Speaker 5 Besides, it’s very hard to understand from outside. “What do you mean, a war? Didn’t you know there was going to be a war?” But you can’t understand it when you’re there and everything is normal, and people—nobody is leaving. Nobody left.

51:35 Speaker 1 Really.

51:37 Speaker 5 And why would we leave? Why would we leave? We have school tomorrow. We have our lives here. I mean, from outside it really looks strange.

51:45 Speaker 1 Yes, it looked as though—

51:47 Speaker 5 When you’re there, it makes sense.

51:48 Speaker 1 Yes, because on the ground there really wasn’t anything. There was nothing at all. There wasn’t that panic where everyone rushes to the grocery store to buy things. Really.

51:55 Speaker 5 Yes.

51:55 Speaker 1 Not at all.

51:55 Speaker 5 Everyone was there, there were lots of children going to school the next day, families. Everything was normal. So...

52:00 Speaker 1 Yes. I just remember that the day before—Wednesday—was the ceremony for the school’s thirtieth anniversary. Everyone came with balloons. Mendel wrote to me, “Could you do us a favor? In case something happens, make sure you have sandbags.”

52:17 Speaker 5 Yes.

52:18 Speaker 1 “And take a picture to send to Chani so she’ll feel reassured, just in case.” I brought eight sandbags. Where did we get the sandbags? We were doing—

52:27 Speaker 5 The mikveh.

52:28 Speaker 1 The mikveh. We were renovating the women’s mikveh and had started renovating the men’s mikveh, so we had bags of sand. I said to Andrei, “Andrei, bring me a few bags of sand.” That way everyone would feel reassured. I took a picture and sent it to show I had them. And that night, Wednesday night, was the first time I slept with my phone beside me. I don’t sleep with my phone, but I thought, just in case.

52:52 Speaker 5 It was time.

52:52 Speaker 1 It was time. Maybe. At five in the morning it started ringing. I thought, “Oh, how stupid of me to keep the phone beside me.” I answered, and a man was shouting. I said, “Calm down, calm down. What happened? Did something happen?” He said, “Don’t you know? They’re bombing Kharkov.” I said, “What do you mean, bombing?” “The war has started. I’m here at Boryspil airport—I was supposed to fly. They’ve closed the whole airport. You need to know you’re stuck in Kharkov now. The war has started.” So I opened the window to listen, and I began to hear the...

53:31 Speaker 5 Yes.

53:32 Speaker 1 And I said to my husband, “It’s started. It’s started.”

53:36 Speaker 5 It was a little like, a little—oh.

53:39 Speaker 1 It had started.

53:39 Speaker 5 Because people had been talking about it for two months. Would it happen? Wouldn’t it? Do you remember Purim Katan? That was on a Wednesday. They said, “Tomorrow there’ll be an invasion,” and then there was a miracle. We thought, that’s it.

53:49 Speaker 1 Yes, it didn’t happen. I remember the first call. A woman named Lena called me. She said, “Miriam, will there be school tomorrow—will there be school today?” It was five in the morning. I said, “Lena, a war has just started. I have no idea whether there’ll be school or not. I don’t know what’s happening.” After that Mendel called: “Dad, come get us. We’re on the fifth floor. Come take us to...”

54:15 Speaker 5 That had actually been the plan if there was a war.

54:17 Speaker 1 If there was a war, then my husband—I’d also said to my husband, “Can you drive if there’s a war?” There’s nothing like...

54:22 Speaker 5 There’s no news. Now there are instructions, instructions.

54:26 Speaker 1 There were no instructions. What do we do? Can we travel? I had no idea. We were hearing things, but we didn’t know where it had started or how. We weren’t really connected to any Telegram groups or anything, so we didn’t know what was happening. My husband arrived with the children. It was Adar. I remember I had a big sack, a big bag of Purim costumes. They arrived with just a few things. I told everyone, “Children, go downstairs. You’re going to have fun now—a fun week at Grandma’s. Do whatever you want.” That was it. They went downstairs, and a few minutes later the school principal called: no school, no kindergarten. All the children had to stay home. So, as I said, there were no instructions, and no one to ask what to do when there’s a war where you live.

55:20 Speaker 5 Right.

