Episode 50: Shlichus as a Way of Life | This time - an episode about me, hosted by Chani Marzel

00:02 Speaker 1 How can we turn our lives into lives of shlichus filled with meaning? I’m Chani Moskowitz, born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and now continuing our shlichus in Karmei Gat, Israel. On this podcast, we’ll meet different women who will share their shlichus in a variety of fields and, through their stories, help each of us find and refine our own shlichus in the world. Because living the life we were created to live is as good as it gets. Shlichus as a way of life. We’re starting right now. Welcome to another episode of Shlichus as a Way of Life. And today, Chani, I don’t know how to open, because usually I say, “I’m hosting…”

00:40 Speaker 2 Right, today we’re switching places. We’re swapping roles.

00:42 Speaker 1 Yes.

00:43 Speaker 2 Today I came to interview you. Even though I’m not an interviewer.

00:45 Speaker 1 That’s so nerve-racking.

00:46 Speaker 2 No, but that’s the thing—I’m not interviewing, I’m having a conversation.

00:49 Speaker 1 Right, but a podcast isn’t an interview at all. I always say that. Just so that’s clear and…

00:53 Speaker 2 Yes, but we’re still… you are switching… we’re swapping hats and giving it a try.

00:58 Speaker 1 Okay, but still, introduce yourself for a moment, and tell us how we ended up sitting on these couches together.

01:03 Speaker 2 Yes, let’s tell the behind-the-scenes story, because that’s always the most interesting part.

01:06 Speaker 1 Exactly.

01:07 Speaker 2 I’m Chani Marzel. Professionally, I’m a strategist. I help promote businesses and educational institutions, and I do interesting things. Over the past year, I’ve also gotten deeply involved in AI, artificial intelligence, and I teach and give training sessions and courses. And I love people. I love figuring things out. Strategy involves a lot of figuring people out, and people fascinate me. I’ve also hosted a few podcasts. I did forty episodes of the podcast “Metaretz Atzmi” for Mikvah.org, which was fascinating. Chava Katz, a wonderful woman, has taken it over now. And I did another podcast with a friend, Chaya Sofer. In short, it interests me…

01:57 Speaker 1 Well, we need to do another episode with you afterward.

01:59 Speaker 2 Maybe. What interests me is sitting down with someone, talking, and getting to know them. And I’ve been following you. I don’t know you; we’re not the same age. I don’t even know how old you are. We’ll find out soon. And where did something catch my attention? I remember you once posted a video you’d made, and I asked you, “What did you do in that video?” You’d told everyone about it as though you hadn’t really done anything.

02:29 Speaker 1 Which video?

02:29 Speaker 2 Something with your children. Writing, a song.

02:32 Speaker 1 Oh!

02:33 Speaker 2 And then I see…

02:33 Speaker 1 The one about Karmei Gat.

02:36 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, that’s right. And you…

02:38 Speaker 1 We made a checklist when we got here.

02:39 Speaker 2 It had incredible creative work and incredible acting and everything. And yes, she did all of it. So I said to her, “Do you realize you’re a…” I started giving her names for…

02:49 Speaker 1 Yes, right.

02:49 Speaker 2 For the profession, which is…

02:51 Speaker 1 I told you, with every frame I’d say, “Gilad does the creative work,” and…

02:54 Speaker 2 No, there was creative work, copywriting, everything. And I thought, okay, this woman doesn’t know what she does; she doesn’t know who she is. Then the idea struck me: maybe I should come on her podcast and interview her. And then we met at the wedding of my cousin and someone you’re a shlucha to.

03:13 Speaker 1 Through my shlichus, yes.

03:15 Speaker 2 And I said, “Wow, what hashgacha pratis.” It really happened right around…

03:19 Speaker 1 Spontaneously.

03:19 Speaker 2 The same time. By the way, I entered the Karmei Gat raffle.

03:24 Speaker 1 Right, right.

03:26 Speaker 2 Because it…

03:26 Speaker 1 It spoke to you.

03:28 Speaker 2 You did very precise, very good work there. It was like, “Donate now,” and… Then I suggested the idea to you. I asked, “What do you think?” You got excited about it too, and here we are.

03:40 Speaker 1 I got excited because, actually… Okay, this is going to be the fiftieth episode. That’s how it worked out.

03:46 Speaker 2 Wow.

03:46 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, really. Today I’m posting episode forty-eight with Mushka Pizem, forty-nine with Yelena, and I’m thinking, wow. For fifty episodes, women have been asking me, “Chani, when are you doing an episode about yourself?” What am I going to do, interview myself? I don’t know. I don’t enjoy doing a monologue, even though that’s what I do when I give talks.

04:02 Speaker 2 Right, some people do solo episodes.

04:03 Speaker 1 True, but…

04:04 Speaker 2 A podcast is different.

04:06 Speaker 1 For me, like you said, the fun is in having a conversation. And I thought, am I going to invite an interviewer here now? How would that…? And then this came along, and I thought, let’s do it. It’s a personal conversation, and…

04:18 Speaker 2 And that heavenly timing, with it being episode fifty.

04:20 Speaker 1 Yes, exactly. The jubilee episode.

04:22 Speaker 2 How exciting! Wow.

04:23 Speaker 1 That’s really how it turned out. Of course, afterward I’ll say that I did an episode about myself in honor of the fiftieth episode, but you should know it happened by chance.

04:29 Speaker 2 By hashgacha pratis.

04:30 Speaker 1 Yes, yes.

04:31 Speaker 2 Perfect timing.

04:31 Speaker 1 Exactly.

04:32 Speaker 2 So, let’s begin.

04:34 Speaker 1 Let’s go.

04:34 Speaker 2 We’ve done the introduction.

04:35 Speaker 1 What year should we start with?

04:37 Speaker 2 No, here’s the thing. Who are you?

04:40 Speaker 1 Wow. Who are you? That’s a hard question.

04:41 Speaker 2 Let me tell you what I know, and then we’ll start from the beginning.

04:46 Speaker 1 Let’s go.

04:46 Speaker 2 Okay, and we’re doing this completely spontaneously… We’ll just go with the flow. What I see in…

04:51 Speaker 1 When did you first come across me?

04:53 Speaker 2 I…

04:53 Speaker 1 It makes a big difference.

04:55 Speaker 2 I’ve been following you, I think, probably since you… since you came to Israel.

04:58 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

04:58 Speaker 2 As in, when you started…

05:00 Speaker 1 Two years.

05:00 Speaker 2 When you started Shlichus as a Way of Life—did that begin before then?

05:03 Speaker 1 No.

05:04 Speaker 2 Right, the whole branding, the…

05:06 Speaker 1 I had Shlichus as a Way of Life, but…

05:08 Speaker 2 No, not as…

05:09 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, yes.

05:09 Speaker 2 Not as a brand, not presented outwardly as a brand. And even then, you kind of found your way into my heart. I thought, wow, here’s someone going through such interesting, extraordinary things, and look how she makes something of them, how she keeps doing things. There’s a person at work there. To my mind, you’re someone who works on her character and takes action.

05:32 Speaker 1 Yes.

05:32 Speaker 2 Someone who can fall and get back up, who isn’t afraid to share things and open up. You share a great deal, but in a very, very distinctive way. That’s one thing. Then there’s your motherhood—your children are with you in everything. No matter what you’re doing, the children are with you. And then I saw all the “Health as a Way of Life” work, which I’m sure we’ll get to later.

06:00 Speaker 1 Another niche. Yes.

06:01 Speaker 2 And everything you do, you do yourself, all of it…

06:09 Speaker 1 From beginning to end. The whole package.

06:11 Speaker 2 Yes.

06:11 Speaker 1 Right.

06:12 Speaker 2 Without even knowing the names for what you do. If I ask you what you do, you won’t give me the definitions. Maybe I’ll need to help you with those definitions—that’s my area.

06:18 Speaker 1 Be my… Go on, give me names for what I do.

06:20 Speaker 2 Yes. And I find it really amazing. Fascinating. I came here with a lot of curiosity.

06:27 Speaker 1 Okay, so maybe I’ll just tell you a little about…

06:29 Speaker 2 Right, so let’s start at the beginning. First of all, how old are you…

06:32 Speaker 1 I also really feel like I’m the same person. Take me back to seventh grade for a moment, and I’m the same Chani.

06:37 Speaker 2 Really?

06:37 Speaker 1 Absolutely.

06:38 Speaker 2 So let’s start at the beginning.

06:39 Speaker 1 Of course I’ve been through a lot. I’ve gone through many changes and everything. But that person you’re describing—someone who takes action—that’s the same person.

06:48 Speaker 2 So let’s start at the beginning.

06:49 Speaker 1 Let’s start at the beginning. First of all—no, let’s start with the fact that I’m about to turn thirty-two, im yirtzeh Hashem, next month.

06:53 Speaker 2 Thirty-two. Okay.

06:54 Speaker 1 Yes.

06:56 Speaker 2 You’re a youngster. From where I stand…

06:58 Speaker 1 I’ll tell you the truth: when I turned thirty, it was a few months after we arrived here because of the war, and I thought, finally I’m thirty. I already felt like I had so much life experience…

07:08 Speaker 2 You were already old at…

07:09 Speaker 1 Enough already—how long could I keep saying I was in my twenties? I’d already been through so much.

07:13 Speaker 2 That’s powerful.

07:14 Speaker 1 But…

07:15 Speaker 2 You were born.

07:15 Speaker 1 I was born in Kiryat Malachi, in Nachala—Nachlas Har Chabad.

07:21 Speaker 2 What family are you from?

07:22 Speaker 1 A real Nachala girl.

07:23 Speaker 2 The Wolf family.

07:24 Speaker 1 The Wolf family. My grandparents—my grandmother has an entire episode of her own, for anyone who wants to listen. Episode ten, if I’m not mistaken. She tells the story herself. They were among the families the Rebbe sent to establish the neighborhood. Before that, they lived in Lod.

07:36 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

07:37 Speaker 1 My father was just two or three years old then.

07:40 Speaker 2 See how you immediately turn the conversation to other people? We’re here for you.

07:43 Speaker 1 I always make a point of that.

07:44 Speaker 2 Yes.

07:45 Speaker 1 I’m saying it because I really grew up as a proud Nachala girl, very connected to the neighborhood and its whole atmosphere. It was my entire world.

07:54 Speaker 2 Where do you fall among the children in your family?

07:56 Speaker 1 Wait. I have a sister who’s a little less than a year older than me. We’re practically twins, and the sister after me is about a year and a half younger.

08:04 Speaker 2 Wow.

08:04 Speaker 1 So there were three of us, I’d say. Oh, and then another brother. We’re still a really close-knit bunch to this day. And when I look back on it now from a different perspective, I think, you know, my world was very small in a way, and that was good for me.

08:21 Speaker 2 What do you mean?

08:22 Speaker 1 Nachlas Har Chabad was my whole world.

08:24 Speaker 2 Oh.

08:25 Speaker 1 My whole world. When I went to the college in Kfar Chabad after eighth grade, it was like—

08:29 Speaker 2 You’d gone out into the big wide world.

08:30 Speaker 1 Yes, absolutely. My friends signed up to go to Tzfas, and I didn’t dare. I took the forms from the office and brought them back. I didn’t want to sleep away from home. No, I was very... I was happy where I was.

08:39 Speaker 2 Okay.

08:39 Speaker 1 It was just a really fun childhood.

08:40 Speaker 2 But why do you call it a small world?

08:43 Speaker 1 Because, because my whole world was... I didn’t know anything beyond it. And again, as a child, I think that was fun. I was very focused, very... And I really do remember myself as someone who always had energy and was always doing things. Sometimes people ask me where I get my energy. It’s not something I work at.

09:03 Speaker 2 Okay. What was your first project?

09:06 Speaker 1 Look, already in elementary school, there was the student council. Anything that could be done, I did. Apart from studying, by the way. I was a very mischievous student in elementary school. Later, in middle school, I settled down and—

09:18 Speaker 2 You didn’t like studying? It just didn’t interest you?

09:21 Speaker 1 No, no. I was bored sitting in class and studying. I wanted to be... I was the kind of student who behaved and followed the rules—G-d forbid I should skip a class. I was always afraid of getting into trouble and all that. But studying didn’t interest me. My test grades were really terrible. In seventh and eighth grade, I started studying, and then I fell in love with it. I still really love learning. Very, very much.

09:38 Speaker 2 What changed?

09:39 Speaker 1 Apart from anything to do with numbers.

09:41 Speaker 2 Okay, what happened that suddenly made you—made that change?

09:43 Speaker 1 Just the material. I suddenly realized it was interesting. Interesting. I really love Tanach, Torah, history—all the humanities subjects. Very, very much. A total nerd, really.

09:55 Speaker 2 And your fam—your home gave you room for all those activities and everything?

10:00 Speaker 1 Yes.

10:00 Speaker 2 They saw it, and it was okay?

10:02 Speaker 1 Yes, yes. My parents really gave us a lot of room to do things, and...

10:06 Speaker 2 And how did the school take it?

10:08 Speaker 1 The school liked it.

10:09 Speaker 2 Really?

10:09 Speaker 1 I contributed a lot to the school. Look, in sixth grade I was already in charge of a school newspaper. I always had a thing for newspapers.

10:15 Speaker 2 Okay.

10:16 Speaker 1 That was when we first encountered a digital camera. The school bought one. You put a diskette into the camera, could take about ten pictures, and then transfer them to a computer. I was one of the first students to use it.

10:26 Speaker 2 Wow.

10:27 Speaker 1 I’ve always loved newspapers and photography and writing. Not long ago—my parents moved a year ago—and my mother brought me a box. I look inside and there’s a newspaper from seventh grade, class two: “Created by Chani Wolf.” There was also a newspaper for the extended Wolf family; I used to email it to everyone. A newspaper here, a newspaper there. The main thing was to have somewhere to write and somewhere to put the photos I was taking...

10:50 Speaker 2 So it was both the writing and the photography. And who did the design?

10:53 Speaker 1 Me. I did everything.

10:54 Speaker 2 Oh.

10:54 Speaker 1 In Word.

10:56 Speaker 2 In WordArt.

10:57 Speaker 1 Oh, yes. Or in Paint? I don’t know, I really don’t remember anymore. And by ninth grade I already had my own digital camera, which I’d worked to pay for. I’ve always liked working, actually. Really.

11:10 Speaker 2 What was your first job?

11:13 Speaker 1 I think it was in seventh grade. All my friends signed up for a camp—what do you call it? A summer camp, a day camp run by the school. I traveled to another city to work as an assistant so I could earn five hundred shekels after a month. It was at a day camp with my aunt and uncle in Dimona. I don’t know how to explain it to you; I just enjoyed it so much. I was a helper, and I was almost the same age as the children. They were in first through sixth grade.

11:33 Speaker 2 You enjoyed it because you were doing something and getting paid?

11:34 Speaker 1 Giving, working. I was in charge of the sandwiches and helped supervise on the bus. And whenever children misbehaved, they were sent out to me, and I would sit with them. I remember one particular boy, and I would just talk and talk with them. I’ve always liked listening too—really, as you said, hearing people’s stories. Really: Who are you? What are you like? And...

11:57 Speaker 2 You knew how to see them.

11:57 Speaker 1 They were drawn to me, yes, and it felt so meaningful. I also always loved drawing. All my notebooks are full of illustrations, especially characters, in a kind of comic-book style. So I’d teach them to draw, and I’d draw whatever the camp needed, and—

12:16 Speaker 2 It was as if you came there saying, “Take whatever you need from me.”

12:18 Speaker 1 Yes.

12:19 Speaker 2 And that’s what made the whole experience.

12:20 Speaker 1 Absolutely. I think I always—I don’t know, maybe it’s something natural—I always had a lot of self-awareness, a kind of confidence. You know how teachers would do those lessons where they’d say, “Try to find three good things about yourself”? I don’t know, I knew what I was good at, I enjoyed it, and I did it. I filmed and edited all the school’s video clips. After I graduated, they would bring me back and pay me to do it, because who knew how to edit videos? At first, it was on Movie Maker, which I taught myself to use. We didn’t even have a computer at home yet; I’d go to my grandmother’s.

12:51 Speaker 2 So you’re self-taught. See, I’m starting to give you labels.

12:54 Speaker 1 Yes.

12:56 Speaker 2 So you’ve basically been self-taught since you were five.

12:58 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, you could say that. I really loved everything to do with computers. Not obsessively—I learn the basics of what I need and move on.

13:08 Speaker 2 That’s what being self-taught is. That’s what I— you learn what you need.

13:11 Speaker 1 Yes.

13:11 Speaker 2 It’s not your profession.

13:13 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, right.

13:13 Speaker 2 But broadly speaking, that’s what you need today.

13:16 Speaker 1 Yes.

13:16 Speaker 2 How do you see that? Let me jump ahead for a second to your children, to you as a mother. How do you pass that on to your children?

13:21 Speaker 1 Wow. Honestly, I feel I don’t pass it on enough. I feel like I do everything for them.

13:27 Speaker 2 Mm.

13:27 Speaker 1 I’m slowly learning to let go.

13:30 Speaker 2 Because they won’t—because you really do believe in what you’re doing.

13:33 Speaker 1 Very much. One day it suddenly struck me, and I thought, “Oh my goodness, my children don’t know how to use a computer,” because they haven’t had the chance. I also don’t like children sitting in front of screens, so they don’t spend much time on them.

13:43 Speaker 2 What do you mean, “in front of screens”? When you sat in front of a screen, you weren’t just sitting in front of a screen. You were working.

13:48 Speaker 1 True, but I started, say, in seventh grade. Sixth, seventh.

13:51 Speaker 2 Oh, they’re younger than that with screens now.

13:52 Speaker 1 They’re still very young.

13:53 Speaker 2 But things have changed so much today.

13:54 Speaker 1 Right, right, right. And I suddenly realized I was a bit behind. So now we’re buying them Chani Marzel’s courses, and slowly... It takes me time to let go. In my mind they’re still little, and they’re not.

14:06 Speaker 2 They’re not.

14:07 Speaker 1 Right, and they watch—

14:10 Speaker 2 But with that belief in being self-taught, passing it on is a gift you have to offer.

