Rabbi Moshe Dikshtein - Be'er Sheva - Part 1

00:19 Speaker 1 Moshe Dickstein, good evening. How are you?

00:22 Speaker 2 Good evening.

00:24 Speaker 1 Moshe Dickstein is a shliach of the Rebbe shlita, King Moshiach. He lives in Be’er Sheva, but his shlichus extends across the entire Holy Land in many different ways. Moshe, please tell us a little about your background, so we can understand where you come from. Tell us about your family, your birth and childhood, and how you came to meet the Rebbe. Maybe we’ll start with “l’chaim,” Moshe?

00:50 Speaker 2 Ah, l’chaim. L’chaim. You say l’chaim; that will fulfill the obligation.

00:55 Speaker 1 All right. Fine, you can say l’chaim over tea. That’s good too.

00:59 Speaker 2 Then we’ll say it over coffee. Fine. L’chaim, l’chaim.

01:03 Speaker 1 L’chaim, l’chaim. Long live our master, teacher and Rebbe, King Moshiach, forever and ever. L’chaim, l’chaim, Moshe.

01:09 Speaker 2 Well, so, here’s how it was. I was born into the home of a father who was a Holocaust survivor. He didn’t like the word “survivor”; he called himself someone who had endured the Holocaust. He went through the Holocaust in the worst way imaginable—in the forests.

01:29 Speaker 1 Tell us a little about that.

01:31 Speaker 2 What? What?

01:32 Speaker 1 Tell us a little about that.

01:34 Speaker 2 Yes. He was in labor camps, concentration camps and ghettos. He also escaped into the forest and spent eighteen months—twenty months—in the forest. At the end of the war he was in an extermination camp called Majdanek, and his “job,” in quotation marks, at Majdanek was in the Sonderkommando. That meant taking the bodies of Jews out of the gas chambers to be burned.

02:04 Speaker 1 Hashem protect us.

02:06 Speaker 2 Hashem protect us, yes. Eventually the Red Army liberated the camp, and he went back to his hometown, Lutsk. There he received a “gift”: the Russians, the Communists, accused him of being a spy and sent him to Siberia for two years. He said Siberia was like a convalescent home compared to the six and a half years under the Germans.

02:41 Speaker 1 What can you say? May we never know convalescent homes like that.

02:44 Speaker 2 What? What?

02:45 Speaker 1 May we never know convalescent homes like that.

02:47 Speaker 2 Yes, exactly. In short, he arrived in Israel in 1950 with nothing, just a suitcase in his hand. In it were his clothes from the camps, sandals, a hat, a few other items and a small pair of tefillin. He had put on those little tefillin throughout all the years he was being moved from place to place. He still has them to this day. Boruch Hashem, he arrived in Israel. He had a brother and two sisters there, Zionists who had immigrated before the Holocaust. Later he was privileged to build a home and marry my mother. He was much older and had suffered terribly, and my mother wasn’t young either. When I was born, he called me “the king,” “the prince,” because after everything he had been through, he hadn’t believed he could have children. I was wrapped in cotton wool, treated like an esrog. Whatever I wanted, I got. Whatever I thought I wanted, I got. That was one side of it. But a Holocaust survivor’s home is also a very, very, very, very unusual home. Now, my mother was the daughter of a multimillionaire in Austria. Hitler, may his name be erased, came for them too, and all his property was taken away. My mother immigrated to Israel in 1938, when she was seven or eight. That millionaire, my grandfather, whom I never knew, would walk around Tel Aviv with a box, with a tray hanging from a strap, selling bagels. “Bagels, bagels, bagels.” Three years later he died of a broken heart. My grandmother raised all her children, and that was that. So it was also a very, very pampering home, but we had to be very, very high achievers.

05:11 Speaker 3 How many children were there?