55:21 Speaker 1 Where had it happened? I didn’t know. What do we do? So we went to the shul. It was nine in the morning. We took the older children—Sheina, Yossi, and Yisroel too—to the shul, and there was a minyan for Shacharis. I remember my husband seeing Moishe, who was ninety-two, and saying, “Moishe, what are you doing here?” He said, “What? Where would I want to be when there’s a war? Here, praying in shul.” So they had a minyan, and people started streaming into the shul, just to eat, to sleep, bringing mattresses and other things. The guards asked, “What should we do?” “Leave the gates open. People are coming in.” Someone took a truck to bring mattresses from the yeshiva, and a hundred and fifty people were sleeping in the shul.

56:17 Speaker 5 Not just people.

56:18 Speaker 1 Yes, really.

56:19 Speaker 5 Dogs, cats.

56:21 Speaker 1 It was like Noach’s ark—and the smell, too. The smell, too. The next day, Friday, my husband came to the shul, and there was a tank by the entrance. You can probably see it in the footage, too. So my husband arrived, and there was a tank. We didn’t know—were the Russians already here? Had they already taken over?

56:39 Speaker 5 Everything was terribly confusing. Nobody knew.

56:41 Speaker 1 What was happening.

56:42 Speaker 5 There was no official information.

56:44 Speaker 1 And we were busy doing things. We had this adrenaline; we had to act, act, save people. The phones were ringing constantly. You surely remember the WhatsApp messages—medicine for people, people needing food. It really was a very difficult situation. And there were our parents, the family worrying about us. Suddenly, friends you hadn’t heard from in years were calling: “Do you remember me? I went to school with you thirty-five years ago. How... how are you?” How are you? But you had to decide what mattered most every minute. Lives were at stake. And whether to leave or stay—that wasn’t even... The truth is, in the first days it wasn’t possible, because we were really...

57:31 Speaker 5 Right.

57:32 Speaker 1 Tanks.

57:32 Speaker 5 I remember that on Sunday, one of the shluchos asked me, “Don’t you think it’s time to leave?” I told her, “Even if it is, there’s no way to get out.”

57:41 Speaker 1 How could you? Because Sunday... On Friday night, I remember... War was new to me, too. In Israel it’s a little more familiar. This really was a different war.

57:53 Speaker 5 A different kind.

57:53 Speaker 1 A different kind of war. But I also didn’t know how to explain to the children what was happening. I remember something had happened, and my daughter was downstairs, then came upstairs. She said to me, “Chani explained to me what’s going on.” I thought, Oh, thank you so much. She said, “There are two countries, Russia and Ukraine. They want a little bit of our country, so the soldiers are fighting each other.”

58:21 Speaker 5 Kharkiv is so beautiful, they want it too.

58:22 Speaker 1 Yes, yes. “But Mom, Russia is so big. Why do they need Ukraine?” And then—this was Adar—she said to me, “I understand why we’re all sleeping together in the basement.” I asked her why. “Because Haman wanted to say that the Jews weren’t united, that we were scattered and dispersed among the nations, and we have to show him that we’re united down here.” I remember that on Friday it was dark, too. For more than a year in Kharkiv, there were no lights outside at night, because they said it had to be completely dark.

58:59 Speaker 5 From six in the evening, they must have turned off the lights.

59:01 Speaker 1 They turned off the lights and didn’t put them on at all. It was completely dark. We walked to the shul, and I remember there were more than a hundred people. Friday night, with war raging in Kharkiv and Russian tanks a fifteen-minute drive from the shul—and there were a hundred people. My daughter said, “Mom, remember the first day, the first Shabbos of COVID? It was empty. On Pesach, nobody came to shul because one person at the gymnasium had COVID. And now there’s a war, and the shul is full.” It was really special.

59:38 Speaker 5 It was like a magnet, because people wanted to feel safe.

59:42 Speaker 1 And they still do.

59:43 Speaker 5 Besides, it was a basement.

59:44 Speaker 1 Yes, yes. But still, people need it. We can see that now. We’ve been living with this for almost a year and a half, and people still need that anchor. They need the shul. Now they’re returning to Yiddishkeit, to their roots. I remember we laughed together that we should make a film called “Under Fire with My Mother-in-Law: A Week in the Basement.”