14:16 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, absolutely. And everything is updated all the time. So again, they need to learn things for themselves. I don’t even have anything to pass on to them, because it’ll all change in a moment.

14:25 Speaker 2 Right.

14:25 Speaker 1 They do watch. I involve them in everything. If I’m editing a video, my daughter sits next to me and watches and so on. But, for example, nobody touches my computer. Well, it’s very expensive. But there’s a computer for the children. So slowly, slowly. Really, with a whole group of them, you have to divide and conquer—

14:42 Speaker 2 No, it’s in our heads.

14:44 Speaker 1 Yes.

14:45 Speaker 2 Let’s get back to you. So you were an energetic, self-taught child.

14:49 Speaker 1 Can I tell you something? I think we started learning Chassidus in school around eighth grade. Now, come on, it’s also something we grow up with.

15:01 Speaker 2 We grow up with it, but not really.

15:03 Speaker 1 I felt it was with me.

15:05 Speaker 2 No.

15:06 Speaker 1 We grow up with it, okay—

15:07 Speaker 2 When did you start learning Chassidus? Did you know Chassidus?

15:11 Speaker 1 When you learn a new concept—say, in eighth grade, when we learned about kelipas nogah, the most basic things—it was new to me.

15:19 Speaker 2 It was new to you, but did you feel it sinking in?

15:22 Speaker 1 Slowly. I mean, looking back, I realized it helped me, that it was there for me.

15:27 Speaker 2 So what is Chassidus in your life, really?

15:30 Speaker 1 And also—wait—and also my connection to the Rebbe. That’s something I grew up with too, and I often drew strength from it.

15:37 Speaker 2 What do you mean?

15:37 Speaker 1 I simply grew up with love for the Rebbe, even though I didn’t merit to see him. I was fortunate to receive a letter when I was born. My parents wrote to the Rebbe to tell him I’d been born. It was right at the very end of 5752.

15:48 Speaker 2 In 5752, before 27 Adar?

15:51 Speaker 1 No, in Av. So by then, I don’t even know if you remember—you sent it and all that—but I have the letter. There was this personal connection with the Rebbe. Even as a child, I would really talk to him and feel connected.

16:05 Speaker 2 Tell me about that.

16:06 Speaker 1 Just a gift. A gift. I don’t know. We’d sing all his songs in elementary school, and “See in the Light of Day” would make me cry and cry and cry. Sorry, I’m a sensitive person. And I think that stayed with me. Ever since I was little, I wanted to go on shlichus. I think that also has to do with my family. I have an aunt, my mother’s sister, who’s a shlucha in Russia, and three of my father’s brothers are shluchim in Ukraine. One of them is in what’s Russia today, but— When I was in seventh grade, a girl joined our class. She was the daughter of shluchim from Russia who, for some reason, had moved to Israel, and the teacher seated her next to me. I told her, “You’re teaching me Russian.”

16:44 Speaker 2 You were serious.

16:46 Speaker 1 Not spoken Russian—reading and writing. I still remember the letters she wrote out for me.

16:51 Speaker 2 As if you already knew you’d go on shlichus to Russia.

16:53 Speaker 1 No, I didn’t know, but that world really, really intrigued me. I was very drawn to it. My uncles would come in the summer, and I’d ask them, “Tell me stories about shlichus.”

17:04 Speaker 2 What was it that grabbed you?

17:07 Speaker 1 First of all, I think it was the sense of adventure.

17:10 Speaker 2 Okay.

17:10 Speaker 1 There’s something very adventurous about it. And also the idea that someone travels somewhere and opens an institution and becomes so significant.

17:23 Speaker 2 So it was the sense of purpose.

17:25 Speaker 1 I think so.

17:26 Speaker 2 Even going to Dimona gives you that sense of purpose.

17:29 Speaker 1 Yes, yes. Very much so—making the most of my potential all the time.

17:33 Speaker 2 No, but even when you make a newspaper for your family, that has a purpose. That’s not about pleasing people; it’s meaningful. It’s like you—

17:38 Speaker 1 Creating something of value. I think that’s what drives me all the time. I love creating, producing something, even if it isn’t physical. Usually it isn’t physical.

17:47 Speaker 2 No, but it takes a lot of resources.

17:48 Speaker 1 Doing something. When I was in first grade, my sister, who was in second grade, and I ran a Chanukah day camp for the kindergarten kids from all the nearby buildings. You know what I mean?

17:58 Speaker 2 I’m telling you, I need to meet your mother.

17:59 Speaker 1 We charged five shekels per child. It was—

18:02 Speaker 2 Per day, or for the whole camp?

18:05 Speaker 1 I think for the whole camp. You see, it’s something that really is innate—

18:10 Speaker 2 Like you wake up with tons of energy.

18:11 Speaker 1 Every summer, whenever I had a couple of free days, I’d run a camp. A Tisha B’Av camp, a Memorial Day camp—always a camp, a camp, a camp. I’d travel to...

18:18 Speaker 2 Like you wake up in the morning and say, “Mom, what do I do with all this energy from the battery that recharged overnight?”

18:23 Speaker 1 Something like that. There really is this constant desire and need to create something of value and do things. And it works the other way too: when I’m not doing anything, I’m wiped out.

18:34 Speaker 2 Wow.

18:34 Speaker 1 It’s very hard for me. Very, very, very hard. It’s like—I’m not alive. I constantly need to be doing something.

18:40 Speaker 2 Isn’t it exhausting to live near you? To live with you?

18:42 Speaker 1 Luckily, my husband is really suited to it. Is it exhausting? I don’t know. You’d have to ask the people who live with me.

18:50 Speaker 2 Yes.

18:50 Speaker 1 I don’t think so, because in the end it’s quite balanced. I do things, but I also need—I’m human. I don’t have any superpowers when it comes to that. If I don’t sleep at night, I’m a wreck. I can’t just go to bed at two, get up at five, and have everything be fine. Even though I’m a night person. When I was a girl, I’d do all my assignments, my seminary papers and everything—you have no idea—at four or five in the morning. But with babies, that doesn’t work.

19:15 Speaker 2 And you probably had a lot of sleepless nights, because you had projects.

19:18 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, yes. I was jet-lagged a lot, really. But today I understand—ever since I became a mother, at eleven at night I really have to tell myself, “Chani, go to sleep,” even though the adrenaline is pumping and everything starts working at night, all the ideas. I really miss staying up into the night like that, but I have no choice. When I used to do it and go to sleep at three—in the beginning, during our first years in Kharkov too—I’d sit and prepare classes and everything in the early morning hours, and then I couldn’t function. I’d collapse.

19:45 Speaker 2 Wow.

19:45 Speaker 1 So that’s an example: doing, doing, but...

19:48 Speaker 2 But there are, there are—

19:50 Speaker 1 There are resources—

19:51 Speaker 2 No, it really is a battery. In the end, it’s like a battery.

19:53 Speaker 1 Right, right, right. Exactly.

19:55 Speaker 2 So your dream was shlichus. You knew that, like—

19:58 Speaker 1 Yes.

19:58 Speaker 2 And you planned for it.

20:00 Speaker 1 Yes. I didn’t know for certain, but it was on my mind.

20:03 Speaker 2 Very strongly.

20:03 Speaker 1 Yes.

20:04 Speaker 2 Among girls your age, did many of your friends go on shlichus?

20:07 Speaker 1 No. Honestly? Not a huge number. But I have a friend who went on shlichus to France a few months before I did. Actually, two friends—two are on shlichus in France.

20:19 Speaker 2 And then the numbers start to drop.

20:20 Speaker 1 Most didn’t. Right, my age group wasn’t one of the big ones. Not really. All my friends who are shluchos are a few years older than me.

20:29 Speaker 2 In your dreams, did you also think about the home you were going to build? Did you already picture your life that way too?

20:37 Speaker 1 Hmm, no, I think... There’s something I always say: I have this curiosity about the future, because everything will be okay. I even remember a scene from when I was a child—I think I told this on the podcast about childbirth. My mother was talking to a woman they’d met in the street about a birth she’d had, birth stories, a difficult birth and all that. I remember thinking, “Wow, that’s scary. I’ll have to give birth too.” And then I told myself, “Well, all the women in the world have gone through it and they were okay, so everything will be okay.” Like—

21:09 Speaker 2 Wow, that really is a way of looking at things—

21:10 Speaker 1 I thought that way when we went on shlichus too. I mean, you can’t really—look, you get married. What do you know about what will happen?

21:18 Speaker 2 Nothing.

21:18 Speaker 1 Nobody knows what will happen. So it really helps to think that everything will be okay. It just...

21:25 Speaker 2 Is saying “everything will be okay” your comfort zone, or is it emunah and bitachon? I’m trying to understand where it comes from.

21:31 Speaker 1 Hmm.

21:32 Speaker 2 Or is it just—

21:33 Speaker 1 Maybe today—today I already know that I do it from a place of emunah and bitachon, because I’ve been through things that are a bit more complicated. But back then it was a kind of, I don’t know, outlook. A very logical outlook too, when you think about it.

21:47 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

21:48 Speaker 1 You can’t—if someone, before getting married, tried to take into account everything that could happen to them, they wouldn’t get married.

21:55 Speaker 2 Right.

21:55 Speaker 1 Because it means starting a family and taking on—

21:58 Speaker 2 It’s not something you can think through; it’s something you do.

22:00 Speaker 1 Right. So you say, “Okay, everyone goes through it, everyone deals with it. I’ll manage too. Why not?”

22:05 Speaker 2 So when did you go on shlichus?

22:07 Speaker 1 We went on shlichus—first of all, I had a lot of background. As I told you, I wanted to go on shlichus. So when I was sixteen, I went to a summer camp at my aunt’s in Russia. I was sixteen, and I was a counselor for a group of seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys. We didn’t tell anyone how old I was, because I was tall.

22:21 Speaker 2 Because you don’t look your age anyway.

22:23 Speaker 1 Oh, yes. I enjoyed it so much. Wow. It was an incredible experience. About two years later, we also spent Pesach with my aunts and uncles in Ukraine and went around to see them. The Seder night was in Odessa, Chol Hamoed in Kherson. Yes, three of my father’s brothers. Then they sent us to Crimea for the seventh day of Pesach, which is in Russia today. And I remember sitting at the Seder in Odessa and just crying. I’m looking at my uncle and aunt—I also have a podcast episode with her, with Chaya Wolf—and they’re standing there, with hundreds of people around them in a magnificent hall. People whose stories I came to know after I went on shlichus myself. People who came from—never mind. Besides the fact that so many of them had non-Jewish fathers, some had come from the very lowest circumstances and didn’t even know what it meant that they were Jewish. And there they were, sitting at the Seder, going through Kadesh and Urchatz, hearing words of Torah, singing together. I sat there and said to myself, “This is unbelievable.”

23:19 Speaker 2 What moved you about it?

23:20 Speaker 1 What moved me was the realization that they had come for these people, and if they—

23:25 Speaker 2 Oh, that your aunt and uncle had come for them.

23:26 Speaker 1 Yes. And if they hadn’t done it, I don’t know what would have happened here. Who would have cared about these people? Of course, there are other families of shluchim there too. In Odessa, it’s already a whole incredible network—

23:34 Speaker 2 What was moving about it? Your aunt and uncle’s devotion?

23:38 Speaker 1 Yes, yes.

23:38 Speaker 2 Or the whole idea, the whole institution of shlichus?

23:41 Speaker 1 Yes, I looked at Chaya and said to myself, “Wow, a person… this is life.”

23:50 Speaker 2 Okay, so there you saw what it means to live.

23:52 Speaker 1 Yes.

23:53 Speaker 2 What it means to really live.

23:54 Speaker 1 Absolutely, absolutely. And later, on our shlichus through Beis Rivkah College—for anyone who doesn’t know, you go out for a semester of shlichus—I was in Kyiv. There were four of us girls, so we were always together. Then one day I suddenly went out alone. I walked to the store and back by myself. I don’t know, it just worked out that way. I had time to think. You know, when you’re with friends, you don’t really have time to yourself. And I remember walking down the street and saying to myself, “Wow, I can see myself living in a place like this and doing activities here.” Really. I don’t know, I felt a connection to the language, too.

24:26 Speaker 2 Wow.

24:26 Speaker 1 It’s hard for me to explain—

24:27 Speaker 2 No, but I feel you’re very much someone who talks to herself, who listens to herself.

24:31 Speaker 1 Yes, yes.

24:32 Speaker 2 At a young age.

24:33 Speaker 1 Yes. Very much. That’s true.

24:35 Speaker 2 Which is a gift.

24:36 Speaker 1 Again, I don’t really know how—yes, a gift. I would call it a gift. Absolutely.

24:39 Speaker 2 No, having that awareness at a young age is—

24:41 Speaker 1 Yes.

24:41 Speaker 2 I told you, I’m speaking from the perspective of my age.

24:46 Speaker 1 Anyway, I wasn’t looking for a shliach when I started shidduchim, or anything like that. It just happened.

24:55 Speaker 2 Wait, how did you approach shidduchim before—let’s put shlichus aside for a second. Or did you go into shidduchim thinking about shlichus? No.

25:01 Speaker 1 No.

25:02 Speaker 2 What did building a home mean to you? How old were you when you got married?

25:05 Speaker 1 Twenty-one.

25:06 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

25:07 Speaker 1 We met on my birthday, for our first meeting. Actually, my sister got married before me. You know, she’s less than a year younger than I am. So until she got married, I hadn’t really thought about it much. I was in seminary and then on shlichus in Kyiv. After she got married, I started hearing suggestions, as they say. And I don’t know, nothing sounded right. Suggestions that weren’t relevant; nothing came of them. I actually was worried.

25:34 Speaker 2 Before you started meeting people, what were you looking for?

25:36 Speaker 1 I was looking for—

25:36 Speaker 2 If you were already someone who listened to herself—you’ve told us about being on shlichus—

25:39 Speaker 1 Yes.

25:39 Speaker 2 Then I’m sure you also had…

25:41 Speaker 1 I actually didn’t include shlichus as a criterion, because I felt that—

25:43 Speaker 2 Not shlichus. I mean listening to yourself. So I’m sure you knew what you wanted, more than some girls—there are a lot of girls who don’t know what they want.

25:52 Speaker 1 The most important thing for me was someone with kabbolas ol to the Rebbe, because in my mind I knew that—

25:59 Speaker 2 Kabbolas ol or bittul?

26:00 Speaker 1 Bittul. Bittul and kabbolas ol are—when you have bittul, you have kabbolas ol. I told myself that if what the Rebbe says is someone’s guiding light, everything will be okay, because ultimately the Rebbe’s directives lead us straight to the goal. And with Chassidus in general, if you live Chassidus, your whole life looks different. It affects every area—it’s every area of life, your whole life. So that was what guided me. And a few other things that—

26:33 Speaker 2 Let me stop you for a second. You’re saying that if someone lives Chassidus or has bittul to the Rebbe, their life will be okay. So in your equation, “everything will be okay” means that if I do things a certain way, if I live a certain way—

26:46 Speaker 1 Yes.

26:46 Speaker 2 Then everything will be okay.

26:47 Speaker 1 Yes, yes.

26:48 Speaker 2 Earlier you said, “I’ll have children; everyone has children, so I will too.” Is that rooted in the idea that if I’m doing what I’m supposed to? I’m just trying to understand it.

26:57 Speaker 1 If I’m doing what I’m supposed to?

26:58 Speaker 2 No, you said, “I do what I’m supposed to. I’m a chossid, I’m connected, I have bittul”—whatever it is, kabbolas ol. So do those things go hand in hand?

27:11 Speaker 1 Um, no. I see it more like an instruction manual.

27:15 Speaker 2 No, because if I don’t do those things, then things won’t be okay?

27:17 Speaker 1 I don’t know. Then I don’t know what will happen. Look, are things okay in everyone’s life?

27:23 Speaker 2 First of all, there are people who do everything by the book and things aren’t okay, and there are people who—

27:26 Speaker 1 Right.

27:27 Speaker 2 I don’t know.

27:27 Speaker 1 Right, right, right.

27:28 Speaker 2 I’m just trying to understand—I want to take this statement, “Everything will be okay,” and make it my own. Today you call it emunah and bitachon, but I feel there’s something very deep in that statement.

27:42 Speaker 1 What I mean is, I knew that if I did what I was supposed to, then—well, it’s not necessarily that things would be good. What does “good” mean? What do you mean by “good”?

27:50 Speaker 2 Not that you get to decide what’s good for you. I mean that sense that things are okay, that calm of “We’ll get through this. It’ll be okay.”

27:56 Speaker 1 Yes, yes.

27:57 Speaker 2 It makes life so much easier.

27:59 Speaker 1 Right. Right.

28:00 Speaker 2 A life with calm and ease.

28:01 Speaker 1 Right.

28:02 Speaker 2 Not that you wake up wanting a million dollars in the bank, and if you don’t have it, things aren’t good.

28:07 Speaker 1 But when real life began, it became more challenging, and it took more work. Still, even financially—which, you know, is a huge challenge for everyone—emunah and bitachon have always guided me. I always say, “Hakadosh Boruch Hu will make sure we have what we need. Hakadosh Boruch Hu will make sure we have what we need.” And since I’m a person who takes action, no one has to tell me to make a vessel for the blessing. The vessels are there, so—

28:29 Speaker 2 I make the vessels.

28:30 Speaker 1 Really, when we got married, and a little while afterward—

28:33 Speaker 2 Wait, we’re talking about shidduchim. One second. We’re still on shidduchim, so you…

28:36 Speaker 1 No, I mean in that respect. But I kept saying, “Everything will be okay. Everything will be okay.” We’ll work at it; we’ll take care of what we need to. But giving us what we need is up to Hakadosh Boruch Hu. That’s not—

28:47 Speaker 2 It really comes across. I’m telling you as someone who follows you, it really comes across. It’s beautiful.

28:53 Speaker 1 Baruch Hashem.

28:54 Speaker 2 Because I want it to be real.

28:55 Speaker 1 I really have been blessed.

28:56 Speaker 2 No, because you know, social media is very fake.

28:58 Speaker 1 I’m not fake.

28:59 Speaker 2 Right. No, so that’s very—

29:00 Speaker 1 I can’t stand fakeness, so social media is a little hard for me. I’ll talk about that later.