05:13 Speaker 2 There was me, my brother—may Hashem avenge his blood—and my sister. We weren’t allowed to disappoint anyone. We weren’t allowed to disappoint our parents, and we made do with little. I mean, we wanted a lot of things, but we made do with little, because my father was a laborer who worked two shifts. My mother worked from home, sewing all kinds of shmattes to bring in a little more money. Just as an example, that chocolate pudding every child has at home nowadays—I first ate it when I was thirteen and a half or fourteen, in high school at Nechalim. At home we had margarine, not butter. Meals were mostly bread with jam and cheese, and lots of fruit. We ate meat only on Shabbos—and by meat I mean chicken, not beef. We ate beef only on Pesach. That was it. Now, our home was very—my father was very Zionist. When he arrived in Israel, he kissed the ground. He landed, kissed the ground and said, “Here they won’t bother me anymore. Here they won’t do anything to me.” But when he was walking through the Hatikva Market, someone shouted at him in Arabic, “What’s your name, Jew?” So he realized that the Land of Israel wasn’t quite what he’d imagined. Still, he felt very, very strongly about it. He said, “This is the only place I can live without being beaten, without a ghetto, without any of that.” Now, here’s an example of life in the home of a Holocaust sur—of someone who had endured the Holocaust. I was five or six. My brother, may Hashem avenge his blood, was four, or perhaps four and a half or five. I don’t remember whether my sister had been born yet or—

07:26 Speaker 2 hadn’t been born yet, but we took a train to Jerusalem. My father, my mother, my brother and I got on the train. My father saw a woman sitting by the window and said to her, “Get up. My children are going to sit here by the window.” She said, “I certainly won’t get up. There are seats—there are plenty of seats on the train.” He said, “No! You will get up, and my children will sit here by the window.” He argued with her, and she got up shouting, but we sat by the window. Later—wait—later, when I had a moment alone with my mother, I asked her, “Why did Dad argue with that lady?” She told me, “We’ll talk at home. We’ll talk at home.” But at home we didn’t talk about it. Then my mother said, “Don’t you understand? We were on a train. Don’t you understand? If something happens, we have to be able to throw you out.”

08:26 Speaker 3 Oh, wow. Oh, wow.

08:28 Speaker 2 It was a train going from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Everyone was Jewish. But the moment he got on a train, it all came back.

08:41 Speaker 3 Incredible.

08:41 Speaker 2 That was my father. My father was very much a father. Very, very much a father. But he was also very, very, very tough. Very, very, very, very demanding. Truly.

08:56 Speaker 3 That’s probably why he survived that whole ordeal...

09:00 Speaker 2 Right, right. That’s why. That’s why he survived. And he passed those traits on to me, for better and for worse. I mean, he passed many of those traits on to me, and I hope I haven’t passed them on to my children. Anyway, I went to elementary school, Etzion School. When I entered the school, the principal spoke to all the children to find out whether their families were religious. He asked me, “What do you prepare at home for Shabbos?” I said, “My mother cooks.” He said, “No, no, something special, special, special.” So I blurted out, “[unclear] for Shabbos.” “Oh, that’s what I wanted to hear.” In other words, ours was a religious home, but Mizrachi. Then, in eighth grade, I took entrance exams for three places: the Midrashiya, Midrashat Noam; Netiv Meir; and Nechalim. Now, we had started a Bnei Akiva branch in Adliyahu[?]. The Bnei Akiva branch in Adliyahu[?] was the work of me and a few other boys. When I came to the yeshiva in Nechalim for the exam, suddenly I saw the older Bnei Akiva boys there. I said, “Wait a minute—if they’re here, I’m staying here.” I was accepted at the other places, but I said I was staying there. My father went to find out which place was better academically, and they told him Nechalim was at a very, very high level. It would be good for Moishele to study there. Moishele is me. “It would be good for Moshe to study there.” So my father decided, fine, excellent, and I began studying at Nechalim. In the background, when I was in tenth grade—in ninth grade—there was [unclear] on Shabbos Hagadol with the Torah scroll.

11:04 Speaker 3 What year was that?

11:05 Speaker 2 It was connected with the Rebbe of Lubavitch’s campaign for a Torah scroll to welcome Moshiach. Anyway, eleventh grade—tenth grade went by with me as a Chabadnik, studying Tanya, and I started saying Chitas. No, I started saying Chitas, but in eleventh grade things got chaotic. I left it all and stopped doing—

11:32 Speaker 3 When you say “it all,” what do you mean, Moishe? Explain it to us.