1:00:09 Speaker 5 You should do it.

1:00:11 Speaker 1 And we’re waiting for them to reenact it, and they keep going. You were down there, pregnant.

1:00:15 Speaker 5 Yes.

1:00:16 Speaker 1 In the first weeks of the war, with all the children, you had the challenge of making Purim joyful in Adar, with the spirit of Adar.

1:00:25 Speaker 5 It’s a good thing it was Adar. I think it gave us a lot... All the Purim songs, and...

1:00:30 Speaker 1 Yes. Remember that journalist who came from—he was at our house. He’d been in Kharkiv for a week, and somehow I was on Channel 13, and at the same time... Journalists were contacting me constantly. They all wanted to hear from us—CNN, Fox News, the BBC. Someone on the ground who spoke English and wanted to stay there—that was it. You were the only ones in the world. So they really kept asking, “Why are you there? What’s happening? What are you doing?” Then there was this journalist who appeared on the screen together with us; they split the screen. It was Erev Shabbos. We were trying to explain to Channel 13 that Shabbos was about to begin. Every minute we spent with them was a minute we couldn’t help people. So, come on, let’s get on with it. Then they put that journalist on, and he said to me, “I’ve been here in Kharkiv for a week. I have no food.” So I told him live on air, “Come to our house. We have hot food. Come. Come to our house at 9:14.” In the end he didn’t come, because that night the attacks started—you remember the plane near the house. It really wasn’t easy. And on Sunday they entered the city. At five in the morning, the first Russian tanks entered the city. Nobody went out. We didn’t leave the shul. Everyone was stuck in the shul; they closed the gate. Tanks were driving around, and there was shooting in the city. It really was—

1:01:55 Speaker 5 It was like a movie. And how did we know where the tanks were? From people filming from their homes.

1:01:58 Speaker 1 From people filming from their homes. One of the shluchos lives opposite the shul, and people were saying there was a tank on fire near the shul. It really was... But it was a great miracle. After two—at five in the afternoon, after twelve hours, that was it. They were leaving—

1:02:12 Speaker 5 Kharkiv had won. We thought the war was over.

1:02:14 Speaker 1 We thought they’d won the war, and that was it. So we went to sleep. Sunday night was quiet. At five—at eight on Monday morning, the missiles started. It felt a bit like a child who doesn’t get what he wants, so if he can’t have it—

1:02:29 Speaker 5 He’ll lie on the floor and pull you down with him.

1:02:31 Speaker 1 Yes. So they began bombing the city. Then we started thinking about what to do with all the shluchim. The city was almost—apart from one road, the city was really...

1:02:48 Speaker 5 Closed off.

1:02:49 Speaker 1 Closed off. I remember on Monday we saw someone from our kollel, Vitaly—his Jewish name was Chaim Mordechai—walking down our street. My husband saw him and said, “Chaim Mordechai, what are you doing here?” “I’m going to enlist.” The recru—

1:03:08 Speaker 5 The recruitment office.

1:03:09 Speaker 1 The enlistment office was literally two doors down from our house. So my husband told him to come in and gave him tefillin. I cried. I said, “Moishe, tell him not to go—not to do it, not to do it.” But he really wanted to fight. “I want to volunteer.” He took the tefillin, and another shliach gave him a dollar from the Rebbe, and he began the enlistment process. On Friday morning, he was supposed to be in the square at eight. It was the big square near the hotel where we lived. But he decided, “I have my tefillin. I’ll daven in shul at eight and be a little late.” So at eight in the morning he was putting on tefillin. At eight in the morning, in the square—remember the—

1:03:55 Speaker 5 For heaven’s sake.

1:03:56 Speaker 1 We remember it well. You also have to understand, we weren’t following the news all the time. Suddenly we heard a boom! And I got messages from my children abroad—

1:04:06 Speaker 5 Yes.

1:04:06 Speaker 1 “Mom, do you know what just happened? It was in the square, in the square.” Five minutes later we heard another boom. I thought it was the same place, but it sounded much, much closer. Suddenly we could smell the smoke. There had been an explosion right where the enlistment office was, just two doors down from us. So we started thinking that we had to send everyone away. I would stay with my husband. We tried to work out how to travel. The shluchim found a route, and everyone would have to leave by car. It really wasn’t an easy day. We were still going out from the shul, helping people, giving out food. We had—

1:04:50 Speaker 5 Until three.