29:06 Speaker 2 Yes.

29:06 Speaker 1 Anyway. So the thing that really—

29:08 Speaker 2 We’re talking about shidduchim, so…

29:09 Speaker 1 Yes. So what mainly guided me was looking for someone who cared about what the Rebbe says. Of course, character traits and compatibility go without saying. But I told myself that once you have the most accurate, reliable guidebook in your hands—and I believed that with all my heart—I’m one of those people who went through the stage of choosing this path. Not just following it because I was born into it.

29:30 Speaker 2 When did you go through that stage?

29:31 Speaker 1 In college. We had a few very powerful courses with the rabbis. One of them was with Rabbi Yechezkel Sofer, who really talks about emunah from the most, um…

29:45 Speaker 2 Practical perspective?

29:45 Speaker 1 No, the most intellectual perspective.

29:47 Speaker 2 Intellectual.

29:48 Speaker 1 The most intellectual perspective, and he brings… I remember sitting in class and saying to myself, “You’re choosing this. You want this. You want this life.” And even before that, when I was in Kafeh Tashbat [unclear], Rabbi Zeitlin’s group—may his memory be a blessing—it gave me so much for life. A boost in Chassidus and an understanding that this was what I wanted for myself. Really, really.

30:13 Speaker 2 Had there been earlier stages when you had questions about it?

30:16 Speaker 1 Um…

30:17 Speaker 2 Or was it just routine—“This is who I am”?

30:19 Speaker 1 No, I didn’t have questions or doubts. But in those moments, I said to myself, “Yes, this is it.”

30:28 Speaker 2 Wow.

30:28 Speaker 1 I mean, again, I come back to how limited my world had been. It was what I knew. You know, as far as I was concerned, the world had Chabad people and non-Chabad people. That was…

30:37 Speaker 2 Yes, but in Kiryat Men—in Nachalah, there were also girls who were less chassidish.

30:42 Speaker 1 Right.

30:42 Speaker 2 And more chassidish, of course.

30:44 Speaker 1 I don’t know. I was very, um…

30:45 Speaker 2 You weren’t in a shtetl.

30:48 Speaker 1 I felt like I was.

30:50 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

30:50 Speaker 1 I don’t know how to put it. It was obvious to me that the girls—

30:52 Speaker 2 No, you…

30:52 Speaker 1 The Chabad girls were part of the class, and we were the ones who were also supposed to have an influence, and…

30:57 Speaker 2 So you chose that this was what you wanted: “This is the path, and I want to learn it and follow it,” and…

31:03 Speaker 1 “I’m choosing this for myself.” I remember saying to myself, “Chani, later on, when you build a home and everything, remember that you chose this. You wanted this.”

31:10 Speaker 2 And you still have to choose it.

31:11 Speaker 1 I held on to that moment.

31:12 Speaker 2 And you still have to choose it.

31:13 Speaker 1 No.

31:13 Speaker 2 Well, it’s a choice, um…

31:14 Speaker 1 You know, in Chassidus, the trait of netzach is the ability to persist in something after you’ve already made that commitment in your mind and heart. You don’t have to keep reminding yourself all the time. The moments that really matter to you are moments you need to treasure, and they give you strength afterward. That’s truly something I feel all the time. I go back to those moments. I have a few moments like that, and I tell myself, “You chose this. You wanted this.”

31:39 Speaker 2 Wow.

31:40 Speaker 1 “You were blessed with this.” That sense of being blessed is also something that guides me very, very strongly.

31:43 Speaker 2 What does that mean?

31:44 Speaker 1 Honestly, I have this feeling—and I know it might sometimes sound a little arrogant, because what? There are seventy facets to the Torah and all that—but I really feel that with the path of Chabad, the Rebbe, and Tanya, I won the lottery. Really, really, really. I live it. And when I’m not living it—because, let’s face it, contemplation is something you have to keep working on all the time. It’s like exercise. So I feel it immediately. If I haven’t been doing it for a few days, then, okay.

32:13 Speaker 2 You sound like a baalas teshuvah.

32:15 Speaker 1 That’s how I feel.

32:16 Speaker 2 Which is beautiful.

32:17 Speaker 1 That’s how I feel.

32:18 Speaker 2 I think it’s the truth.

32:19 Speaker 1 That’s why I think it’s so important for every woman who lives [unclear]—

32:22 Speaker 2 You’ve just answered the question yourself, because you chose it.

32:26 Speaker 1 Right, but it’s so important to go through that stage, because, come on, living this way just because I was born into it—

32:31 Speaker 2 Right.

32:32 Speaker 1 That’s not strong enough. It’s not enough; it’s not a goal. When you choose something, you’re committed to it.

32:40 Speaker 2 Beautiful.

32:42 Speaker 1 Anyway. Then there were more shidduch suggestions, some relevant, some not, all sorts of things. And I really saw it as—there was a wedding for a friend from my class who was a convert, and it was clear that there wouldn’t really be many people to dance with. That day, very spontaneously—or maybe it was a day or two earlier—I said to myself, “Wow, that won’t do.” So I recruited my sister, who’s a year and a half younger than me. I told her, “Listen, let’s pay for transportation—a minibus from Nachlas Har Chabad to Kfar Chabad. Bring fifteen friends.” And it was amazing. Nachlas Har Chabad really is a very special place, with special people. All her friends were up for it. They came, they danced, it was joyous. Showing up with fifteen girls makes a real difference.

33:24 Speaker 2 Very much. Especially when they come for that purpose.

33:26 Speaker 1 Yes. They danced and danced and danced and danced. It was as if someone had flipped a switch and off they went. I came home from the wedding feeling so fulfilled. Then my mother said to me, “Chani, there’s a suggestion—someone from Kharkiv.” At the time I didn’t make the connection at all. Only afterward did it suddenly hit me: I’d come back from a wedding where I’d brought joy to a bride and really gone out of my way to do it.

33:48 Speaker 2 A mitzvah.

33:49 Speaker 1 It was only in retrospect that I realized it, and suddenly it moved me so much. Really—

33:54 Speaker 2 You’re someone who looks for signs, right?

33:56 Speaker 1 I really love them, yes. I think—I’ll tell you what I think: everyone gets signs, but not everyone sees them.

34:02 Speaker 2 Right.

34:03 Speaker 1 It’s about being aware that Hakadosh Boruch Hu is with me, and wanting to see that, to make room for Him.

34:07 Speaker 2 To see opportunities.

34:09 Speaker 1 That too, yes. It’s something that really guides me—looking for the next sign along the way and moving forward accordingly. And we actually Googled Kharkiv—

34:19 Speaker 2 You have a title for the episode: “Signposts.”

34:23 Speaker 1 Oh, the creativity is just pouring out of you. We actually typed “Kharkiv” into Google and looked for it on the map. My mother immediately said, “You know, he might want to go on shlichus and live there.” And I was like, “Okay, sure.”

34:37 Speaker 2 Obviously.

34:38 Speaker 1 That’s the problem. What’s interesting is that when we met and talked about shlichus, Mendel said, “Okay, the whole world is open to us. We don’t have to choose Kharkiv specifically.” He’s a very open-minded person. He speaks Hebrew, Russian, and English as native languages. His mother is Australian, his father is from South America, he was born in New York, lived in Ukraine, and studied in yeshivos in Israel. So to tell him, “Let’s settle in Kharkiv”—it’s like, “Wait a second, there’s a whole globe out there.”

35:10 Speaker 2 The whole map is spread out before me.

35:12 Speaker 1 Yes, and I was actually the one who went there and felt a real connection. We traveled there—our last sheva brachos was in Kharkiv.

35:19 Speaker 2 Wow.

35:19 Speaker 1 We got on a plane a few days after the wedding. Mendel was the first child of a shliach in the former Soviet Union. There were three families who went there first, even before communism fell. The Rebbe sent the Kaminetzkys, the Lazars, and the Moskovitzes.

35:32 Speaker 2 Wow.

35:33 Speaker 1 I think the Lazars had a baby girl, the Kaminetzkys didn’t have children yet, and he was six months old. So the first upsherin and the first bar mitzvah celebrated openly, with a large crowd, rather than underground under communism, were his.

35:46 Speaker 2 Wow.

35:47 Speaker 1 He was also the first child from there to go to yeshivah in Israel. And the song “My Son,” which played through almost the whole wedding, was more or less written about him. The idea for the sheva brachos actually came from my mother-in-law. She thought of it because they felt they were missing out by not having the wedding in Kharkiv. On the other hand, it was pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen. So she said, “Let’s have the last sheva brachos there,” and my parents were on board. Afterward, many other families did the same, because it turned out to be a very successful idea.

36:20 Speaker 2 A start-startup.

36:21 Speaker 1 Exactly.

36:22 Speaker 2 Wait, so you went there—how long did you stay?

36:24 Speaker 1 We went after the wedding. His family went back, and we joined them, along with my parents. My parents came for the sheva brachos, maybe stayed for Shabbos—I don’t remember—and went back. We stayed another couple of weeks. It was Kislev, so we stayed through Chanukah.

36:39 Speaker 2 Wow, that’s...

36:40 Speaker 1 Yes.

36:41 Speaker 2 Tell me about that.

36:43 Speaker 1 It was incredible. Incredible.

36:45 Speaker 2 Just think: you’ve only just gotten married, and you’re already staying with your mother-in-law.

36:49 Speaker 1 Yes, yes. First of all, they have a big house, with a basement—which we also ended up in during the war. So we practically had a whole floor to ourselves, you could say. And it was simply fun. Really. Beyond that, a week after getting married, with this whole new world opening up, even walking around the streets was an experience. I also think that, in a way, I needed it. Often, spouses come from the same background, but here he was from Kharkiv. I wanted to see where he grew up. Looking back now, after so many years there, I know all the family’s inside references and all their silly expressions in Russian. Back then, it was really like—

37:31 Speaker 2 But you got married and suddenly made this huge break. For someone as curious as you, it must have been really exciting.

37:37 Speaker 1 Yes, yes. We arrived at their house for the first time at night, after traveling through Kyiv and all that. I walked in and just started crying, because I felt some kind of connection. And Chanukah on shlichus is incredible. Wow. The snow, the light—you see it and can hardly believe it’s happening. Day after day, a menorah lighting here, another one there, and I’m just stunned, stunned, and starting to get hooked. Then we came back for Pesach, too.

38:06 Speaker 2 So you went back to that friend who sat with you and taught you Russian.

38:09 Speaker 1 Yes. Well, even when I’d been at summer camp and at my aunts’ for Pesach, I could already read all the signs. I practiced with my family, and I already knew some... I had a background in Russian when I got to Kharkiv, although in hindsight, come on, I knew nothing. But I do think that background gave me a lot.

38:26 Speaker 2 It gave you the feeling that you could do it—confidence.

38:28 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, absolutely.

38:29 Speaker 2 Okay.

38:30 Speaker 1 So we went back for Pesach. We were living in Nachlas Har Chabad, and we came to Kharkiv for Pesach. It was just understood—no one even asked me. Maybe they did ask, but it was so obvious that Mendel would lead a Seder in Kharkiv. That’s how it works there: there isn’t one big Seder for everyone. There’s one for students, one for seniors, and so on. He was in charge of the Seder for the elementary school—for the children and parents. Fine, okay, I came along. I even prepared an activity for the children that didn’t require words, arranging—I think it was the plagues—in order, or something like that. But mostly I watched from the side. I just watched my husband, whom I’d married so recently, lead a Seder for, you know, maybe 150 people. I was stunned. What is going on here? Really. And then we went home—

39:19 Speaker 2 So that brought you back to the experience of—

39:21 Speaker 1 It clicked for me.

39:22 Speaker 2 Of the—

39:22 Speaker 1 Yes, I really felt as though that Seder night was an evening that stayed with me. And afterward we went to his parents’ house. We arrived, and there was a Seder there too, of course, but for a different crowd—more families, older people. We came in, and his family hadn’t had a normal Seder either. The second Seder night abroad—that’s what’s so good about having two. One is with the parents, and one is for the children. So we came in, and we still hadn’t had a proper Seder ourselves. We went to a corner off to the side, among all the people, found some whole matzos, and started our Seder at eleven at night. I was in total shock at everything that was happening, and I said to Mendel, “Tell me, who does this Seder for the schoolchildren every year?” And he said, “I do. Every year.” Even when he was away at yeshiva, no matter where he was, he always came home for Pesach. So I thought, okay—and who’s going to do it next year?

40:11 Speaker 2 Who’s going to prepare it next year?

40:13 Speaker 1 Because—wait, this is yours. And of course, even during our sheva brachos, they were already giving us tours. My shlucha is amazing at that. She’d arrange something at the school, then show us this place and that place: “Look over there, look at the whole city.” And after a few months, we really started thinking about it seriously. It turned out there was an enormous need, because, well, they’re a generation older than us.

40:38 Speaker 2 Right.

40:38 Speaker 1 The community was growing. There were a few other shluchim families in Kharkiv, but they were all around my in-laws’ age, or a little younger—not our age. And this was a growing community. In a lot of small cities in Ukraine and Russia, all the young people had moved to Israel or gone to big cities, and the community was really mostly elderly people. But not Kharkiv. Couples were getting married and staying there; Jewish children were being born. There was a preschool, a school. It’s a huge city, with a million and a half people—about the size of Jerusalem. And I thought, okay, then it’s us.

41:12 Speaker 2 And that was it. You said, “I’m going on shlichus,” and—

41:15 Speaker 1 There too, I had this feeling that—first of all, I said, “We’ll try it,” just to—

41:20 Speaker 2 Reassure yourself.

41:21 Speaker 1 Yes, because it wasn’t irreversible. And I also had this feeling: I told myself, if my aunt managed, and another one, and another one, and another one—everyone managed.

41:29 Speaker 2 And you didn’t have questions—

41:30 Speaker 1 I’ll manage too.

41:31 Speaker 2 “I’m leaving my family, my friends, I don’t know, my social circle.”

41:34 Speaker 1 That was the hardest thing for me. The hardest thing in the world.

41:37 Speaker 2 How do you do it?

41:38 Speaker 1 Even though, relatively speaking, I was going to a city where I had family, for one thing.

41:42 Speaker 2 Yes.

41:42 Speaker 1 In a way.

41:43 Speaker 2 Yes, you weren’t alone and isolated, but still.

41:45 Speaker 1 And there were other shluchim families too.

41:48 Speaker 2 Yes, but—

41:49 Speaker 1 There were another four families there, besides us. And it also depends how you count the families of baalei teshuvah who had joined the shluchim. It was a mix of families—American, Israeli, local, Russian-speaking—all Chabad. Altogether, seven or eight families.

42:07 Speaker 2 Was there anyone your age?

42:08 Speaker 1 No. So that was it. On paper, I had friends and everything, but I felt lonely.

42:15 Speaker 2 Of course.

42:16 Speaker 1 And I needed my friends and my sisters. That was the hardest part for me.

42:19 Speaker 2 So how do you deal with that?

42:21 Speaker 1 You just cope. It’s very hard. I’m also someone who hates the phone. I don’t like phone calls or video calls. To me, that isn’t a conversation. It just isn’t. Especially with children. You have a video call with the grandparents, everyone’s jumping around, you can’t hear a thing, and then it disconnects. There was a long period when my children didn’t know their cousins in Israel, because I’d had enough of video calls where, every time you turned the phone on, someone would cry because they couldn’t see it or be on it.

42:45 Speaker 2 And you didn’t have children yet. You didn’t go with a child.

42:48 Speaker 1 We did. Mussi was two months old.

42:49 Speaker 2 Oh.

42:49 Speaker 1 She was born—

42:50 Speaker 2 We hadn’t heard about her!

42:50 Speaker 1 Very quickly. Yes.

42:52 Speaker 2 We hadn’t heard about the mother!

42:53 Speaker 1 Yes, yes. So during that first year, I gave birth.

42:57 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

42:57 Speaker 1 Mussi was born on Rosh Chodesh Elul. And then—we wanted to—

43:02 Speaker 2 When you gave birth, you already knew you were going on shlichus.

43:04 Speaker 1 We finalized it around then. Things were a bit chaotic in Israel; that was during Operation Protective Edge.

43:08 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

43:10 Speaker 1 And at the same time, we were figuring out how to go on shlichus financially. We really didn’t want to depend on our parents or on my husband. Sometimes you don’t even know what that means.

43:18 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

43:19 Speaker 1 It also meant working with family. We’d talked about it a lot beforehand—what we would do, what we wouldn’t do—so there wouldn’t be problems. We genuinely wanted to avoid problems. Both we and they were very aware of that in advance. Then they had an idea: maybe we could try going through the Ministry of Education, because there had been a position there before. The Ministry of Education has a branch called Hefzibah that sends teachers to the former Soviet Union. So we approached them and tried, and went through the process. We waited about two months for an answer, to find out whether we could do it through the Ministry of Education. If we could, then presumably it would happen. Right around then I gave birth, with everything that involved, and about two weeks after the birth we got a positive answer. Suddenly I said, “Okay, wait a second. Are we sure?”

44:03 Speaker 2 It’s happening.

44:05 Speaker 1 “Are we sure?” Yes. We’d made the decision.

44:08 Speaker 2 Wow. A month and a half later, you left.

44:10 Speaker 1 Uh-huh.

44:11 Speaker 2 To try it out.

44:11 Speaker 1 A little later—at the end of Cheshvan.

44:13 Speaker 2 You went to try it out.

44:14 Speaker 1 At the end of Cheshvan, we went to try it out, though I knew it wouldn’t really be a trial. I mean, look, if something had been—

44:19 Speaker 2 Yes, of course.

44:20 Speaker 1 Terrible. Well, we did leave in the end, but...

44:25 Speaker 2 You didn’t leave; you were made to leave.

44:26 Speaker 1 Yes. No, I’m joking. But I’ll tell you: when you come to a place and want to give yourself to it, you can’t arrive thinking, “I’m just trying this out,” because the beginning is the hardest part. The beginning is the hardest part.