11:35 Speaker 2 I left everything. I left all of Chabad. All my learning about Chabad—I left it all, everything. To this day, I don’t know why.

11:46 Speaker 3 Okay.

11:46 Speaker 2 But because I’m an extreme person, extreme in both directions, I became extremely opposed to it. I disrupted Tanya classes and disrupted the study of Shulchan Aruch. In short, I was really out of my mind. Until Rabbi Bastovsky[?] caught me. He asked me, “What bothers you about someone learning Tanya? About someone learning the Alter Rebbe’s Shulchan Aruch? Why does it bother you? Why are you interfering? Why are you interfering?” I argued with him: “Why are you interfering in my affairs? This is what I want. What do you care?” I was really worked up. I don’t know what suddenly happened. One day I woke up and turned around again. And then I was—this was, I think, at the end of eleventh grade, heading into twelfth. I remember the Rebbe’s niggun then was “Yifrach Beyamav Tzaddik.”

12:45 Speaker 4 “Yifrach Beyamav Tzedek.”

12:49 Speaker 2 Yes. That, that’s what...

12:50 Speaker 4 “Yarich.”

12:53 Speaker 2 That drew me back into things. Then I started saying Chitas, and I started going on mivtza tefillin at the hospital, Hasharon Hospital. The medical center, sorry. And then I really became a Chabadnik. Eventually I would go to Kfar Chabad for Shabbos and go to Kfar Chabad to learn. Just one story, for example: we used to listen to the broadcasts in Kfar Chabad.

13:24 Speaker 4 By broadcasts, you mean the Rebbe’s sichos broadcast around the world.

13:29 Speaker 2 Around the world, and to Kfar Chabad too. We’d leave in the evening, sneak out of the yeshiva and hitchhike to Kfar Chabad. Then early in the morning—five, six-thirty, five-thirty, six—we’d start heading toward Nechalim to make it to davening at seven. Sometimes we’d get a ride from the road to the yeshiva, and sometimes not. Anyway, I remember one day, at six-thirty, I’m walking along the road from the entrance—the Petach Tikvah–Vilna road. Petach Tikvah–Vilna road? Vilna doesn’t mean anything. Be’erot Yitzchak—the Petach Tikvah–Be’erot Yitzchak road. I turn in by Nechalim, walking toward the yeshiva, and one of the administrators or deputies happens to be coming out. He sees me returning, and I say to myself, “That’s it. My time here is over.” Sure enough, at ten o’clock, at the start of the Gemara study session, one of the rabbis comes into the study hall, calls me over and says Rabbi Bagad wants me in his office.

14:51 Speaker 4 Who’s Rabbi Bagad?

14:53 Speaker 2 Yoske Bagad, the head of the yeshiva. He says to me, “I’ve learned that at six-thirty this morning, you weren’t in the yeshiva.”

15:03 Speaker 4 He saw you, after all.

15:05 Speaker 2 No, he didn’t see me. Someone else saw me.

15:07 Speaker 4 Oh, someone else.

15:07 Speaker 2 I told him, “That’s right.” “Where were you?” I could have lied and said I’d gone for a morning run. I could have lied and said I’d gone for a walk. But I thought, what’s with all these lies? Why keep trying to make myself look good and hiding? For once, I’ll tell the truth, and that’s that. What could happen? What’s the worst that could happen? They’ll throw me out of here. I have another yeshiva I can go to. So I told him, “I was in Kfar Chabad last night. There was a broadcast of the Rebbe. I came back this morning on foot, and that secretary saw me. That’s what happened.” “If you were so into the broadcast, what did the Rebbe speak about at the farbrengen?” I pulled a note out of my pocket. At the Rebbe’s farbrengens, it would go: sicha, singing, sicha, singing, sicha, singing. During the singing, Meir Brodsky would immediately translate what the Rebbe had said from Yiddish into Hebrew for us, and I’d sit there writing it down. I took those pages out of my pocket and started reading him what the Rebbe had spoken about. He said, “You wrote this down too?” I said, “Yes, I wrote it down too.” “All right,” he said, “go back to the study hall. We’ll see what to do.” Afterward, to cool my enthusiasm for Chabad, they sent me to a very, very, very chareidi yeshiva that had just opened in the moshav of Tifrach.