1:04:51 Speaker 1 Yes, until three. That was the curfew. It had been six, and suddenly it was three. We had to do as much as we could in the time we had. And that evening—I remember it. We could hear the booms, and you took me aside. You said, “You’re staying, I’m staying, but go to the children. We’ll be with the children; you’ll have a good time in Israel.” So you were supposed to take all our children, my children. That was the plan: you would take them, and I would stay with my husband. It was a quarter to eleven when my children arrived. My daughter said to me, “If you’re staying, I’m staying too.” Then I felt like Sarah speaking to Avraham: “Whatever Sarah tells you, listen to her voice.” So I told my husband, “We have to leave.” Honestly, those were the hardest moments of the entire year and a half. We had lived under shelling and missile fire, but making the decision to leave was very, very difficult. As logical as it sounds, it was the hardest thing.

1:05:58 Speaker 5 It’s impossible to understand.

1:05:59 Speaker 1 Because for a week we’d been saying it, and not just saying it—we believed that we were the captains of the ship and couldn’t abandon the community. And suddenly I had to say, with my own hands, that we needed to leave. So the decision was to go only as far as Dnipro and wait there. Imagine me with the children, while all the shluchim found some way out. That night I told everyone, “Take whatever you have.” You had almost nothing. Whatever there was, there was, and I had to choose. I told each child, “Tell me a little...”

1:06:38 Speaker 5 You were packing, basically.

1:06:39 Speaker 1 We packed, we packed. What do I need? Do I need this? What about this? We thought maybe we should take all the things we’d received and the letters. We didn’t know whether we’d ever return to that house. It was our whole home. How do you fit thirty-two years into a suitcase? You can’t. You have to choose what matters and what doesn’t. And my husband kept taking the things I’d left behind. “But we’ll come back. You can bring it then. We’ll come back here.” Okay, okay, we’ll come back. But...

1:07:03 Speaker 5 Knowing that—that was really the—

1:07:06 Speaker 1 Yes, but he also—

1:07:07 Speaker 5 You don’t know what will happen.

1:07:08 Speaker 1 What will happen. And my husband was also thinking, “How can we help?” Everyone would panic now, because we were what gave everyone—

1:07:16 Speaker 5 An anchor.

1:07:17 Speaker 1 An anchor. And now we were going to leave. How could we do that? So in the morning—on Sunday, on Wednesday morning—at six-thirty, I went with my husband to the shul. I went downstairs. All 150 people were asleep, along with cats and dogs. I went into the kitchen. They were already working there; at six-thirty in the morning, Ola, the cook, was already starting to prepare food. I told her, “Ola, we’ll be back soon, but I need to take the children to Dnipro.” She started crying, and I was crying. I wanted to show that I was calm about the decision, but I wasn’t. I went upstairs. The shul was dark. My husband went to the Aron Kodesh and kissed the paroches. It was surreal. Here we were, in our shul all these years, and now we were leaving, not knowing: Would we ever see it again? Would the shul still be standing? What would happen? This was a real war. I asked him, “What did you daven for?” He said, “That we’d come back here.” We went back from the shul—to the house—and waited. I remember it. We waited for the driver, but he wasn’t answering his phone.

1:08:38 Speaker 6 It was just...

1:08:39 Speaker 1 Emotionally, we were already ready. We had our suitcases, but he wasn’t answering. All the while we could hear the explosions, the explosions. Then suddenly, at eight, he answered the phone. I said, “Zhenya, Gena, we’re waiting.” He told me, “I can’t get into your area. They’re shooting there constantly.” Eventually he said, “That’s it, I’m coming. Everyone has to come out.” So we came out. For you, that was the first time you’d been outside.

1:09:07 Speaker 6 Me and the children.

1:09:07 Speaker 1 With the children. For the children, it was the first time seeing the outside world. And suddenly, as we drove on, we saw it too. I’d only been going between the shul and the house, the house and the shul, and now we saw the destruction. It was like Sodom and Gomorrah.

1:09:22 Speaker 6 We said, “Let’s close the curtains so the children won’t see.”