44:40 Speaker 2 And really, saying that—

44:40 Speaker 1 It reminds me a little of breastfeeding, you know? I often hear conversations like, “That first month is so hard. I’ll breastfeed for a month, and that’s it.” But wait a second, dear—the first month is the hardest, and afterward it becomes much more straightforward. Not easy, but—when you come in knowing that the beginning will be hard, you understand that you need to commit yourself to it before you can find a rhythm. It’s not that there are no challenges afterward, but the beginning, with the language—oh my goodness.

45:03 Speaker 2 So that’s why—what, you mean the language of—

45:06 Speaker 1 The language. You come to work with people. You’re coming specifically to work with people. You haven’t come to wash dishes.

45:11 Speaker 2 And you’re a people person.

45:13 Speaker 1 And I’m a people person, but I arrived without my strongest tool: language. By the way, that’s one of the reasons—and I’ll get to this later—that I started posting statuses. I was really looking for a place for Hebrew, somewhere I could express myself in Hebrew.

45:28 Speaker 2 Wow.

45:28 Speaker 1 I missed that very, very much. Very much. Even though I learned the language fairly quickly, because I already had some background, and I really threw myself in at the deep end. I started teaching at the school in Russian the very year I arrived, with [unclear]—

45:38 Speaker 2 But you still didn’t have your own language, your language.

45:41 Speaker 1 It was very, very hard. Very, very hard. After a few years, I really could sit and chat with a woman, but I always felt—I even told them this. I’d say, “Lena, listen, I’m talking to you, but it’s important to me that you know that my command of the language isn’t quite enough. I feel a little limited.”

46:01 Speaker 2 Wow.

46:02 Speaker 1 And later I really began to see it with new immigrants too. They can’t express themselves fully. Language is...

46:10 Speaker 2 It’s communication. It’s the way you—

46:13 Speaker 1 It’s your soul.

46:13 Speaker 2 Express yourself.

46:14 Speaker 1 Yes. Yes, yes, exactly.

46:15 Speaker 2 So what are these statuses?

46:17 Speaker 1 Oh, wow, that was many years later...

46:20 Speaker 2 So you’re learning the language, you’re there, and—

46:23 Speaker 1 Learning the language, starting to teach—

46:25 Speaker 2 And what do you do about the difficulty of missing your family? How often did you come to Israel?

46:30 Speaker 1 It was hard. Hard. We tried to come as often as we could. After we’d been there for a while, direct flights between Tel Aviv and Kharkiv suddenly started. It was like a miracle from heaven. When I heard about it—

46:38 Speaker 2 Geulah, Geulah.

46:39 Speaker 1 Exactly. And the prices were relatively reasonable too. So we’d go from time to time. For example, for my father’s fiftieth birthday, we surprised him and went for a day and a half. And because my husband’s family was there, we could even leave the children with them and travel. Imagine that. Today I can’t find anywhere to leave the children. In that respect, it was actually simpler there.

46:58 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

46:58 Speaker 1 …

46:59 Speaker 2 Is there help there?

47:00 Speaker 1 Wow, help—don’t talk to me about that. It’s a sore point. Yes. You should know, when I got there, I’d come from Israel. Come on, I was a real balabusta: scrubbing the floor, straining my back. I get there, and my husband says to me, “Here, you’re not the one who does that.” I said, “What, excuse me? Someone else is going to wash the floor?” “Yes, it’s…” Anyway, he says, “Come on, come on. Two hours, just two hours.” Fine, two hours. One thing led to another, and you get hooked. I think that’s, uh—he also brought me a letter the Rebbe wrote to a shlucha, saying she needed to get more help, and you—

47:36 Speaker 2 And today you can show him that letter too.

47:39 Speaker 1 In Israel, by the way, it’s terribly hard to find help.

47:41 Speaker 2 Right.

47:42 Speaker 1 Aside from the fact that it’s terribly, terribly expensive. I learned from this that you need to use your strengths for the higher-level things, the things only you can do, and let someone else do the other things.

47:56 Speaker 2 Exactly right.

47:57 Speaker 1 Listen, she washed my dishes, washed the floor, folded my laundry. I never let her do the washing. After all, uh, it’s too high a price when someone ruins your washing machine. You can—

48:08 Speaker 2 How is it so simple there? Are there a lot of women available, and is it very cheap too?

48:11 Speaker 1 You arrive there as an Israeli with an Israeli salary, and you’re already rich. Okay? You’re not an oligarch. There are huge class differences there. There’s the majority, ordinary people, and there are the oligarchs. There aren’t many people like us. There were a few, there were families like that, but, uh, so you can easily hire someone local. When I say “easily,” I mean that over the years there was some inflation and prices did go up, but it was ten shekels an hour.

48:40 Speaker 2 Wow.

48:41 Speaker 1 Yes. And there’s no daycare, either.

48:45 Speaker 2 So that’s who raises the—

48:46 Speaker 1 From age—yes, there’s no daycare. From age two, there’s preschool. So until age two you have to have someone at home. At first I said, no way, I’m going to set up a daycare here. I tried. Listen, I even managed to get funding from someone in Israel to set up a daycare. There was an empty room in the shul. Nobody went for it; nobody wanted to send their child. Really. I told myself, no, my daughter needs other children around her and all that. But no, because first of all, they had caregivers at home. It was very hard for me to trust someone and leave her alone with the baby. We installed cameras. There was a stretch when I didn’t have anyone, because one woman didn’t work out and it was hard to find someone. But in the end, most of the time there was a caregiver at home with a baby. I think I always had a baby under two at home, or almost always, and then she’d do light housework. Let’s say they don’t know how to wash floors. They really don’t do a proper floor-washing like in Israel. Just a wipe-down.

49:36 Speaker 2 No, I know, but—

49:37 Speaker 1 A wipe-down.

49:37 Speaker 2 But, but it’s a kind of help. Like you said, to—

49:39 Speaker 1 Of course.

49:40 Speaker 2 Wash the dishes.

49:41 Speaker 1 Of course. No, it’s an enormous help. I’d be sitting—what do I mean, sitting?—at school, teaching at the institute, and during a break I’d message the helper: “Ten onions, peel them, dice them,” and so on. I’d get home and it gave me so much more freedom to make use of my time and do what I wanted to do. You know, it reminds me a little of AI. You’re in that world, where people say, “What, is ChatGPT going to replace us?” No.

50:05 Speaker 2 No.

50:06 Speaker 1 It gives us the time to invest in the things we can do and it can’t.

50:11 Speaker 2 Right, the AI assistant—no, and it’s a personal assistant too. I tell it what I need, and I just pay it twenty dollars a month.

50:19 Speaker 1 Yes, exactly. But it does the things you don’t have to do yourself. On the contrary, you need some help—

50:25 Speaker 2 So, so I—

50:25 Speaker 1 And it saves you time and resources.

50:27 Speaker 2 Let’s get back to Chani in Kharkiv with several small children.

50:32 Speaker 1 Uh, depends—depends which year you’re talking about.

50:34 Speaker 2 We can tell the whole story. I’m trying to get a picture of you, to build the character.

50:42 Speaker 1 An avatar.

50:43 Speaker 2 Yes, the avatar, so that if we want to replicate you, you know. That’ll probably happen soon.

50:48 Speaker 1 Clone me.

50:49 Speaker 2 So, is what pulls you out of the difficulty and the homesickness the fulfillment of doing things?

50:56 Speaker 1 Uh, yes. For me, the hardest part really was friends and family, the distance. Really, yes, people—

51:02 Speaker 2 It’s also not just—there’s also the social side—

51:03 Speaker 1 “Oh, you don’t have kosher food, you don’t have…” Come on, that’s nothing. It really is nothing. Anyone who thinks that’s the problem—no, absolutely not. Let’s say for people who depend on baby formula or things like that, it’s hard, but you get used to it. You get used to it, you eat a lot more home-cooked food, and you have help too, so—

51:22 Speaker 2 That’s exactly what I mean. Is the difficulty the language, or also that there weren’t women your age to be friends with?

51:26 Speaker 1 Both. What do I mean, that I didn’t have friends? There was a period when I did. There was a teacher sent by the Ministry of Education for a year—really sweet, a little older than me—and it was fun. But they weren’t my friends from back home, and I didn’t have those friends there.

51:40 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

51:41 Speaker 1 I mean, something gets cut off. Sometimes I’d see a friend I hadn’t seen for five years. You talk on WhatsApp and feel as though you’re sharing your life with her and all that, but it’s not the same. And I’d also bring people over to me. Listen, I used to market Kharkiv.

51:53 Speaker 2 What do you mean?

51:54 Speaker 1 I was always telling my sisters, my cousins, my friends, my parents, “Come visit, we’ve got…” You have to understand, I hosted a lot of people over the years because I was marketing the place.

52:05 Speaker 2 Ah.

52:06 Speaker 1 For example, one cousin came to stay with her husband and three children for a week. After them, another cousin came with her husband and four children.

52:12 Speaker 2 And what was it like for you? Did you enjoy having people there?

52:15 Speaker 1 Of course.

52:15 Speaker 2 And it didn’t put a burden on you? It wasn’t a burden?

52:17 Speaker 1 It did, it did, but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. And Kharkiv really is a beautiful, big city, you have no idea, with beautiful parks. For them, a weeklong visit was actually more practical than one in Israel. They enjoyed it.

52:30 Speaker 2 Nice. And did you have a home big enough to accommodate them, or—

52:33 Speaker 1 Later on, yes. But even at first, in the little apartment we rented, I hosted people. I had a tiny room with a pullout bed. My cousin, my cousin Esty Wasserman—I don’t know if you know her, she’s a film editor—I really pulled her over to visit me. Then she said, “Wow, how cool, I want to make a film here,” and she made a short film there because she needed that location. She needed it to look like the Soviet Union.

52:55 Speaker 2 Wow.

52:56 Speaker 1 And then she came to visit me another couple of times afterward.

52:58 Speaker 2 I like that you use the word “marketing.”

53:00 Speaker 1 Yes.

53:00 Speaker 2 You really wanted people to come, so you sold them on it, sold them the product.

53:04 Speaker 1 In general, I think what helped me a lot was realizing that I could look at Kharkiv one way or I could look at it another way.

53:11 Speaker 2 Like anything in life.

53:12 Speaker 1 Like anything, yes. But there it really made a difference to me. I mean, come on, in the end you step outside onto a broken sidewalk. On the other hand, you keep walking along that broken sidewalk and you reach a beautiful park.

53:22 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

53:23 Speaker 1 And the healthcare—let’s not even start talking about healthcare in Ukraine. On the other hand, wow, there’s dental treatment. People come from Israel for it because of the prices, and really… So it was about seeing the good things. I would actually tell my family, “Come get dental work done, stay with us for a vacation,” and so on. Yes, a friend of mine came to stay with me for a few days.

53:43 Speaker 2 For dental treatment?

53:44 Speaker 1 No. She came because—I just talked her into coming.

53:47 Speaker 2 Through your marketing.

53:47 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, yes. When they arrived, I’d make them—wow, I can’t believe I’m telling you this—a kind of brochure. When you arrived, you’d have a map of the city, important phone numbers, and a basic Russian-Hebrew phrasebook—

53:59 Speaker 2 Really.

53:59 Speaker 1 A Russian-Hebrew phrasebook.

54:00 Speaker 2 Okay, a proper trip.

54:01 Speaker 1 A whole production.

54:02 Speaker 2 Really, yes.

54:02 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, a production. I also dreamed of bringing groups to Haditch. Wow, we had Haditch too, three hours away from us. A dream, an absolute dream of a place. There’s something there—I think that’s also something that really connected me to Tanya and—

54:14 Speaker 2 Did you go there often?

54:15 Speaker 1 Yes, we went a lot. Well, a lot—not once a week, but every few months.

54:21 Speaker 2 It was practically within reach.

54:22 Speaker 1 Yes. And because my husband was— I mean, you have all the shluchim in Ukraine, but Russian isn’t their native language, and for him it is. Suddenly there was a young shliach who was a native Russian speaker. So he also did things beyond Kharkov that involved all of Ukraine. There’s an organization, a sort of Ohr Avner youth movement, called EnerJew, and he worked with them. He was what they called EnerJew’s rabbi in Ukraine. The counselors weren’t Chabad; there were mentors and coordinators who were responsible for the counselors, and they would put together the content and send it to him all the time. He’d go over it and add to it, and they’d ask, “Give me a story on this or that topic.” So we were busy with that too, and thanks to it—I say “thanks” because it was something very special for me—we traveled around Ukraine a lot. We’d go to Shabbatonim—

55:09 Speaker 2 Ah.

55:09 Speaker 1 With teenagers. Wow, it was just incredible.

55:12 Speaker 2 What was your role in Kharkov?

55:14 Speaker 1 In Kharkov, broadly speaking, the institutions, the educational institutions—that was the work—

55:20 Speaker 2 What was your role?

55:22 Speaker 1 At first I started as a teacher, and then, once you’re there on the ground—look, I arrive and right away I see, this needs doing, and this needs doing, and this needs doing.

55:30 Speaker 2 You see what’s needed and do it, yes.

55:32 Speaker 1 Yes. So I did all kinds of projects at the school and at the institute.

55:36 Speaker 2 By the way, there’s a term for that: an overall coordinator.

55:39 Speaker 1 An overall coordinator? What does that mean?

55:40 Speaker 2 Someone who sees the big picture, gets down to the details, and does the—

55:42 Speaker 1 The critical person who comes in and...

55:44 Speaker 2 Not critical—that’s an inspector. Someone who grasps the big picture and knows how to manage it, including telling people what to do. It’s sort of—

55:53 Speaker 1 I think we also brought a very fresh perspective, because in the end, you know, the shluchim had been there for years, and—

55:58 Speaker 2 Fresh, young, and creative.

56:01 Speaker 1 Yes. But you can’t come to a place and immediately start making sweeping changes. It doesn’t work that way.

56:06 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

56:07 Speaker 1 It really— And again, the language was part of it too.

56:10 Speaker 2 Were there changes you wanted to make?

56:11 Speaker 1 There were a lot of things I saw and thought, “Wow, I want to...” But I knew I also had to earn the trust of the people there. I have to tell you, the Ukrainians—at least most of the ones I worked with—are wonderful people. They can be very rigid, and there are all kinds of things I could give you a whole list of. Communism still has a huge influence there. You can see it in the way people think.

56:31 Speaker 2 Amazing.

56:32 Speaker 1 Really. But in general, wonderful people. Warm, too. Not one of them ever commented on my language. Think about that. Think about it. There I was, speaking with mistakes—with mis-takes—giving a class.

56:44 Speaker 2 Were you bluffing with confidence?

56:46 Speaker 1 At first, without the confidence. And then they’d tell me, “Your Russian is amazing,” when I knew it wasn’t. They really were incredible women. That was part of what made it so hard for me later: I didn’t have them anymore.

56:57 Speaker 2 Wow.

56:58 Speaker 1 I didn’t have them. Listen, people become part of your life.

57:01 Speaker 2 Of course.

57:02 Speaker 1 So we worked at the elementary school and the institute. I worked at the institute, and my husband worked at the school too. There was also a sort of small cheder. At the same time, he worked with the youth throughout Ukraine, which included the youth of Kharkov. So it all fit together really well. We did a two-week camp in Odessa, for example, and lots of Shabbatonim.

57:20 Speaker 2 What do you mean, “we did”? What did you do?

57:21 Speaker 1 “We did” means my husband came as the rabbi. That involved preparation beforehand, and I helped him a lot behind the scenes, putting together activities and content. I really loved doing that. I’d do it in Hebrew, and then they’d translate it into Russian. And he helped me translate so many things too. It was fun. The fact that he came knowing the language helped me so much. I think it gave us an incredible head start. So yes, Shabbos here, Shabbos there—we went to Shabbatonim in almost every part of Ukraine.

57:49 Speaker 2 So you’re there—and that joy, that choice you made, was it with you the whole time?

57:55 Speaker 1 No. I went through a very, very hard period of feeling, “What am I doing here?” I felt I wasn’t fulfilling my potential.

58:07 Speaker 2 Why? Because you were—

58:08 Speaker 1 Because of the language.

58:10 Speaker 2 But your husband was there to help you and all that.

58:13 Speaker 1 That wasn’t it. That wasn’t it. Over the years I spoke with other shluchos about this, and it turns out it’s a very real thing.

58:21 Speaker 2 Do you think it was just the language, or are you saying—

58:22 Speaker 1 Do you know English? Let me ask you: do you know English?

58:24 Speaker 2 Yes.

58:24 Speaker 1 If I put you in the United States right now, do you speak English like a native?

58:28 Speaker 2 No, but I spent a year abroad. I was a teacher.

58:31 Speaker 1 Oh, so you’re at a level where you feel very comfortable with the language, and—

58:34 Speaker 2 Today, yes. But I went there knowing nothing and jumped in at the deep end. I didn’t have Hebrew there.

58:39 Speaker 1 I personally felt that—

58:40 Speaker 2 I didn’t have Hebrew there, so—

58:43 Speaker 1 So you had no choice.

58:43 Speaker 2 So I had no choice.

58:44 Speaker 1 No, I believe my Russian is at that level, but I don’t know. It depends, in a way—

58:50 Speaker 2 Of course I’d look for a place with Israelis. Of course I’d look for a place—

58:52 Speaker 1 You feel stupid. You feel that you’re... Say I’m doing educational work: I was in charge of informal education at the institute. We did incredible things. In fact, something we’d had to stop in the middle just arrived in our shipping container. We had a sticker album that I designed—listen, sticker by sticker—for this huge yearlong campaign. And it’s not that nothing came of it. It did happen, and it was beautiful. But I always felt that—

59:16 Speaker 2 No, but what you’re saying is, you’re looking for that “wow,” for many more people. That’s also something you could have there.

59:23 Speaker 1 At that stage, it wasn’t about that.

59:24 Speaker 2 Today, when you do something, you influence and manage to reach a much bigger audience. Sometimes I think people who are so active are like an eagle in a birdcage.

59:40 Speaker 1 I don’t think that was my problem there. I actually love working closely with people. You know, that’s why, after two years of giving talks, we just had to start our shlichus. Because I felt that no matter how many thousands of people I met in Israel—

59:51 Speaker 2 Ah, you wanted the...

59:53 Speaker 1 Listen, at the institute I had classes of three girls, and they were my life. My life. That Esther who’s here now—listen, I raised her, if you’ll excuse me. What do I mean, raised her? I was her teacher from first grade until we left.