16:47 Speaker 5 Oh, a Litvish yeshiva. Yes.

16:50 Speaker 2 A yeshiva gedolah, a black-hat yeshiva. In short, a yeshiva where maybe they’d separate me from Chabad and get me back on track. I had a really, really good week there. We genuinely sat and learned. I really love Gemara. We sat and learned, and one night, Thursday night, my study partner and I were learning the sugya about mustard and bees. A person has a field where he grows mustard, and next to the field there’s a beehive. The bees go to the mustard flowers for nectar, it burns their tongues, so they return to the hive and eat the honey. The owner of the bees says to the owner of the mustard, “Listen, you’re causing me losses.” The mustard owner says, “Then tell your bees not to come over here.” In short, the discussion in the Gemara is: which one has to move away? Do the bees have to move, or does the mustard? There’s a whole discussion with Rashi and Tosafos, and four approaches in Tosafos. A whole involved matter. We spent the entire night on it, until I managed to understand all the approaches, all the disagreements and all the fine points. My study partner, who had already been a yeshiva student for several years, was delighted that I understood it. And in the way of a high-school kid, I sat down and summarized all the approaches and opinions in a chart. By five in the morning, the page was all marked up—every Tosafos, every Rashi was marked on the page. He was delighted. I asked him, “Tell me, Rabbi Avni, why did I work all night on mustard and bees? What did I get out of it? I learned and learned and learned. What did it give me? What does it give me?”

18:51 Speaker 5 What’s the practical point?

18:53 Speaker 2 Yes! I’m not a farmer. I don’t grow mustard or keep bees. Why do I need this? So he says to me, “What do you mean? It’s learning Gemara. It’s Hashem’s Torah. It’s a mitzvah.” What do you mean, a mitzvah? Hakadosh Boruch Hu, and suddenly mustard and bees? What? “No, it’s halachah.” Anyway, he let slip that Torah, Gemara, sharpens a Jew’s mind. What, Torah sharpens? Are you telling me my head is a pencil, and Torah is a pencil sharpener? I went at him for about five minutes. He was sitting, and I was standing over him at my full height, giving it to him. How could he say my head was a pencil and Torah was a sharpener? Until the rosh yeshiva came in. He heard the last few words I said. He beckoned to me with his finger. “Come, come, come, come. Listen,” he said. “After davening, you’re going to have breakfast. Then you’re going to your room, packing your suitcase and going back to the camp. I don’t want you here. You’re not staying here for Shabbos, and I’m calling Rabbi Bagad to tell him you’ve left.”

20:11 Speaker 5 Moishe, what’s the expression? Going from strength to strength.

20:15 Speaker 2 Yes, from strength to strength. Anyway, I was thrown out of the yeshiva. On Friday I’m standing there by a road, and I don’t even know where I am. You understand? Somewhere on the Be’er Sheva road. I have no idea where I am—right, left? They’d just explained that there was a bus stop there, a bus would come, and I should take it to Tel Aviv. I got to Tel Aviv and thought, what’s this? I’m out in Tel Aviv. They’d told me to go home. So I’d spend Shabbos at home, and on Sunday we’d go back to the yeshiva. What could happen? I was already a troublemaker; I’d be a bit more of a troublemaker. I came home. My father was delighted I’d come for Shabbos. My mother was delighted I’d come for Shabbos. My brother called and asked, “Is Moishele at home?” They said, “Yes, Moishe is at home.” So my brother said, “Wonderful. Very good. Fine.” He didn’t tell them a thing. Sunday morning I went back to Nechalim—of course, making sure I was at the yeshiva for davening by seven. Rabbi Bagad said to me, “I’ve heard very, very, very, very serious things about you. You made fun of a yeshiva student, made fun of the Gemara, made fun of the mitzvos...” And that was the end of it. Three months or so go by, and I decide to go to Kfar Chabad for a night. It turned out not to be one night, but several days. I came back with Meir Bosdonsky[?], who was returning from a Tanya class. I got a ride back with him. I returned to Nechalim and saw lots of cars. I didn’t know what was going on—what were all these cars? It turned out there was a parents’ meeting.

21:58 Speaker 5 A parents’ meeting.