1:09:25 Speaker 1 So they wouldn’t see. And the driver was so animated: “Oh, look, there was an explosion there! Look, another one there!” I said, “Gena, you don’t have to tell the children everything.” We could see the smoke, and suddenly we heard another boom. As we were leaving the city, the KGB building, the mayor’s building—everything was starting to explode. We were on our way out when the calls started coming: “What? You left? How could you leave us?” My husband said, “See why we left?” I said, “Okay, we have to focus. We’re on our way to Dnipro.”

1:09:55 Speaker 6 That was two hours of throwing up on the road.

1:09:56 Speaker 1 A full two hours. And I was trying to reassure the children that we were doing the right thing, but I didn’t feel good about the decision. We said Tefillas Haderech. I specifically told [unclear], “Repeat after me: Yehi ratzon.” With tears in my eyes, I said the words “and bring us back in peace.” I wanted it to be a short trip. We reached Dnipro, and then went on. We really could do a lot, but when we got to Dnipro, we understood that we—

1:10:25 Speaker 6 We could talk for fifty hours, because it was—

1:10:28 Speaker 1 It was. And we arrived in Israel, boruch Hashem—

1:10:31 Speaker 6 After a few days.

1:10:32 Speaker 1 After a few days. I remember Friday night in Chisinau. We arrived there really looking like refugees. It was only a few hours before Shabbos. There was a box of—

1:10:50 Speaker 6 Cholent?

1:10:50 Speaker 1 No, not cholent. There were—

1:10:53 Speaker 6 I thought maybe it would bring things full circle.

1:10:54 Speaker 1 Yes. I can hardly eat it now. Maybe it’s trauma that I don’t eat cholent. But there were cups and all sorts of things. I started looking through the box to see if there was anything we needed, and my daughter said to me, “Mom, we’re not refugees.” I didn’t know how to tell her.

1:11:12 Speaker 6 Oh, sweetheart. Yes.

1:11:14 Speaker 1 Yes. We arrived Friday night. The poor shluchim there—suddenly, just minutes before Shabbos, a hundred refugees from Ukraine descended on them. There were five families of shluchim. The shliach from Sumy, Levit—Levitansky, Reitzes, Levit—several shluchim arrived with mattresses.

1:11:34 Speaker 6 Had the Levitanskys been with you in Dnipro?

1:11:36 Speaker 1 No, no, no. They were from Sumy.

1:11:36 Speaker 6 From another region.

1:11:37 Speaker 1 They drove from Sumy on their own, straight to Chisinau, and arrived five minutes before Shabbos.

1:11:42 Speaker 6 A story in itself.

1:11:43 Speaker 1 A story in itself. We arrived that night, and there wasn’t room for us in the shul. They were building a large shul, but it was summer—winter, February, the middle of winter, and very cold. It was a huge empty building they were still constructing. My husband began to make Kiddush, and he cried during Kiddush. But afterward, once we’d washed our hands, he got up and started dancing with everyone, singing “And you shall rejoice on your festival.” There were journalists from The Jerusalem Post there; I remember one of them. After that dance, he came over to my husband, and really everyone was—

1:12:21 Speaker 6 They joined in.

1:12:22 Speaker 1 They joined in, and those are the moments when you wish there were someone to film it, even on Shabbos.

1:12:27 Speaker 6 It’s a shame there’s no one to film it.

1:12:29 Speaker 1 To film it. And they’re dancing there, and he says to my husband, “Are you all right? How can you dance? What holiday is it that you’re dancing to ‘You shall rejoice on your festival’? You have no community, no home, no future, no— you don’t know where you’re going or what will happen.” So my husband tells the Rebbe’s story about a child who wanted something to eat. I don’t know if it was a candy or an apple, and his father didn’t want to give it to him. So the child starts saying the bracha, and then the father has to give it to him, so the bracha won’t be in vain. So we’re dancing to “You shall rejoice on your festival,” and He has to give us one.

1:13:06 Speaker 6 Some kind of festival.

1:13:07 Speaker 1 Something, a festival. So it was hard. It really wasn’t simple in Israel. We were there with many people from our community, the shluchim. We had lived together for decades, our children together, and suddenly we were all scattered.

1:13:26 Speaker 6 All over the world.