1:00:09 Speaker 2 So let’s see—

1:00:09 Speaker 1 She’s your soul.

1:00:11 Speaker 2 We could sit there—

1:00:12 Speaker 1 Because there were several families and people, too. You work with people not just on—not just with one soul. Say there’s a woman who has a daughter Mousia’s age. So we’re friends, and we’re both mothers, and we see each other all the time through the school. They come to us for Shabbos. And she might call me to ask for the recipe for the spreads—

1:00:31 Speaker 2 All the different circles. In every circle.

1:00:33 Speaker 1 In a way, it’s more like family, in terms of how much time you spend with her, how much you talk with her, how much you mean to her. You have a chavrusa with someone, and it changes her life.

1:00:41 Speaker 2 So where did you feel a lack of meaning? Where was the point when you felt despair?

1:00:44 Speaker 1 It was more at the beginning. At the beginning, there was this gap between how many things I wanted to do and how slowly I was moving. You can’t just do everything you want right away. And there were other difficulties around us, all sorts of difficulties.

1:00:59 Speaker 2 What was it like coming to Israel and then going back in those first years?

1:01:04 Speaker 1 Wow. That was one of the ways I could tell. I would cry. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go back—that’s not quite right.

1:01:11 Speaker 2 Being there was—

1:01:11 Speaker 1 It was clear that I was going back.

1:01:13 Speaker 2 That was your home.

1:01:14 Speaker 1 Uh...

1:01:14 Speaker 2 Or wasn’t it?

1:01:15 Speaker 1 In the very early years, I remember my husband saying to me, “Wow, Chani, you shine in Israel.”

1:01:19 Speaker 2 Wow.

1:01:20 Speaker 1 It was really hard for him to see that. He said, “Maybe, maybe this isn’t for you.”

1:01:24 Speaker 2 Wow, how hard.

1:01:25 Speaker 1 It was hard for me too, because, again, I was very self-aware and I could see it. But I kept telling him, “I’ll learn the language, and that’ll make the difference for me.” I hoped so. I hoped that would make the difference, and—

1:01:39 Speaker 2 So you were still filled with the desire and the belief that this was what you wanted—the shlichus.

1:01:44 Speaker 1 Yes. And I really believe things take time. Look, when you see things from the perspective of years—any successful company you come across—

1:01:51 Speaker 2 Of course.

1:01:52 Speaker 1 Nobody had it easy in the first year, or even in the first ten years, right?

1:01:56 Speaker 2 Fine, but you can also do shlichus in Israel.

1:02:00 Speaker 1 Ah, right, okay. You can be on shlichus anywhere—I’m the one who says that all the time. But I felt we were needed there.

1:02:05 Speaker 2 Wow.

1:02:06 Speaker 1 So you don’t want to leave. There are people who—

1:02:08 Speaker 2 You believe in it.

1:02:09 Speaker 1 We worked with families. You’re asking what else we worked with? With the young families.

1:02:13 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

1:02:13 Speaker 1 We were like—

1:02:14 Speaker 2 You believed this was the right path.

1:02:16 Speaker 1 Yes, of course.

1:02:17 Speaker 2 Okay.

1:02:17 Speaker 1 That’s what kept me going.

1:02:18 Speaker 2 No, but it’s still hard for a husband to say, like—

1:02:21 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, yes. That was more at the beginning, and really, little by little—

1:02:24 Speaker 2 What was it like to come back? You arrive in Israel happy and excited, and—

1:02:29 Speaker 1 Yes, with a huge, heavy load of luggage, and you can’t—you can’t bring most things because they need a freezer, or they won’t survive the trip, and so on. At some point you also say, like, enough. I don’t want to be dependent on things from Israel. You have things in your pantry at home, and you’re thinking, this will run out in a week, that will run out in a month. So at some point I let go of almost everything. I had an actual list of about ten things—maybe tahini, things that really weren’t available there but were basics for me—that we made sure to bring. Or if someone was coming and asked—

1:02:56 Speaker 2 What to bring.

1:02:57 Speaker 1 What to bring, those were the things. But, um, you adapt, you make allowances. Yes. There’s no question. And I also remember saying to myself, “Okay, you have difficulties here. Fine. If you did something else in life, you wouldn’t have difficulties? What, I’d get to Israel and everything would be perfect? Everyone has difficulties in life, so mine are the difficulties of shlichus.”

1:03:17 Speaker 2 Beautiful.

1:03:17 Speaker 1 In a way I even told myself, like, my difficulties are the difficulties of shlichus, and there’s a sense of privilege in that. And I was also always trying to—actually, I wasn’t trying, I did it. I would look at myself from the outside all the time and say, this is not something to take for granted. For example, I would daven with the children at school. We didn’t have national-service volunteers. They arrived only two weeks before the war; that was the first time they’d come. Um, we wanted that, we worked to make it happen. I said, “When my daughter starts first grade...” It took a little longer, but eventually it happened. I took responsibility for the girls because there had been something there before, but, um—

1:03:52 Speaker 2 It wasn’t there anymore.

1:03:53 Speaker 1 Somehow it had ended because things got complicated, and—so I was the one who davened with the children, said the brachos with them, washed hands with them. Basic, basic, basic things. Teaching—listen, children come to you in first grade, and there are a lot of children in Ukraine who don’t go to preschool. They’re with their grandmother or mother until then, and they arrive in first grade for their first Jewish studies lesson. What do you teach them?

1:04:11 Speaker 2 What do you teach them?

1:04:12 Speaker 1 You simply start with the fact that the world was created in six days, and there’s a Creator, and there’s Shabbos. And the children look at you like this. They know there’s, like, Hashem. It’s talked about a lot. Ukraine is a very religious country—not our religion, but the concept is familiar. But they’re stunned. Stunned by so many things. And women in Torah classes—do you know what it’s like to tell Torah stories for the first time? Things we’ve always known about. Have you ever thought about how a woman reacts when she first hears the story of Yaakov and Rachel and Leah, and... he wakes up in the morning and discovers it’s—like, shock. Um—

1:04:47 Speaker 2 You also have to know how to make it accessible.

1:04:48 Speaker 1 Right. It’s a challenge, but it’s an incredible privilege. Incredible. You sit there afterward—I mean, how can I—

1:04:54 Speaker 2 When you talk about it, I can feel how fulfilled you are.

1:04:57 Speaker 1 Yes, because—but you have to stay aware of it while you’re there. I mean, I remember saying Shema with the children—ninety children in the school, usually between ninety and a hundred, an elementary school from first through fourth grade—and I would daven with them and say Shema, and so many times I would just tear up. I’d say to myself, “Listen, you’ve been given this privilege.”

1:05:12 Speaker 2 Wow.

1:05:12 Speaker 1 You’ve been given this privilege. And I remember telling myself, “Don’t get used to it. Don’t get used to that feeling of privilege, because—

1:05:19 Speaker 2 Listen, you have—

1:05:19 Speaker 1 No, we get used to good things.

1:05:21 Speaker 2 I’m saying, you’re giving us a glimpse into your diary, because you really, really talk to yourself. It’s beautiful.

1:05:26 Speaker 1 You could say that.

1:05:27 Speaker 2 It’s beautiful.

1:05:28 Speaker 1 Yes. Yes. Listen, you also spend a lot of time with yourself.

1:05:31 Speaker 2 It’s not—that’s just it, though—

1:05:33 Speaker 1 It gave me so much—

1:05:34 Speaker 2 But I think you could spend a lot of time with yourself because, even before that, you were someone who talked to herself.

1:05:39 Speaker 1 I don’t know. Like—

1:05:40 Speaker 2 Maybe it became more pronounced there.

1:05:41 Speaker 1 Yes. No, I hadn’t noticed before that I was someone who... The awareness, everything I’m telling you, is in hindsight. I didn’t see it that way at the time, but there—and in marriage, too. It’s you and your husband. Now, again, we had family there and all that, but still, still—

1:05:56 Speaker 2 That’s the concept—that’s what I’m saying, that’s the Rebbe’s concept of shlichus. It gave couples—I don’t know how it works for everyone—but, go and figure yourselves out, without [unclear] there.

1:06:08 Speaker 1 Exactly. You don’t have your friends, comparisons, any of that. It’s like a desert island.

1:06:13 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:06:15 Speaker 1 And I really did have a lot of time with myself. A lot. And I like being with myself. Put me on a twelve-hour flight alone—I look forward to it.

1:06:25 Speaker 2 Wow.

1:06:26 Speaker 1 Because I like to think and write and read and work through things on my own. It’s tiring too, sometimes—

1:06:32 Speaker 2 In the end you need—

1:06:33 Speaker 1 Too much.

1:06:33 Speaker 2 You must get tired of yourself.

1:06:35 Speaker 1 I get tired of myself a lot. Um, anyway, that sense of privilege really guided me. And I would also tell myself, “Chani, you wanted this. You wanted this. This is what you wanted; this is what it looks like. This is what it looks like.”

1:06:50 Speaker 2 Now you’re saying “wanted,” “chose”—you’re talking about the past, because you have that moment of choice, that powerful point, and then it carries you forward.

1:06:58 Speaker 1 Yes, and I would also really tell myself, like, “You’re choosing this at every moment.”

1:07:02 Speaker 2 Beautiful.

1:07:03 Speaker 1 Sometimes, you know, people ask me, “What, isn’t it hard for you? Don’t you want to go back to Israel?” Questions like that. And sometimes I do want to go back, and I choose to stay. That’s a real thing. Come on, we all face things in life—even someone who works at a job they absolutely love has parts of the job—

1:07:20 Speaker 2 That they like less.

1:07:21 Speaker 1 Yes. So what, do you get up and leave? No. If you have a deeper purpose and you’re clear about what you want, then you’re there. You’re committed to it.

1:07:31 Speaker 2 And then you’re on shlichus, and you’re [unclear].

1:07:35 Speaker 1 Yes. Listen, we bought an apartment.

1:07:37 Speaker 2 Wow.

1:07:38 Speaker 1 Yes. I mean, it was clear to us that we were staying there.

1:07:40 Speaker 2 Beautiful. Let’s—

1:07:43 Speaker 1 Yes.

1:07:43 Speaker 2 Fast-forward.

1:07:44 Speaker 1 When we came back from—we were here during COVID. I was in my ninth month and had planned to give birth there. Then, um, an Israeli doctor—we consulted... Suddenly, one of the other shluchos, who was pregnant at the same time as me in another country, also a country similar to Ukraine—it was two days before the airports closed—said to me, “Chani, I’m going to Israel. The doctor recommended that I go to Israel. I’d suggest you look into it right now.” It hit me like a bombshell, because I was already so certain I was going to give birth there. I’d been in touch with the midwife throughout the pregnancy, and I knew what the delivery room looked like—everything. Then suddenly she says this to me, and we said, “What do we do?” It was Motzaei Shabbos, and they announced that Monday’s flight would be the last flight to Israel, and then the skies would close. So we said, okay—a mashpia, a mashpia, then a doctor friend. He was actually a Ukrainian Jew who spoke fluent Hebrew. He knew the medical care in Israel and the medical care in Kharkiv. He told us unequivocally, “You can go to Israel now.”

1:08:37 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:08:39 Speaker 1 At the time, I thought that was the craziest trip I’d ever taken.

1:08:43 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:08:43 Speaker 1 And then we decided not to travel on Sunday because it was too crazy. We said we’d wait until Monday and take the last flight, and if we were meant to get to Israel, we’d get there. Now, we packed without really knowing for how long. And you’re packing to give birth at the end of winter. What do you pack? Summer clothes? Winter clothes? Um—

1:08:58 Speaker 3 How many children did you have?

1:08:59 Speaker 1 Ah, three. This was my fourth birth. We drove eight hours to Kyiv, and on the way we got a message that foreign citizens weren’t being allowed into the country. Now, my husband isn’t Israeli. We were all packed into the car. Okay, fine. We got to the airport and told the driver to wait outside, and only once we told him we were on the plane should he turn around and head back to Kharkov. We tried everything, listen. Somehow, only at the gate did they remember to ask, and somehow we managed to get through. They’d been told to ask, but they didn’t really want to make a whole fuss either, so somehow it worked. In Israel, they held us up for about an hour and a half. Listen, we got to passport control and it was empty, empty, empty. Not a soul there—just us and the bureaucracy. In the end they let us in. So here we were, arriving in Israel after a long time away, and we couldn’t see my family.

1:09:53 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:09:54 Speaker 1 We had to quarantine for fourteen days. No exceptions, nothing, and I was nine months pregnant. We somehow found an available apartment belonging to my husband’s aunt in Ganei Tikva, in central Israel. Listen, it was the middle of nowhere. I mean, compared to Nachlas Har Chabad, it’s central Israel, but for me it was the middle of nowhere. No community, nothing, nothing, nothing. Just us, on our own. You couldn’t go shopping. You weren’t allowed to go more than five hundred meters from home.

1:10:16 Speaker 3 It was like the forties. It really felt like a different place.

1:10:20 Speaker 1 Yes. After two weeks we saw my parents. They came to us, and then, a few days later, I gave birth. I’d arrived at around week thirty-seven, something like that. Luckily, I usually wear loose clothes, so you couldn’t tell I was pregnant. And then we stayed in Israel for quite a while, about four months.

1:10:39 Speaker 3 In Ganei Tikva?

1:10:39 Speaker 1 In Ganei Tikva. There were no flights.

1:10:41 Speaker 3 Wait, okay.

1:10:41 Speaker 1 Later there were flights, but you had to put your name on a list and wait on standby. And we were in Ganei Tikva.

1:10:47 Speaker 3 And what does the energetic Chani Moskowitz do after giving birth?

1:10:51 Speaker 1 Right, I’d just given birth, and I remember telling myself, “Good thing I’ve just given birth.” I was like, “Here’s your chance to take it easy after the birth. Take your time.”

1:11:02 Speaker 3 But four months is a long time.

1:11:04 Speaker 1 Four months, but that includes the time from when we arrived, the birth—and time goes by quickly, and also—

1:11:09 Speaker 3 Tell me, where were the children?

1:11:11 Speaker 1 At first, the schools weren’t open.

1:11:12 Speaker 3 Ah, right.

1:11:13 Speaker 1 We also told ourselves, “You like coming to Israel? Well, enjoy it. You have this stretch of time.” Hakadosh Boruch Hu had given us this, so let’s enjoy it. It really was during that period—the bris had ten people, including the mohel. That was it. I gave birth wearing a mask, never mind. Later, when the schools reopened, we enrolled the children in the Chabad kindergartens in Yehud, which were the closest, a drive of twenty-something minutes. The community in Yehud is wonderful, such special people. To this day, Chabad Yehud has a real place in my heart. We were in touch with them for about two months, and—

1:11:49 Speaker 3 Dina Wolfi is a cousin?

1:11:52 Speaker 1 Her husband is my father’s cousin. And that was it. We went back to Kharkov. Listen, when you return after four months, you need a moment to remember how to speak Russian. The children had forgotten.

1:12:06 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:12:07 Speaker 1 It took them two weeks to get it back. Mussi came home crying: “Mom, I can’t talk to anyone.” Not kindergarten, sorry—she’d just started first grade.

1:12:15 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:12:15 Speaker 1 “Mom, I can’t talk to anyone.” It was crazy. I thought, oh my, just four months and this happens. Then, once we were back, I felt I needed an outlet in Hebrew. This was the time of lockdowns here and there, different waves, and suddenly I thought, “Hey, I’ll do Zoom sessions.” I was always looking for things to do; I’d arrange for someone to lead a farbrengen and so on. I started doing Zoom sessions for high schools.

1:12:40 Speaker 3 What did you talk about there?

1:12:41 Speaker 1 I told stories. Listen, when you’re on shlichus, you’re never short of things to tell. You’re living a story.

1:12:46 Speaker 3 You were telling a story as it unfolded.

1:12:48 Speaker 1 Yes. Even the smallest everyday things are inspiring for the girls. So I’d take a few stories and draw out a message, something they could really take into their lives. I remember doing one for Sukkos, or later for 22 Shvat, Yud Shvat—all the dates. I enjoyed it so much. Then Naama Oishi[?]—do you know her?

1:13:09 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:13:10 Speaker 1 She’d started posting statuses right at the beginning of COVID, and one day I thought, maybe I could do the same thing and have some kind of outlet. I spoke to Naama—I remember calling her, or maybe we messaged on WhatsApp—and she said, “Wow, Chani, listen, this is made for you. Come on, I’ll tell people about you, and you can start.” I said, “Wait, but how? What? Who?”

1:13:29 Speaker 3 To tell the... to tell the—

1:13:31 Speaker 1 To show people what life was like. Before that, I’d been posting on Instagram, but only halfheartedly, because I had lots of people from Kharkov following me. I kept thinking, “Am I speaking Russian? Am I speaking Hebrew? What am I even trying to convey?” In a way you feel split, because you’re one person in one setting and another in the other—not just on shlichus, but when you’re working in two languages, it’s really hard.

1:13:49 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:13:50 Speaker 1 Now everything is in sync for me here—the community and what I do and all that. But back then I felt I really couldn’t post things on Instagram because it was strange. I was speaking to a different audience, in a different way. So I started posting content there, just showing things. It was right around 19 Kislev and Chanukah, with lots going on. I just showed it; I hardly said anything. Then one day there was a Hayom Yom teaching I liked, so I talked about what it meant, and suddenly lots of girls responded. So many girls, most of them not Chabad. “Wow, this is the first time I’ve heard this.” And someone wrote to me—

1:14:25 Speaker 3 This was right at the beginning of—

1:14:26 Speaker 1 “You’re thawing the frost I grew up with, with chassidic warmth.”

1:14:28 Speaker 3 Say that again, say that again.

1:14:29 Speaker 1 “You’re thawing the cold I grew up with, with chassidic warmth.”

1:14:33 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:14:34 Speaker 1 And there were all these responses. After a month I realized I was collapsing under it, because I’m someone who likes to give everyone personal attention. I’d post a status and get a hundred responses, and I’d answer each one, and each exchange would turn into a conversation.

1:14:46 Speaker 3 Oh no.