22:00 Speaker 2 Yes, and I had no idea about it.

22:02 Speaker 5 And what, Moishe?

22:04 Speaker 2 You see how involved I was in the life and atmosphere of the Nechalim yeshiva? I had no idea there was a parents’ meeting.

22:11 Speaker 5 Did your parents know there was a parents’...

22:13 Speaker 2 My parents came, yes! They saw my brother, but they didn’t see me. They looked for me. Well, I meet them. “Moishe, where were you?” “What do you mean, where? I was in my room, sleeping.” “You weren’t in your room. We were in your room, and you weren’t there.” “Never, never.” I met Meir. I said, “What do I do now? Save me.” “What? What can I do?” He tells me, “Listen, this is it. This is the turning point. Tell them the truth: you’re a Chabadnik. You were in Kfar Chabad, and that’s that.” So I meet my father and tell him, “Dad, I’m a Chabadnik. I was in Kfar Chabad.” “A Chabadnik? What, a chossid?” “Yes, I’m a chossid. Chabad. The Rebbe of Lubavitch. I was in Kfar Chabad.” Smack—two slaps, one on each cheek, in front of the whole place, all the children, all the parents. And they were hard slaps. When my father hits like that, my cheeks go flying. I said, “Dad, what happened?” “You will not be a chossid! Be whatever you want, but you will not be a chossid.” “What do we have against Chassidus? What? What happened?” “You will not be a chossid.” And he went to Yoske, to Rabbi Bagad. There’s a line; the principal is sitting there seeing parents in order. My father doesn’t bat an eye. He opens the door as the person inside is about to leave, and I’m standing behind him. He says, “I sent my son to Nechalim to study in Nechalim, not to study in Kfar Chabad. I pay a lot of money here for him to study—study here. Why on earth are you sending him to Kfar Chabad? What is this? What happened? Have you all completely lost your minds?” That’s how he shouted at him. Yoske just squirmed and squirmed and squirmed, and didn’t answer him at all. That was it. He went outside. My father said to me, “Listen, Moishele,

24:11 Speaker 2 you are not going to Kfar Chabad. You will not be a chossid.” “Why? What’s wrong with chassidim?” “You will not be a chossid.” That was it. He didn’t even speak with my teachers anymore—he didn’t ask me about math, English, anything.

24:28 Speaker 5 Listen.

24:29 Speaker 2 Anyway, I felt very uncomfortable about the whole thing. What do you do? How do you move forward? So after a while I asked my mother, “Mom, what does Dad have against chassidim? What?” And my mother told me something I hadn’t known—not even an inkling of it. My father’s father, my grandfather, whom I never knew, was murdered in the Holocaust. His whole family were Karlin chassidim. Now, my grandmother—

25:02 Speaker 5 You mean your father’s father.

25:05 Speaker 2 My father’s father.

25:06 Speaker 5 Your father’s father was a Karlin chossid.

25:08 Speaker 2 Karlin chassidim, and his father was a Karlin chossid. They had been Karlin chassidim since the time of the Alter Rebbe. And my grandmother, whom I never knew, had a cousin who had left Europe for America before the First World War. She sent certificates from America—a hundred certificates—for the whole extended family to come to America. My father’s sister in Eretz Yisroel—I told you there were Zionists who had left earlier, who had come in the waves of immigration before Hitler—sent her a hundred certificates from there, through the British authorities, for the whole large family.

26:03 Speaker 5 To Eretz Yisroel.

26:04 Speaker 2 To Eretz Yisroel—to Palestine, not Eretz Yisroel.

26:06 Speaker 5 Doesn’t matter. Yes.

26:08 Speaker 2 Yes.

26:08 Speaker 5 The Holy Land.

26:08 Speaker 2 Anyway, my grandfather traveled to Stolin, to Karlin-Stolin, to ask the Rebbe where to go: to Palestine or to America. He had the option of going here or there. Which should he choose? What did the Rebbe answer him? The Rebbe answered, “Stay here.” So my father says, “I really do understand, Moishe. I understand that your father raised you in such a way that once you decide on something, nothing will stop you.” But because I’m stubborn as a mule, there was a period when I ran away from home.