1:13:26 Speaker 1 All over the world. And our one anchor was that wherever we were, we would continue our shlichus. It was a week before Purim, and I’ll be honest: we really weren’t in the mood. We were still constantly on our phones.

1:13:43 Speaker 6 We still had those pages open on our phones about—what Purim? We wanted to do Purim in Jerusalem.

1:13:49 Speaker 1 Purim in Jerusalem. Yes, suddenly it was Purim in Israel, but that wasn’t how we had hoped to do it. In Kharkiv, Purim was always at the circus, with two thousand people. Even during COVID, we tried somehow to put on something for Purim. It was always something huge in Kharkiv, and now we didn’t know what would happen. In the end, we held Purim in Kfar Chabad with three hundred refugees. It wasn’t an easy Purim. There were tears—

1:14:19 Speaker 6 Yes.

1:14:20 Speaker 1 Tears, hugs. And the people who had arrived hadn’t planned on making aliyah. Suddenly we were alone, not knowing where we’d landed, and they saw us. People who had made aliyah earlier said, “Oh, Reb Moishe, we’re so happy to see you. But not... not here, not now.” They wanted us—

1:14:39 Speaker 6 Not under these circumstances—

1:14:39 Speaker 1 Not under these circumstances. But baruch Hashem, by Shavuos my husband went back to Kharkiv with our two oldest children. It really was—maybe taking children there doesn’t sound normal, but my son, who was twenty-two then, very much... He told me, “I want to go back right away. Whenever we return, I need to be there.” And my daughter, Sheina, who had gone on shlichus to Vienna to help the refugees arriving there, said, “If you go back to Kharkiv, I’m there.” So I said, I’m not going to explain this to anyone, but it was very important to her.

1:15:19 Speaker 6 Sheina, are you listening?

1:15:23 Speaker 1 And we were actually supposed to go there too. My husband said he would go first, and then... he went on Sunday, and the following Sunday I was supposed to come with the younger children. He would see how things were. There had actually been two weeks of quiet, because they had pushed the forces back a bit from Kharkiv, a few kilometers farther from the city. So on Thursday morning, I remember telling the younger children, “I have good news. On Sunday we’re going back to Kharkiv for Shavuos.” They told everyone in their room there at Kochava, and at school too. And on Thursday at two-thirty, heavy missile attacks began. Nine people were killed there, and there were four hours of nonstop attacks. My husband called and said, “No, we can’t bring the children here.” So I told the children when they got back. And I had already bought... When my husband arrived, he said there was no salt in Kharkiv.

1:16:23 Speaker 6 Oh wow.

1:16:24 Speaker 1 The salt factory—

1:16:25 Speaker 6 They went to our house and took the salt we had in the pantry.

1:16:28 Speaker 1 Yes. What happened was that the salt factory in Ukraine had been blown up, and there was no salt. So they actually went to your house to find salt. I bought some at Osher Ad; I had a—

1:16:40 Speaker 6 A pack.

1:16:41 Speaker 1 Thirty kilos of salt to take to Kharkiv. That was it.

1:16:44 Speaker 6 I have to know what you ended up doing with it.

1:16:47 Speaker 1 So I told the children, and I made a kind of compromise for them. We... A week in Jerusalem sounds lovely, but for me, with my children, it really wasn’t simple. I took them to Jerusalem. The next time, in Tammuz, my husband went back with our oldest son. Then, before Rosh Hashanah, my husband said, “It’s a Hakhel year. We’re starting a new year. I have to, have to be there in Kharkiv for Tishrei, but I don’t want to be there alone.” So there was another dilemma. I think that for all the women shluchos who left Ukraine because of the war, the hardest part now is the decisions and the uncertainty about what to do next. Go back, don’t go back, do this, start something new. But maybe, maybe, maybe. These decisions can drive you crazy.

1:17:45 Speaker 6 And the children.

1:17:46 Speaker 1 And the children.

1:17:46 Speaker 6 Okay, I... but the children.