1:14:47 Speaker 1 I was collapsing. Anyway, Shabbos came and I was exhausted. I have a family and a life too, you know?

1:14:52 Speaker 3 Exactly.

1:14:53 Speaker 1 I told my husband, “Listen, that’s it. I’m done with this. I’m stopping.” Now, on Shabbos I like reading letters from Igros Kodesh. Anyway, I opened Igros Kodesh and came to a letter. I don’t remember the exact words. At the time I posted something about it, but I think that book may not even have made it here from Kharkov. It was something about spreading Chassidus—

1:15:16 Speaker 3 I hope it wasn’t about the frost.

1:15:18 Speaker 1 About not stopping that work and carrying on despite the difficulties. Listen.

1:15:24 Speaker 3 Wow, wow, wow.

1:15:24 Speaker 1 I thought, okay. I hadn’t even intended to—I hadn’t opened it looking for—

1:15:28 Speaker 3 Right.

1:15:28 Speaker 1 I’d just felt like opening it. So I said, okay, I need to continue. And I really did feel I was having an incredible impact there, that I had something to give.

1:15:38 Speaker 3 It was fulfilling for you too.

1:15:39 Speaker 1 Yes, it was fulfilling, but it didn’t fit into my schedule. So over time I learned to get a little less drawn into conversations, even though I really love them. But what can I do? I don’t have that much time at my disposal.

1:15:54 Speaker 3 How did you do that, though? Someone writes to you and you don’t respond?

1:16:00 Speaker 1 No, I do. You know, you can let a conversation grow, or you can bring it to a close.

1:16:03 Speaker 3 I see.

1:16:04 Speaker 1 Someone writes something, and instead of starting with, “Wow, listen, you’re so right,” and going on and on, you say, “Thank you so much, I’m really glad to hear that.” You don’t have a choice.

1:16:11 Speaker 3 These days, with emojis—

1:16:11 Speaker 1 Though there are a few girls who—

1:16:12 Speaker 3 Emojis are really good for that.

1:16:14 Speaker 1 It’s easier, yes. Again, there really are a few girls I met through my status who simply became friends. But you can’t do that with everyone. And it really took a lot of time out of my life, and I didn’t know why I was doing it. I just kept going. It was nice, it was enjoyable, nothing more than that. And I knew I was having an impact. Since that letter from the Rebbe, I also knew it was another part of my shlichus. I really told myself: this is my shlichus in Russian, and this is my shlichus in Hebrew.

1:16:40 Speaker 3 Were there things you’d think about posting and wonder, “Should I post this or not? Am I revealing too much about myself?”

1:16:46 Speaker 1 To this day. First of all, at the beginning I didn’t put my kids in the videos, until I said to myself, “Chani, sweetheart, you do J-Kids with your own kids, so what’s the difference?”

1:16:53 Speaker 3 Right.

1:16:54 Speaker 1 Because even there, the first J-Kids videos aren’t with my kids.

1:16:58 Speaker 3 Wait, I don’t know how much—how much time we have, because look, I’ve got you interested.

1:17:01 Speaker 1 Wow, wow, wow, oh my goodness. Well, what can I say? We’ll go with the flow. We said we would, so there you go.

1:17:05 Speaker 3 Yeah.

1:17:05 Speaker 1 I’ll tell you how J-Kids started in the first place.

1:17:07 Speaker 3 One second, though, we’re still on the statuses. We’ll get to J-Kids in a moment.

1:17:09 Speaker 1 Oh, okay. No, because part of—you asked me about the difficulties.

1:17:13 Speaker 3 Right.

1:17:13 Speaker 1 Part of what was hard for me was feeling that I had a lot of talents I wasn’t using.

1:17:17 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:17:18 Speaker 1 All the writing and the films I used to edit.

1:17:20 Speaker 3 The digital camera that apparently...

1:17:21 Speaker 1 Yeah. Now, there were things there that needed a little work here and there, but not on the level of... It just makes me happy. I don’t know how to explain it. Writing songs—and I used to write songs in high school, too. All our class anthems and things like that were mine. Back in fifth grade, I wrote our group’s anthem. It’s really such a part of me. And... one day a woman from the community approached me, a mother with children around my kids’ ages, and she said, “Chani, listen, we’re becoming more observant, and I want to show the kids Jewish content in Russian.” She told me, “I searched all over YouTube. There’s nothing.”

1:17:54 Speaker 3 Nothing.

1:17:54 Speaker 1 I said, “That can’t be.”

1:17:55 Speaker 3 There’s nothing, so make some.

1:17:57 Speaker 1 I said, “That can’t be”—I had a hard time believing it. Come on, it’s YouTube! So I typed “Jewish videos for kids” in Russian, and everything else that might, might, might lead me to something. Nothing. Listen, there wasn’t even some badly translated thing. Nothing.

1:18:12 Speaker 3 Okay.

1:18:12 Speaker 1 And the idea started taking shape in my mind.

1:18:15 Speaker 3 What do you mean?

1:18:16 Speaker 1 I said to myself, “Wow, Chani, here’s a chance to get back into making videos a little.” And listen, it took an incredible amount of time.

1:18:23 Speaker 3 What? What did you do?

1:18:24 Speaker 1 I simply started with an alef-beis video. At first it was going to be in Russian, and then I said to myself, “If you’re putting this much work into Russian, do it in Hebrew and English too.” It was a matter of making versions of it.

1:18:35 Speaker 3 So what did you do? Tell me what you actually made.

1:18:37 Speaker 1 I started making videos. At first I didn’t want to use my own kids. They were also very little—[unclear] was three or four; Mussi was maybe four. So I found two children through an agency for child actors. I looked for a boy with some sort of peyos. At first I wanted to use children from the community, but then I said, “I won’t involve them.” I didn’t yet know where this would go or what would come of it, and I didn’t want to take responsibility for people I had another kind of responsibility toward. And it just worked. We uploaded a video. First, I made a questionnaire in Forms and posted it in groups. I circulated it and tried to focus my ideas: What would you want to see? This, that, and the other. Then we made a first video about alef-beis in the park, a video about Shabbos, and a video about colors.

1:19:22 Speaker 3 Did you start in Russian?

1:19:24 Speaker 1 I started in all three at the same time. Russian, Hebrew, English. We made them in three languages simultaneously.

1:19:29 Speaker 3 Oh, right, the children don’t move their lips?

1:19:31 Speaker 1 No.

1:19:31 Speaker 3 I don’t know the videos. I need to watch them.

1:19:33 Speaker 1 They don’t move their lips at all.

1:19:34 Speaker 3 Beautiful.

1:19:35 Speaker 1 At first I hired a videographer. I was more responsible for the songs. But gradually—this is hard for me with things like this—by the time I explain to you what to do, I could do it myself. At first he edited, and then I told him, “Send me the footage and I’ll edit it.” And then I started filming. Come on, when you’re making a video, nothing beats filming it yourself. You film what you need, what you see in your head.

1:19:55 Speaker 3 That’s—you know, today you do that through the art of prompting. You tell the artificial intelligence. It can produ—if you know how to express yourself well—

1:20:02 Speaker 1 Yeah.

1:20:03 Speaker 3 It’ll know how to help you.

1:20:04 Speaker 1 To the ex—however much...

1:20:05 Speaker 3 Right.

1:20:06 Speaker 1 You see something in your head.

1:20:07 Speaker 3 Right.

1:20:07 Speaker 1 Prompt or no prompt, it can’t see exactly what you see. It can give you something that makes you say, “Wow, that’s nice, it’s very close,” but you have a vision.

1:20:15 Speaker 3 But at the end of the day, your twenty-four-seven is limited.

1:20:18 Speaker 1 Right, right. That’s why I’m not making more videos, even though I really want to, and I have one waiting—a song that’s almost ready. Anyway, I started uploading the videos, and listen, they caught on. The Russian ones did too, but I was shocked by the Hebrew ones. They had so many viewers. I don’t know, apparently there wasn’t really a niche for... I don’t know, cute songs in particular. At first I made them to familiar tunes, alef-beis... Then I said to myself, “Come on, Chani, you love writing songs. Go for it.” I needed to give myself a little push, because it was hard for me to put myself out there.

1:20:51 Speaker 3 As a—

1:20:52 Speaker 1 Look at the videos. Not one of them says a word about Chani Moskowitz. Nothing. Just J-Kids. J-Kids. Lots of people don’t even know it has anything to do with me. Most—basically, nobody knows it’s connected to me unless they know me.

1:21:04 Speaker 3 Why?

1:21:05 Speaker 1 Just because.

1:21:06 Speaker 3 Because you didn’t feel you’d made it?

1:21:08 Speaker 1 No. I felt I’d made it, but—

1:21:10 Speaker 3 Because you felt J-Kids was you, only the world didn’t know it. Like a pen name, a stage name.

1:21:14 Speaker 1 Sort of. I felt I didn’t need to put myself out there. I wanted it to be J-Kids.

1:21:19 Speaker 3 Okay.

1:21:21 Speaker 1 In hindsight, that was a mistake. You made something—put your name on it! But you know, at the time I was in a place where I think I was also a little nervous. I didn’t know how it would be received. Maybe it was even a kind of pride, that I wouldn’t put my name out there until I knew what would come of it. Yeah. In practice, something did come of it. It’s like—

1:21:39 Speaker 3 Did you find it fulfilling?

1:21:41 Speaker 1 I enjoyed it so much. It cost me money, of course.

1:21:43 Speaker 3 Right, so you put money into it without earning that money back.

1:21:45 Speaker 1 Right, and I saw it as—I said to myself, “I’m investing in a hobby.” Someone else pays for, for—

1:21:51 Speaker 3 A class, a craft class.

1:21:52 Speaker 1 Yeah, a class is a class. This was my own media class. I enjoyed it immensely, and it didn’t cost me as much as it might sound, because I was in Kharkiv. There was a studio there that made a backing track for me for a thousand hryvnia, you know? In Israel, I don’t think I could have afforded it.

1:22:07 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:22:08 Speaker 1 I also had more time because I had help then. So that’s it. It just kept growing and growing, and then—

1:22:14 Speaker 3 Wait, so you have—how many songs did you release?

1:22:18 Speaker 1 I don’t know.

1:22:19 Speaker 3 You don’t even know, and you’re J-Kids.

1:22:20 Speaker 1 No, because—

1:22:21 Speaker 3 Ask J-Kids.

1:22:22 Speaker 1 I have ChatGPT. I don’t know, there’s a song about saying a bracha, one for every holiday. There are songs about brachos. All the things I said to myself—

1:22:29 Speaker 3 So what drives you is the creative part? Like, “Wow, I came up with something, wrote a song, and made it happen.” What drives you?

1:22:34 Speaker 1 Both the creativity and filling a need. There’s no song about brachos. None. Search everywhere. There’s no song that goes through one bracha after another.

1:22:42 Speaker 3 Yeah, but if it were just about filling a need, you could ask someone else to make it now. I think it’s your own creativity.

1:22:49 Speaker 1 So it’s both. It’s a combination.

1:22:49 Speaker 3 You’re thinking about the world of creativity.

1:22:50 Speaker 1 Yeah, listen. Five in the morning—or late at night—the kids are asleep, and I sit down at the piano and just—

1:22:56 Speaker 3 You compose the music?

1:22:56 Speaker 1 I close my eyes and a song comes out. Yes, they’re my songs.

1:22:59 Speaker 3 Your own melodies?

1:23:00 Speaker 1 Yes, yes.

1:23:01 Speaker 3 Oh! That’s what I’ve been doing now with ChatGPT, with this artificial intelligence. I thought—

1:23:05 Speaker 1 You left a link, you know. Intelligence that isn’t artificial.

1:23:09 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:23:09 Speaker 1 By the way, that’s much more chochmah than binah. Speaking of binah, because—

1:23:14 Speaker 3 Yeah.

1:23:14 Speaker 1 In the end, however much binah you have, you need that flash of inspiration, the melody.

1:23:20 Speaker 3 Right.

1:23:20 Speaker 1 A melody is—composing a melody is chochmah.

1:23:21 Speaker 3 Wow, no, but a melody is... you know, in—

1:23:25 Speaker 1 Yeah.

1:23:25 Speaker 3 You’re an incredible person.

1:23:26 Speaker 1 I don’t know about incredible. I just gave myself the space to say, “Look, you love doing this. Go and do it.” I think there are lots and lots of women who know how to compose.

1:23:33 Speaker 3 No, I also really liked—

1:23:34 Speaker 1 And never get around to it.

1:23:34 Speaker 3 I really liked that you invested in a hobby. That’s beautiful.

1:23:37 Speaker 1 Yes, because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to do it until I sort of changed my—made a switch in my head and said—because at first I was doing it because there was a need for it. Then I saw how much I enjoyed it, and I saw that it was costing me money. So I told myself, “Have fun.” Just enjoy it.

1:23:50 Speaker 3 How amazing.

1:23:52 Speaker 1 Yes, I had no idea. And it really was a matter of not committing to anything. Every video I put out was like, here you go. I don’t know if there’ll be another ten videos or another twenty. Even now, I don’t know.

1:24:02 Speaker 3 But if I came to you now and said, “I want you to make me a song like that,” would you do it?

1:24:06 Speaker 1 No, no.

1:24:07 Speaker 3 Because that’s not—because then it starts becoming an obligation, work, and...

1:24:10 Speaker 1 Because if I find time to compose a song, I’ll use it to keep developing my channel.

1:24:16 Speaker 3 I see.

1:24:17 Speaker 1 I mean...

1:24:18 Speaker 3 Interesting.

1:24:19 Speaker 1 Look, it started from zero. Nobody knew about it; my name wasn’t even on it. Today it has almost three thousand subscribers, if not more. I have two and a half million views there.

1:24:26 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:24:27 Speaker 1 It’s crazy. It really is crazy. And that’s not counting the Russian; the Russian is a separate channel. At first everything was together, until I realized it was just a mess, a mess, a mess. So I took down all the Russian videos and made a separate channel.

1:24:35 Speaker 3 I’ll probably send you a video next week of Libi singing.

1:24:40 Speaker 1 Yes, it’s addictive. My one-and-a-half-year-old son says, “J-Kids”—that’s the beginning of it.

1:24:44 Speaker 3 Of the opening.

1:24:46 Speaker 1 And...

1:24:46 Speaker 3 So, where we are now is that you’re doing J-Kids, and I don’t know where the twenty-four—apparently ten—twenty-four hours, it’s like...

1:24:52 Speaker 1 I don’t know. I think it’s because I loved almost everything I did. What do I mean, “almost everything”? There were—you know, again, everything comes with difficulties. Suddenly Premiere crashes on you, and you don’t like that, but...

1:25:06 Speaker 3 Now, did you teach yourself Premiere?

1:25:07 Speaker 1 Yes, yes.

1:25:08 Speaker 3 Why does that seem so obvious?

1:25:09 Speaker 1 What? Well, did I go to Premiere school or something?

1:25:12 Speaker 3 Yes, some people go and take classes for a hobby.

1:25:14 Speaker 1 By the way, that really is something I’d like to do. With a lot of the things I taught myself, I think, wow, if I had the time, I’d sit down for a bit and learn properly. Because, look, it’s trial and error, and it’s hard. So I open YouTube and search, “How do you do such-and-such?” and learn one function out of a million.

1:25:31 Speaker 3 True, but it’s the one you need. In the end...

1:25:33 Speaker 1 Yes, exactly. In the end, that’s how I moved forward with it.

1:25:36 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:25:39 Speaker 1 Where are we in the story?

1:25:40 Speaker 3 So, we’re at the point where you—you bought an apartment in Kharkiv, and you’re there until Moshiach comes.

1:25:45 Speaker 1 Until Moshiach comes.

1:25:46 Speaker 3 And we meet here.

1:25:47 Speaker 1 And at some point...

1:25:48 Speaker 3 Now we need to make a long story short.

1:25:51 Speaker 1 Yes. In 5782, we were out somewhere on the street, and my husband said to me, “Chani, you enjoy speaking Hebrew and expressing yourself in Hebrew so much. A podcast would really suit you.” In Kharkiv. Now, nobody in Israel knew what a podcast was, myself included. But he listened to them in English, and he really, really liked them. They’d already been around much longer in America. I said to him, “What’s a podcast?” I really needed an introduction to the term. In Israel, it just wasn’t a thing. And he was very interested in the whole field. He even thought about doing one over Zoom, and he told me, “No, this suits you. This suits you.” We even considered doing a podcast together, because I told him, “I’m not doing it over Zoom. No way. I hate the phone, Zoom.” So he said, “Listen, let’s buy the equipment and see where it goes.”

1:26:36 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:26:37 Speaker 1 He ordered this equipment from Amazon. It arrived at our house, and while it was on its way, it was already the period when people were warning about a war. The warnings went on for two months. It was a nightmare, the uncertainty. One of the craziest times—and I was at the beginning of a pregnancy, nauseous, in bed. Of course, we asked a mashpia whether to stay. This whole story of our staying wasn’t as simple as it sounds, okay? “We’re staying,” and that’s that. Staying was a huge decision.

1:27:08 Speaker 3 A responsibility.

1:27:08 Speaker 1 When you have no idea what’s going to happen. You’re responsible for your children, and... It really wasn’t simple at all. And baruch Hashem we have mashpi’im, because otherwise I don’t know what I would have done. I was lying in bed, completely wiped out. Everyone experiences pregnancy differently. I was nauseous and exhausted—there were days when I couldn’t even walk to the school.

1:27:30 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:27:32 Speaker 1 And every day they’d say, “There’ll be a war tomorrow.” But then there wasn’t. “There’ll be a war tomorrow.” But then there wasn’t.

1:27:36 Speaker 3 A bit like what’s happening up north now.

1:27:37 Speaker 1 Yes. And we kept getting emails from the Foreign Ministry too. I’m from Israel, my husband is from the United States. “Leave. Later we won’t be able to get you out,” and so on. And nobody knew—nobody had any idea what would happen. At the same time, the Ukrainians were saying, “Nothing is going to happen.” That was their... Never mind, I wouldn’t call it a tactic, but that’s how it was. The president even posted a video the day before the war, a kind of street interview with people saying, “Nothing’s going to happen. Everything will be fine.” And it caught people unprepared. It was a miracle that the community, the shul, had sacks of buckwheat and flour. Anyway, the war started. I really will keep this short, because it’s an incredibly long story.