1:17:48 Speaker 1 Yes, but the children. That was what I was thinking. I could go, but what if I’m there on Rosh Hashanah and suddenly the missiles start? But then, by some miracle, two weeks before Rosh Hashanah, something happened. If you followed the news at all, within a few days the Russians had been driven out of the whole Kharkiv region. So it was relatively quiet. We told our parents that to reassure them, though I don’t know if it actually did. But after all our years there, they already know we’re crazy—what can they do with us? We said that if something happened, we’d go to Dnepropetrovsk. It was relatively quiet then. So we traveled, and it really was such a feeling—so moving, so moving. We arrived and went straight to the shul. That was after... Okay, going back isn’t... You travel to Chisinau, fly to Chisinau, and from there it was sixteen, seventeen hours by car to Kharkiv. But now the direction was reversed. We weren’t fleeing; we were going there. And they kept stopping us at—

1:19:00 Speaker 6 Checkpoints.

1:19:00 Speaker 1 Checkpoints, and asking, “Where are you going? Kharkiv? Kharkiv? With the children?”

1:19:04 Speaker 6 Are you sure?

1:19:05 Speaker 1 “With your family? Why?” “Well, we live there.” “Ah, okay.” We arrived in Kharkiv, and it was really moving to get to the shul. Everyone hugged me. I went downstairs to that Olya who said, “I knew you would come back. I knew you would come back.” To the house, to my Luda, to all the... to everyone.

1:19:24 Speaker 6 It had been about seven months.

1:19:26 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, but seven months in which I didn’t know this would happen.

1:19:30 Speaker 6 Yes.

1:19:31 Speaker 1 That I would come back. I didn’t know if I would see that house again. Even when my husband went back each time, we didn’t, didn’t, didn’t know whether he would come back, whether we would be able to return again.

1:19:40 Speaker 6 Yes.

1:19:42 Speaker 1 So it really was moving. On Rosh Hashanah there were three hundred people in the shul. Again, it was a shame we couldn’t film it. You could hear the sirens, and from time to time a boom in the distance, but the feeling that we were together filled everything. There were people who had joined my class on Zoom whom I’d never seen in person. They were new. They’d come to receive a food package, and after taking the food package... they got acquainted, you know. And they asked there, “Could I join the kollel? Miriam is in Israel, but she does Zoom every day at seven?” “Sure.” Then suddenly you hear that word and suddenly I see her—oh, live, not on a screen. So in the midst of the darkness, and it really is darkness—you can’t say it’s... It really isn’t pleasant when there are missiles. And there were several days without electricity in the winter; by four in the afternoon it was completely dark. People walked around with flashlights, flashlights outside. There were days when people had no electricity, and we sent them all kinds of things to keep them warm, to help them, and to make sure they had food. You can’t take the situation for granted. But on the other hand, in the darkness you see the light. You see new Jewish faces. There’s one Jew, Sasha, who first came in August, a month before Rosh Hashanah. A few months later, after a bris, he’s now Alexander, wearing tzitzis and a kippah, putting on tefillin every day. He went straight into high gear. Yes, yes, he did it all in one shot. The adrenaline of war. The adrenaline of war. Yes. You really see that people are looking for more meaning and an anchor, because everything around them is collapsing. Everything around them is collapsing, and they know they need family and that Yiddishkeit is home. Wow. And it’s good for the Jewish people who left, too, that we’re there, because it

1:21:55 Speaker 1 An anchor, a feeling that maybe there’s a future there, or maybe even a home there. It’s a completely different feeling. Every time you’re there, it’s worrying. It’s worrying. But there’s also this feeling that there’s something there, that it all makes your heart beat. We’re speaking now in Israel; we only came for two weeks. But before I left, Olya was arguing with me. She came up to me: “Miriam, you’re only going for a few weeks? I haven’t forgotten”—she asked to see the ticket—“I haven’t forgotten the first of March, when you left, so don’t pull any tricks on us.” I told her, “No, no, no, no, we’re coming back. Just two weeks.” Well, tomorrow night you’re... Yes, we’re going, going back. We also have to... We land in Kishinev at one thirty in the morning, and we have to wait until five in the morning to cross the border. The curfew only ends at five in the morning, and we have to get there before the curfew, which starts there at six in the evening. Yes, no, now it’s... they changed it; now it’s eleven. Oh, so you can make it. Now we can make it. So at five we leave and continue on to Kharkiv. These really aren’t easy times. I would tell everyone, about shlichus too, that we say it’s like a shidduch. But what I’ve seen is that you don’t, you don’t, you don’t change your husband, but you change the... not the place, but the shlichus can change. We were on shlichus in a big city with many shluchim, with thirty or forty children of shluchim. We had institutions and everything, and suddenly my shlichus now is more... helping Jews, with Yiddishkeit too, doing another mitzvah and another mitzvah, putting another mezuzah in someone’s home, giving someone Shabbos candles, helping someone put on tefillin. But it’s also helping a Jew live—making sure he has food, that he has money for an operation, or, G-d forbid, if