1:28:17 Speaker 3 No, you have a show about it too. A talk. Can people book you to speak?

1:28:20 Speaker 1 A talk, yes. “An Entire Life in a Carry-On Bag.” I’ve already changed the name to “Shlichus as a Way of Life.” I adapt it, because you don’t understand—we’ve given the talk close to a hundred times already.

1:28:30 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:28:30 Speaker 1 Which is crazy. I’ll tell you in a moment how that started. But it never sounds the same twice.

1:28:38 Speaker 3 Of course.

1:28:38 Speaker 1 We went through such an incredible process along the way. Think about it: the first talk was three weeks after we arrived. We stood there speaking, and I cried and cried and cried and cried—

1:28:46 Speaker 3 Now, that’s what I want to—this is what interests me. More than the show itself, I’m interested in the—the—

1:28:51 Speaker 1 Yes.

1:28:51 Speaker 3 The person behind the show. Okay, so the whole story is in the show. People can book it.

1:28:55 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, yes.

1:28:56 Speaker 3 Please.

1:28:57 Speaker 1 Anyway, we—

1:28:58 Speaker 3 You don’t make money from J-Kids. Is it the same story with this, with your public persona?

1:29:01 Speaker 1 Yes. I’m also thinking about how to build on J-Kids and turn it into something, with Hashem’s help. I’ll tell you about that later. Anyway, we arrive in Israel with nothing. A carry-on bag, one outfit for each child, boots on our feet—refugees in every sense. Listen.

1:29:18 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:29:19 Speaker 1 There’s no way to explain it. What does it mean to be a refugee in Israel, when you arrive in Nachlas Har Chabad and everyone’s like, “Okay, you’ve made it to Nachlas. It’s good for you here, isn’t it?”

1:29:31 Speaker 3 A place of rest. You always wanted this.

1:29:33 Speaker 1 You always wanted it, you always missed it. Now you’re here. But you have nothing. You have no idea what will happen to your belongings. You have no idea what’s happening with the people who, until a day ago—or a week ago, because the journey took time—were an inseparable part of your life. And when I say inseparable, I mean people I sometimes spoke to several times a day. We had a Jewish neighbor on the floor above us. She was part of our lives. Her children would come to us for Shabbos. Someone who hasn’t experienced—

1:30:01 Speaker 3 The awareness of that.

1:30:01 Speaker 1 —this kind of shlichus doesn’t understand how much of your identity it is.

1:30:06 Speaker 3 Wow. And you’re aware that you’re refugees, and you don’t know when you’re going back, or if you’re going back at all.

1:30:10 Speaker 1 Nobody knows what will happen. At first I thought, okay, maybe it’ll be one month. Then I realized it wouldn’t. So I bought the children school supplies so they could have some kind of normal end to the school year, while telling myself there’s no way this won’t end.

1:30:23 Speaker 3 Wow. Th-the—

1:30:23 Speaker 1 That’s why we didn’t pack properly, by the way. All the predictions were talking about two or three weeks.

1:30:28 Speaker 3 Did the four months you spent in Israel during COVID prepare you a little for this?

1:30:32 Speaker 1 No, because then we were in a kind of bubble. And during COVID, we knew it was temporary. This was different. We’d also packed: we came to Israel with three or four suitcases. That’s an enormous difference from arriving with nothing. Listen, when I tell you nothing, I mean nothing. You have to go and buy things, if you’re lucky enough to be able to. People gave us bags of clothes. Listen, people were cleaning out for Pesach. It was Adar II, and I was getting bags of clothes from people. Some people were just such good souls. One woman, for example, sent me things with the tags still on. She told me, “I order a lot from abroad, and some things work out and some don’t.” Some of those things really worked for me, and some of the clothes had stains and holes.

1:31:11 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:31:11 Speaker 1 And you’re used to being very much the one who gives, and I’m crying and crying. At first we were staying at my sister’s house, and she said to me, “Chani, I’m not bringing you a single bag without going through it first.”

1:31:21 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:31:22 Speaker 1 Um, and my amazing sister reached out to a few women who have businesses—Hadas, who has children’s clothing, Hadas Mini Love, and Sivi.

1:31:35 Speaker 3 Yes, yes.

1:31:36 Speaker 1 And Tekini sent us things.

1:31:38 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:31:38 Speaker 1 Just incredible, incredible. But nothing was enough, because you have to outfit an entire family from scratch. Then they opened a warehouse in Kfar Chabad. One of the strangest things: all the companies’—everything they couldn’t sell goes to the warehouse, okay? And at first I said, there’s no way I’m setting foot in that place. It was just too hard for me.

1:31:58 Speaker 3 Humiliating.

1:31:59 Speaker 1 Too hard for me. Not humiliation in other people’s eyes; it’s your own personal experience.

1:32:03 Speaker 3 Humiliating in your own eyes.

1:32:04 Speaker 1 Yes, like, to go there and— Then we had something in Kfar Chabad. Um, and around that time we found an apartment, because we’d already said, come on, we need to live in a place of our own. After a few weeks we moved in—now, we had nothing. We found an apartment with a table and chairs, a fridge, one bed, and we had to get everything else.

1:32:20 Speaker 3 And you kept sharing all this on your status?

1:32:23 Speaker 1 Yes, yes. It was like a movie, like a do-documentary, but—

1:32:28 Speaker 3 Right—

1:32:28 Speaker 1 Live.

1:32:29 Speaker 3 Do you have it all saved?

1:32:30 Speaker 1 Uh, I think you can find it by date in the Instagram archive. In Google Photos. And yes, I shared that I took Mussi to school for the first time. We didn’t know what was going to happen, and I—and someone wrote to me, “You can see the trauma in your eyes.” Everyone started analyzing me, what I’d been through and what I should have done, or maybe should have done.

1:32:49 Speaker 3 That you were experiencing post-trauma.

1:32:55 Speaker 1 And... then we—I said, come on, let’s stop by the warehouse and see. It was at the entrance to Kfar Chabad, near the vocational school. We went in, and the moment I walked in, all that feeling went away. It was like, wow, blankets! Wow, pillows! Wow, car seats! Listen, you suddenly understand what you’d been giving people all those years.

1:33:13 Speaker 3 Beautiful.

1:33:15 Speaker 1 There are so many people in need in Ukraine. When we were at the school, we had a dual responsibility. The Rebbe says to care for people’s material and spiritual needs. You see a child wearing shoes that are too small, you have to do something about it. We’d take children to buy shoes, glasses—those are things you have to take care of, and you do it from a place that’s, thank G-d, very healthy and strong.

1:33:33 Speaker 3 But you’re always the one giving, not necessarily—

1:33:36 Speaker 1 Yes.

1:33:36 Speaker 3 It’s more about the feeling.

1:33:36 Speaker 1 But no, I couldn’t have imagined what it did for them. Do you understand what I mean? And suddenly I’m saying, I have nothing. What does “I have nothing” mean? Thank G-d, it’s not that I had nothing, but financially you can’t outfit an entire life in a month. So at first you say, let’s just buy what we absolutely need. Then you realize you need everything. Everything. We went a few weeks without a vegetable peeler, just because I told myself we didn’t need one. And then there are silly little things, listen, things you don’t even think about day to day. There’s no list of everything you need. There isn’t.

1:34:11 Speaker 3 It’s like putting together a whole trousseau for a wedding.

1:34:14 Speaker 1 Everything. Getting married with four children.

1:34:15 Speaker 3 Yes, right.

1:34:16 Speaker 1 Yes, I was already pregnant.

1:34:18 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:34:19 Speaker 1 I arrived in Israel in my third month. And nobody knew I was pregnant.

1:34:24 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:34:25 Speaker 1 Somehow I made it here. On the way, there was an incident in Kishinev; I needed an IV. We got dehydrated, there were no bathrooms along the way, all that. And I hardly told anyone, because it was still so early. Um, I don’t remember what I wanted to say now.

1:34:43 Speaker 3 Now you—I want to get back to the podcast. Did you bring the podcast equipment?

1:34:48 Speaker 1 We were in Israel.

1:34:48 Speaker 3 Did you bring the podcast equipment?

1:34:50 Speaker 1 No, we arrived with a carry-on bag. Then after, um, about three weeks, a month, we realized—no, sorry, it took a little longer. After Pesach we suddenly heard about a company. You know, in every crisis there are people who do business. A company that was operating right under fire was bringing shipments from Ukraine to Israel, because a lot of people had taken the same route and needed that service. And there was someone from the community, one of the people who’d stayed there. We always kept a key at the shul, and we needed someone to go into the house anyway. Listen, I’d left dishes in the sink, laundry in the machine—the dishes were rusty and stank. It’s impossible to describe. And right after we left, he’d also gone in to empty the freezer and fridge and take things to the shul, because there were shortages. They needed every piece of meat. We already had wine for Pesach, all sorts of things.

1:35:39 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:35:42 Speaker 1 So we decided to bring over some suitcases. It was terribly expensive, terribly expensive. Each suitcase cost several hundred dollars to bring.

1:35:50 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:35:50 Speaker 1 So what do you put in them? What do you put in them? And it’s terribly hard to have a stranger walking around your home. “Open that cupboard; show me that on a video call.” Emotionally, even being taken back into the house like that was terribly hard.

1:36:04 Speaker 3 It’s your home. Wow.

1:36:05 Speaker 1 Terribly, terribly hard. We’d lived in that apartment for over five years. My daughter Saar was born while we were living there; we’d moved there relatively soon after arriving. And we’re packing, and my husband tells him, “The candlesticks, the Rebbe’s dollars, and the kesubah. The kesubah.” Then my husband mentions the podcast equipment, and I say to him, “Mendel, what? That’ll take up a quarter of a suitcase.” He says, “Chani, it’s important.”

1:36:34 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:36:34 Speaker 1 Now I really can tell you: you see me doing things and all that, but he’s the strength behind it. I was broken. I was broken—

1:36:43 Speaker 3 Listen, he said it was important because he—

1:36:45 Speaker 1 He said, “You’re in Israel now. We don’t know how long we’ll be here. You have equipment; let’s bring it. Maybe we’ll do something with it.”

1:36:51 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:36:51 Speaker 1 That’s how it was. And the whole thing with the talks started because we found ourselves in a vacuum. Okay, they arranged buses to get people out. There were a few things we could do remotely as part of our shlichus, and we kept asking people how they were. People you’d been in touch with every day—one was in Turkey, one in Hungary, one in Germany, one in Canada, another in Eilat. So it was, “How are you? How are you?” Until the crying all day over WhatsApp had more or less run its course, and everyone was very much in a victim mindset.

1:37:21 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:37:22 Speaker 1 And when people met you, they made you feel that way too. Most of them didn’t mean to.

1:37:27 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:37:28 Speaker 1 “Oh my, this is unbelievable—oh my goodness, do you realize how crazy this war is? When will you go back? What will you do? And how are you paying for the apartment you’re living in now? It must be so hard.” Like that. And you tell yourself, I’m taking all of this in.

1:37:47 Speaker 3 I can’t go on like this.

1:37:48 Speaker 1 I can’t—it isn’t helping me one bit, not one bit. Then one day my husband and I were sitting there, truly broken. The children were already in school; we were home alone, with a total lack of purpose. After what I told you I felt in Kharkiv, this was an enormous contrast. And I was thinking, what, that’s it? Is my shlichus over? Will I ever return to my shlichus? My shlichus stayed there.

1:38:15 Speaker 3 Wow. What does “my shlichus” mean? Who am I? Who am I?

1:38:17 Speaker 1 Who am I? What am I without Kharkiv? What is shlichus, anyway?

1:38:20 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:38:21 Speaker 1 And then you tell yourself: we’re here through hashgachah pratis. The concept of hashgachah pratis had sounded a little clichéd to me, because I grew up with it and with the whole story about the leaf. But there’s a Hayom Yom, one of the sayings in Hayom Yom, that says that if the Baal Shem Tov says even a leaf is subject to hashgachah pratis, how much more so every person, and all the more so every Jew. And then you say, wait a second. I went through something here, this whole journey, all of it. I’m supposed to be here now. It isn’t by chance. You keep feeling that something happened, there was a crisis, you were thrown somewhere, and you’re here by mistake.

1:38:59 Speaker 3 And it’s also very easy to be a victim here.

1:39:01 Speaker 1 Right. That’s our automatic response.

1:39:03 Speaker 3 A victim of the situation.

1:39:04 Speaker 1 Right, and the blame—people say it.

1:39:06 Speaker 3 And...?

1:39:07 Speaker 1 The name of the neighboring country and the name of its president—I’m even afraid to say them. It’s not normal. The most natural thing is to say, “Right,” and to keep looking for support. There was an incredible support network in Israel because so many families had arrived. There was a storeroom and all kinds of other things. Suddenly someone would tell you, “If you come...” Then we got a message that a clothing store in Jerusalem was giving free clothes to Ukrainian women on a certain day, during certain hours. And you think, “Should I go?” But my husband said, “Chani, no. Don’t.” We had more or less the basics. I don’t think we’d stocked up on anything. I mean, Yom Kippur comes around: a kittel, a machzor—everything has to be bought from scratch. Everything, everything. You have nothing. Nothing.

1:39:48 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:39:49 Speaker 1 And the birth. I’d had so many things from the older children. So, nothing—everything again, everything from scratch, down to the undershirts. And then we realized we had to—

1:39:59 Speaker 3 Get up.

1:40:00 Speaker 1 Um, understand that the situation had changed.

1:40:05 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:40:05 Speaker 1 I mean, you can sit forever thinking, “Oh, what we had, what I lost.” It really is a loss.

1:40:11 Speaker 3 I believe you need to go through the stages of grief.

1:40:13 Speaker 1 Right.

1:40:14 Speaker 3 But at what point were we? Two weeks later? We’re talking about two weeks later.

1:40:17 Speaker 1 Two or three weeks later, we understood that if we kept thinking about what had been and what we’d lost—or maybe hadn’t lost yet, because we didn’t know what would happen—thinking about the past and the future—

1:40:28 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:40:28 Speaker 1 It wouldn’t help us.

1:40:30 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:40:30 Speaker 1 Not only wouldn’t it help us, there was a moment when my husband said, “I want us to look back on this period, no matter where we are, from whatever point in the world, and say, ‘Wow, we did the very best we could.’”

1:40:40 Speaker 3 Wow. You’re talking about where things stood then in... Kharkiv.

1:40:43 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, yes.

1:40:44 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:40:45 Speaker 1 He really is extraordinary. Without him, I wouldn’t have had the— I was broken, and he saw it as, you know, “This is where we’re being tested.”

1:40:55 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:40:56 Speaker 1 This is where we’re being tested. All your life, yes, you have challenges and difficulties and all that, but there’s no denying it—this was a major crisis. And you say—

1:41:04 Speaker 3 Where did the idea for the show come from?

1:41:06 Speaker 1 Um, someone asked me. I’m trying to remember, because several things happened at once. I was asked to speak on a Zoom call for donors to some organization in the United States. They wanted to raise donations for refugees from Ukraine and were looking for a woman who could tell them, more or less, what they’d been through, in English. Specifically someone connected to Chabad shluchim, but they didn’t want a man. They wanted someone who didn’t have the look, you know, the hat and suit, because for those people it would have been a barrier. Somehow they reached me, and I said, “I don’t know English.” He said, “Just say a couple of sentences in English.” I said, “Okay.” “That’s enough for us.” So I sat down and opened the Zoom on Motzaei Shabbos, a week and a half after we’d arrived. We were still staying at my sister’s house, and I started telling them. They sat there looking at me and crying and crying and crying and crying and crying and crying and crying and crying and crying and crying. Afterward, my husband said to me on the side, “Chaimush [unclear], listen, that’s quite a story.”

1:42:01 Speaker 3 Quite a show.

1:42:02 Speaker 1 Yes. Then, about a week later, a friend of my father’s who has a very large Chabad House in Israel contacted us. He said, “Listen, I want you to come speak at a women’s evening I’m holding for Rosh Chodesh Nissan.” Rosh Chodesh Nissan—and we’d arrived here on Rosh Chodesh Adar II. We told him, “We don’t know how to speak. We don’t do public speaking.” He said, “What could happen? What could possibly go wrong?” So we said, “All right, let’s do it,” because we’d decided to look for opportunities. We couldn’t just sit at home. We couldn’t sit at home.

1:42:35 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:42:36 Speaker 1 Listen, I’m telling you, when you sit at home like that, you go out of your mind.

1:42:39 Speaker 3 Of course.

1:42:40 Speaker 1 You go out of your mind.

1:42:41 Speaker 3 It shakes you.

1:42:42 Speaker 1 I made a few meals for people sitting shivah here, and suddenly that gave me a great deal of satisfaction. But I understood that it wasn’t—I mean, it wasn’t a routine. I couldn’t rely on it. So we went to his Chabad House, and there was—

1:42:55 Speaker 3 Did you sit down and write it out beforehand?

1:42:57 Speaker 1 Yes. We went to Ashdod together, just to see the sea for a moment. It was an unbelievable day. Then we sat down, took a few sheets of paper, and just poured everything out, poured it out and poured it out. First of all, what did we even have to tell? Suddenly you realize you have so much to tell from eight years on shlichus. And suddenly we realized that my husband’s childhood was quite a story too.

1:43:16 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:43:17 Speaker 1 Then, when we arrived—

1:43:19 Speaker 3 Now you see that your childhood is quite a story too.

1:43:22 Speaker 1 When we arrived, lots of people offered to help us. You know, people don’t know how to help, and you don’t know how they can help you either, so they say, “If you need anything...” One of the women who offered to help was Tzipi Koltaniuk.

1:43:31 Speaker 3 Oh, she’s wonderful.

1:43:32 Speaker 1 I knew her. I’d brought her to Kharkiv for a show, so we’d stayed somewhat in touch. Then I reached out to her. I said, “Tzipi, you know what? I need help.”

1:43:40 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:43:41 Speaker 1 I told her, “I have a kind of framework for the story, and I need you to give me tips on how you even get invited to places, how you do it—whatever you can tell me.” I don’t think she really gives talks like this, but—

1:43:56 Speaker 3 But she had worked with Hama.

1:43:58 Speaker 1 Exactly. I went to her house, and we sat together for about three hours. She was wonderful, just—

1:44:03 Speaker 3 Who could have?

1:44:03 Speaker 1 She gave me everything she had, and it saved me an incredible amount of time. Instead of learning everything the hard way, there were already so many things—forget it, I didn’t know how... I had to register as a small business. I’d never been self-employed, I mean, in that sense. I’d done lots of things independently, but for most of those years I’d received a salary from the Education Ministry. I did my work at school, and nobody paid me for anything beyond that. I was doing shlichus.

1:44:27 Speaker 3 You paid for your hobby. Yes.

1:44:29 Speaker 1 I was the one paying, exactly. And then suddenly you say, “Wait, how does this work?” Even now, I still don’t fully understand how it all works. Being self-employed is tough, and I fought for it a little because I knew I had something to offer. As soon as we started giving the talks, I felt there was something extraordinary here. We went to places where people couldn’t stop being moved and thanking us. Really—

1:44:56 Speaker 3 And the concept of a couple speaking together isn’t—

1:44:58 Speaker 1 Yes, yes.

1:44:59 Speaker 3 Usual.

1:45:00 Speaker 1 A lot of shluchos told us—people told us—that just seeing the two of us speaking together gave them so much. It was enjoyable; it really was. The biggest difficulty was finding a babysitter. I didn’t know anyone. That was genuinely the hard part. And then, actually, I think that now, telling you all this and looking at it with a bit of perspective, I can say that I let Hakadosh Boruch Hu lead me—my husband and me.

1:45:26 Speaker 3 You gave yourselves over to the journey.

1:45:28 Speaker 1 “Show us what You need. We’re ready.” And that saved me. About two months later, I was at a gathering of shluchos from Ukraine, and I saw that they were in a different place. Again, every city has its own story. Every family has its own story. How many years had you been there? The whole thing is incredibly complicated. And still, I felt that I was more stable because I was doing something, because I was active.

1:45:53 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:45:54 Speaker 1 All the time, it—

1:45:55 Speaker 3 Was that the first episode?

1:45:56 Speaker 1 The first episode—well, this was really when we started giving the talks, and I would always stay afterward and speak with women. Of course, we talked about shlichus. Because suddenly it was, “Wow, shlichus is so special, and I’d like to feel like a shlucha too.” And I’d say, “Wait, you can do shlichus in your everyday life. Hold on.” That’s how the whole idea of “Shlichus as a Way of Life” began. Then I thought to myself, wait, the Rebbe spoke all the time about technology, about using technology to spread the message. I have podcast equipment, and my husband encouraged me. He said, “Come on, go for it, go for it.” I said to him, “Who’s going to listen? Who’s going to listen?” Then I said, fine, I’ll put out five episodes. At most, there’ll be a five-episode podcast out there, and I’ll move on with my life. It was hard for me even to start, because I thought we might be going back. What do I mean, “might”? The plan was to go back; we just didn’t know when. So he said, “What does it matter? You’ll have five episodes, ten episodes, however many you manage before we go back. Maybe you’ll continue on Zoom, maybe people will come by from time to time. When you travel to Israel, you can record there.” Really, it was starting without knowing what would come of it—not just whether it would take off, but what would happen with me.

1:46:52 Speaker 3 Right. It really creates milestones.

1:46:55 Speaker 1 Yes. And throughout, I had this feeling that I needed to act. Not overthink it, not think too far ahead. Just do, do, do. I started the podcast in Sivan; it’s been exactly two years. I put up the first episode in Sivan.

1:47:08 Speaker 3 Who was on the first episode?

1:47:09 Speaker 1 Me. The first episode is nine minutes of me introducing myself.

1:47:12 Speaker 3 Ah.

1:47:12 Speaker 1 But I put it up together with the second episode, which I did with Dina Salmon, a shlucha in Kremenchuk, Ukraine. We simply talked about the uncertainty of the situation. And I did another two episodes with my cousins. Even then, it was like, people were wondering, “Where did you come from?” I didn’t want to spring it on people, because they didn’t even know what a podcast was. You had to explain: “Listen, a podcast is...” Who am I? What am I doing? What—

1:47:35 Speaker 3 Okay, you put up your first episode, and...?

1:47:37 Speaker 1 And they loved it. Women were saying things like—now you were—

1:47:40 Speaker 3 And then you came up with the “Shlichus as a Way of Life” branding?

1:47:42 Speaker 1 Yes, yes.

1:47:42 Speaker 3 So you went out—

1:47:43 Speaker 1 It just came to me. It just came to me.

1:47:45 Speaker 3 And did you make the logo?

1:47:46 Speaker 1 No. I actually asked Mushky Brichte[?] to make the logo. She’s an amazing graphic designer, and she’s also my brother-in-law’s sister. I knew her, so I said, “Come on, make me the basic design,” and... I use that logo for everything else.

1:47:59 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:47:59 Speaker 1 She also made the first ad for our talk. And she makes my cover images, by the way—that’s the one thing I’ve taken off my own plate. Yes. And that’s it; it just keeps going. It really does. I mean, there’s hardly a day when I don’t get a response. One day, a woman called me and said, “Can I call you?” She started telling me that she’d changed jobs after twenty-seven years of being miserable, because of one of the podcast episodes she’d heard. And she said, “You have to understand, that was a year ago. I don’t even remember which episode it was.”

1:48:25 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:48:27 Speaker 1 The feedback—

1:48:27 Speaker 3 How do you take that in? That’s actually something I wanted to ask.

1:48:30 Speaker 1 It’s incredible. Um...

1:48:30 Speaker 3 I think we should wrap up, because we could sit here talking for hours.

1:48:32 Speaker 1 Wow, oh my gosh, this is one of the longest— I have a podcast episode that’s almost three hours, but we’re not going to get there.

1:48:37 Speaker 3 Forget it, I want to ask... this.

1:48:38 Speaker 1 Um.

1:48:39 Speaker 3 I’m saying, hold on, let me wrap this up a bit, because we really could sit here and... You’re fascinating. You’re fascinating. I came in curious, and I’m leaving captivated. I really enjoyed this. How was it for you?

1:48:51 Speaker 1 Interesting. I feel a little like I’ve been on a therapist’s couch.

1:48:55 Speaker 3 Oh, really?

1:48:57 Speaker 1 Like I’ve just been pouring everything out. When I give talks, I’m very focused. I have an hour—

1:49:02 Speaker 3 Right.

1:49:02 Speaker 1 And I’m always really pressed for time.

1:49:05 Speaker 3 You speak for an hour, and you can steer it.

1:49:06 Speaker 1 Exactly. Once, we spent a Shabbos at Mayanot, at the Mayanot beis midrash, and we had all the time in the world. We just talked for five hours, until it was time to leave. It was unbelievably enjoyable.

1:49:14 Speaker 3 We could sit and talk for hours. But yes, I want to end with something that’s been on my mind this whole time. I’m curious what feedback means to you. Where—

1:49:27 Speaker 1 I’m back on the therapist’s couch. Just kidding.

1:49:29 Speaker 3 No.

1:49:29 Speaker 1 I’m joking. Um, I don’t know. I see feedback as something that echoes back to you—a response. Literally, feedback.

1:49:40 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:49:40 Speaker 1 It’s constantly giving me direction, guiding me. The feedback I got on my status posts at the beginning guided me.

1:49:47 Speaker 3 And if you didn’t get feedback? Would you feel like you weren’t in the right place anymore?

1:49:54 Speaker 1 Well, it also depends what you call feedback. For me, when I see that people are listening—when I see the number of listens—that’s a kind of feedback. You want to create something of value for someone, for some purpose.

1:50:02 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:50:03 Speaker 1 Yes. If, say, I see that a podcast episode didn’t catch on as much, I say, okay, that’s not quite the direction to go in. Next time I won’t bring on something in that style. In other words, I learn from it.

1:50:11 Speaker 3 It helps you tune in to the right frequency.

1:50:13 Speaker 1 Yes.

1:50:14 Speaker 3 The listens. But the... but the...

1:50:18 Speaker 1 And the responses.

1:50:19 Speaker 3 You get a response from someone saying, “I left my job,” and so on. What does that do to you?

1:50:23 Speaker 1 First of all, I tell my husband everything right away. Also because it’s all thanks to him, so he’s the first to hear.

1:50:29 Speaker 3 It belongs to both of you.

1:50:29 Speaker 1 Absolutely. It’s all thanks to him, really.

1:50:31 Speaker 3 Have you done an episode together?

1:50:33 Speaker 1 Yes, one little one. I’ll tell you, we wanted to start a podcast together, and then we got tangled up in questions. We said, who would it be for—men, women? I don’t know, it was... On Tu B’Av, we did an episode about relationships.

1:50:42 Speaker 3 I vaguely remember that.

1:50:43 Speaker 1 People sent me questions, and we answered them.

1:50:44 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:50:44 Speaker 1 Something sweet like that, a little lighter. But really, I ask him about everything, I consult him about everything. He’s the brains behind it. You need someone who...

1:50:55 Speaker 3 It belongs to both of you. Both of you.

1:50:55 Speaker 1 Yes, yes. So I tell him right away, and I just... I tell her, “I can’t take it all in. It’s impossible to take it all in.”

1:51:02 Speaker 3 Right, right.

1:51:02 Speaker 1 But it gives me the strength to keep going, because—

1:51:05 Speaker 3 Would you want to take it in?

1:51:06 Speaker 1 I’m constantly on the move.

1:51:07 Speaker 3 Would you want to take it in? I mean, do you embrace it?

1:51:09 Speaker 1 I enjoy it. And when I see feedback, I say, “Thank You, Hakadosh Boruch Hu. Thank you, Rebbe, for...” Just thank you, really. Thank you that I’m in a place where I feel everything I talk about: shlichus as a way of life.

1:51:23 Speaker 3 It really is, I—

1:51:24 Speaker 1 I feel that’s what guides me in life. And when you asked me just now when I started “Shlichus as a Way of Life,” I told you, a long time ago. Because when I look back, that’s what was guiding me.

1:51:34 Speaker 3 In seventh grade, you were already living shlichus as a way of life.

1:51:36 Speaker 1 It really guided me. It really guided me. I’ve always loved people. By the way, I didn’t mention this about my status posts: I put about two years into them, an enormous amount of my time, without knowing what for. In practice, when we started giving talks in Israel, I didn’t advertise anywhere—not once.

1:51:49 Speaker 3 No, you didn’t spend money on advertising.

1:51:51 Speaker 1 People already knew me.

1:51:53 Speaker 3 Beautiful.

1:51:53 Speaker 1 And that was—

1:51:54 Speaker 3 When we do something, we don’t know why we’re doing it.

1:51:56 Speaker 1 [unclear], but really, it’s about going with that gut feeling that there’s... there’s something there. You have this feeling. I don’t know, I feel it very strongly a lot of the time: this is what you need to do. Go and do it.

1:52:08 Speaker 3 Chani.

1:52:09 Speaker 1 It’s yours.

1:52:09 Speaker 3 Thank you so much. I found it fascinating.

1:52:11 Speaker 1 Thank you.

1:52:11 Speaker 3 I’m glad I gave myself the chance to get to know you.

1:52:14 Speaker 1 Now we need to think about when we’ll do the episode the other way around.

1:52:16 Speaker 3 Huh? Wait a second, let’s give this a moment... How do you immediately want to switch roles? Episode fifty. And what’s your dream for the podcast?

1:52:26 Speaker 1 Oh, wow. I tried to organize a podcast gathering—

1:52:30 Speaker 3 For the people on the podcast?

1:52:31 Speaker 1 For women who really love the podcast, together with some of the people behind it—

1:52:34 Speaker 3 Ah.

1:52:35 Speaker 1 And it was canceled. I don’t even remember why. That was a year ago, for the podcast’s first anniversary. My dream is simply for it to reach as many people as possible and achieve its goal. I think Chassidus literally changes lives, and I try to bring as much Chassidus as possible into the podcast. That’s my goal.

1:52:52 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:52:52 Speaker 1 Let’s not hide that.

1:52:54 Speaker 3 You’re not hiding it.

1:52:55 Speaker 1 No, I’m not hiding it—just the opposite. I tell everyone who listens to me. I say, “Do you want a tip for a good life? How do you... how do you—”

1:53:01 Speaker 3 But today Tanya and Chassidus have become much more widespread, and—

1:53:04 Speaker 1 You hear it from other places altogether.

1:53:06 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:53:07 Speaker 1 Yes. But still, I think it’s important to learn it the right way, from the right sources. Someone studies NLP and says it reminds her of Chassidus and all that. I’ve read books on NLP; I know it very well. Let’s not get it backward. We have an authentic Jewish source right here. It’s all there. It changes lives. And now, beyond the talks, I’m starting to give workshops on Chassidus, which—oh my goodness, how much I—

1:53:32 Speaker 3 Enjoy it.

1:53:32 Speaker 1 You do such beautiful things there with colors and art, and I think it looks—

1:53:35 Speaker 3 Wow, how wonderful. Maybe you could also do a workshop on melodies—how to compose a melody, or...

1:53:39 Speaker 1 I want to— No, so now I really see myself as— We were at a crossroads. We’ve now moved to Karmei Gat.

1:53:48 Speaker 3 Right, you’re on shlichus there.

1:53:49 Speaker 1 Yes, and people ask, “Are you going back to Kharkiv? Aren’t you going back?” We’ve been through so much with that question. It’s terribly complicated, and terribly hard to explain to people. People want to know, “Why aren’t you going back to Kharkiv?”

1:53:59 Speaker 3 Where are your in-laws?

1:53:59 Speaker 1 They’re there.

1:54:00 Speaker 3 Oh, they’re there.

1:54:00 Speaker 1 They’re there. About twenty percent of the community that was there is still there. The city is shelled every few days.

1:54:05 Speaker 3 Hashem protect them.

1:54:06 Speaker 1 Even getting there is an ordeal—a day and a half, nineteen hours on the road by car. It’s crazy. It’s terribly, terribly complicated. We thought about it a million times. Our hearts drew us there, but there are other considerations, and there are children, and it’s all so complicated.

1:54:23 Speaker 3 And today, are you in a good place with yourself?

1:54:26 Speaker 1 Every so often I have a day when I tell myself, “Go ahead. Cry. Miss it.” I really let myself dwell on it. I’m also in touch with people there. Listen, these are women—

1:54:38 Speaker 3 And here you have to start from the beginning.

1:54:39 Speaker 1 A woman who started—a woman who started because of me. What do I mean, because of me? It’s because of the Rebbe. But she reached out to me, and I went along with it, and we learned together as study partners, and I invested so much time in her. And today, listen, she keeps Shabbos. She married someone who also became observant.

1:54:54 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:54:55 Speaker 1 She observes the laws of family purity—everything, everything, everything. And we’re in touch. You can’t just put that behind you—

1:55:01 Speaker 3 No.

1:55:01 Speaker 1 And move on, as though you’re turning over a new page. It’s part of me. That’s why, even in the podcast introduction, I always say I was a shlucha in Kharkiv and now I’m a shlucha in Karmei Gat. I updated the promo, the opening, and it really is part of me. There are days when I dwell on it, but now it’s from a place of saying, “Chani, Hakadosh Boruch Hu is leading you. Go with Him.”

1:55:25 Speaker 3 It’s a signpost along the way.

1:55:26 Speaker 1 Absolutely. And how we got to Karmei Gat—that’s another story...

1:55:28 Speaker 3 Leave it, no, that’s an episode in its—

1:55:30 Speaker 1 That’s part two.

1:55:31 Speaker 3 No, every fifty—

1:55:32 Speaker 1 Oh, every fifty.

1:55:32 Speaker 3 Every fifty episodes I’ll come to you. Come on, we’re not doing that.

1:55:34 Speaker 1 Exactly. So, that’s it, and—

1:55:36 Speaker 3 One last question.

1:55:37 Speaker 1 Yes.

1:55:37 Speaker 3 What do you want to do when you grow up?

1:55:39 Speaker 1 I grew up a long time ago.

1:55:40 Speaker 3 No.

1:55:41 Speaker 1 I’m doing what I want to do.

1:55:43 Speaker 3 And you want to keep going.

1:55:44 Speaker 1 Yes. I want more hours in the day. I really feel that because I’m connected to Chassidus—listen, Chassidus is... No matter how much I say, it won’t... Listen, you do things with inner joy, with a sense of connection. You learn things about yourself. All this self-awareness you’re talking about is Chassidus, in the end. Yes, some of it came naturally to me, but a lot of it didn’t.

1:56:06 Speaker 3 No, you were also taught it at home.

1:56:09 Speaker 1 But—

1:56:09 Speaker 3 Let’s wrap up—

1:56:10 Speaker 1 Let’s.

1:56:10 Speaker 3 Because we could stay here a lot longer.

1:56:11 Speaker 1 So I strongly recommend learning Chassidus. If anyone wants a tip from me, that’s it: learn Chassidus. With Hashem’s help, I think I’ll also do Zoom classes and things like that for women. I’m working on it.

1:56:24 Speaker 3 Sounds like that’s the next plan.

1:56:25 Speaker 1 I’m working on it. I’m putting together a course called Chassidus by the Spoonful.

1:56:28 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:56:29 Speaker 1 Sort of—

1:56:30 Speaker 3 The combination of—

1:56:30 Speaker 1 As practical as possible. Really practical.

1:56:32 Speaker 3 But it’s not connected to a healthy lifestyle.

1:56:34 Speaker 1 No, it’s not connected.

1:56:34 Speaker 3 Because we didn’t talk about that at all.

1:56:35 Speaker 1 No, it’s not connected. That’s okay. In episode 150. Listen, everyone.

1:56:40 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:56:41 Speaker 1 Thank you, Chani. It was so sweet of you to come. It was just—

1:56:45 Speaker 3 I enjoyed it so much.

1:56:46 Speaker 1 Incredible. Thank you so much. Keep—

1:56:47 Speaker 3 Let’s keep doing incredible things.

1:56:49 Speaker 1 Until the next milestone.

1:56:50 Speaker 3 Onward and upward.

1:56:51 Speaker 1 With Hashem’s help. Thank you.