1:23:53 Speaker 1 someone needs to be buried. So really, we’ve learned from all this that we’re like... And my children used to be in a big school, and now they’re in an online school. So my eight-year-old daughter and twelve-year-old son sit in front of a screen. And we’re not saying that... There are many shluchim for whom this has always been life, all the time. From a young age, yes. From the beginning. It’s a small ci... yes, a small city. There were never any other shluchim. There’s no possibility of establishing a school, a big school, so they’ve always been in an online school. It’s really an excellent thing, that there’s a way to learn and continue their studies. But for us it’s really completely different. It’s like... Yes. Yes. I’m still sitting in shul on Shabbos morning, and my daughter, my daughter runs around, making up some kind of game, like, “Oh, soon we’ll invite Mussy to our house,” “Maybe I’ll play at Yehudis’s house,” or something like that. She’s really alone, actually. Alone. She has one Soni[?], and that’s it. No, no. Yes, no. Alone, and my son too. But they carry on with the... They’re very proud of their shlichus and of being in Kharkiv. And we also make the whole story... We don’t make it about the... They see the successes more, and we tell them about the successes. “You know, someone came to Abba today and put on tefillin for the first time. Did you know there was a soldier Abba put on tefillin with, and then he suddenly came to shul to say thank you? And there’s a boy from the younger yeshiva who was wounded by the... by the... Yes, but now he...” So they know what they’re there for. Yes. Why they’re in Kharkiv. There’s meaning to all this. There’s meaning to all this, and we pray. We pray that there will be

1:25:33 Speaker 1 an end to it, and that every single person—not just someone who has the... the official title of shlucha. Yes, the badge. That badge. But, like... how do you say it? Shlichus as a way of life. Shlichus as a way of life. Taking every minute, every opportunity, to do shlichus in life. I also tell everyone that working on yourself, davening better and working on your middos, is really very important, but very hard. Working with another person, helping someone else, doing someone a favor, Ahavas Yisroel—that’s nothing but success. For a Chabad chossid, that’s called hiskashrus too, making the Rebbe proud by helping someone. But for every single person, when we help someone, it helps us too. Still, you’re helping someone else. You can try to daven better; you won’t always succeed. But if you do someone a favor, it will certainly be good. It’s just... that’s simply how it is. I think this situation has also taught you that one day you can open a school and another day you can bring someone a slice of bread, and that’s your shlichus now. Really, it’s important for everyone to remember—even someone who didn’t go out on shlichus—that the small acts too may be the very reason their soul came down into this world. You can’t ever measure it or know. Yes, I also understand that a food package isn’t... It sounds small, but I don’t know. We just don’t know. We don’t have a scale to measure these things. Only He knows. We don’t have a “kindness meter” to tell us what... Yes. What an act is... Yes, so we have to do. That’s what the Rebbe always says: do, do, fill

1:27:21 Speaker 1 the day with action. And in the end, we’ll see it. In our lives, it’s like being in galus: every mitzvah, every good thing we do, is like carrying a diamond through a dark room. We don’t see its effect; we don’t really see its... its light. But when Moshiach comes, someone will turn on the... the light, and we’ll say, “Wow, I did all that? Wow.” It’s amazing... But good always lasts. The things in life that aren’t good—we do teshuvah and say, “Let’s move on.” But the good things remain forever. So that’s... Amen, may it happen already. May they turn on the light for us, so we can see all the... may it happen. Thank you very much. You’re welcome. And have a good trip. Maybe we’ll do... Maybe after you go and come back there’ll be another, you know, part two. Part two. The continuation of life in the basement. Basement stories. In the basement with the mother-in-law. Exactly. Thank you very much.