Rabbi Moshe Dikshtein - Be'er Sheva - Part 5

00:22 Speaker 1 Moishe Dickstein, good evening.

00:24 Speaker 2 A very good evening.

00:25 Speaker 1 My dear mechutan.

00:27 Speaker 2 Yes?

00:28 Speaker 1 Moishe, tonight, as part of your fascinating stories about your shlichus from the Rebbe shlita, Melech HaMoshiach, I wanted you to tell us about two very important and fascinating things. First, what are you doing in uniform? I see you have the rank of major.

00:48 Speaker 2 Yes.

00:48 Speaker 1 Not a low rank. What are you doing in uniform right now? The second thing I’d like you to tell us about—and it’s a very important story—is your initiative in organizing the first Lag BaOmer parade for Jewish children, following the instruction of the Rebbe shlita, Melech HaMoshiach, some—

01:10 Speaker 2 5741—

01:10 Speaker 1 Forty-one years ago.

01:12 Speaker 2 Forty-two. 5742.

01:14 Speaker 1 Yes. So please, Moishe, the floor is yours. Go ahead.

01:19 Speaker 2 Well, I’m in uniform because I’m doing reserve duty. I finished three days of reserve duty today. Everyone knows there’s been a whole month of army training for the “Chariots of Fire” exercise. It’s no secret. In my area, I’m the rabbi for the Southern District of the Home Front Command, and my work—what I do—is, first, the rabbinate: Shabbos, kashrus, and everything else. But mainly it’s ANOCH. ANOCH is collecting information about soldiers. I have soldiers under me—

02:03 Speaker 1 Which, G-d forbid, should never be needed, as they say.

02:04 Speaker 2 G-d forbid, yes. In the Home Front Command there are several branches. The branches have rescue battalions, and each rescue battalion has an ANOCH unit—a unit with a platoon commander and another fourteen soldiers. There are quite a number of ANOCH soldiers in the district. I’m responsible for them, and I also train them, G-d forbid.

02:37 Speaker 1 How many soldiers are you responsible for altogether?

02:42 Speaker 2 It depends which hat I’m wearing. If it’s my rabbinate hat, then more than ten thousand.

02:47 Speaker 1 Wonderful.

02:47 Speaker 2 And if it’s my ANOCH hat, then about two hundred, something like that.

02:56 Speaker 1 First of all, we wish you that ANOCH remains purely theoretical.

03:01 Speaker 2 Yes.

03:01 Speaker 1 And with Hashem’s help—

03:02 Speaker 2 That it will just be us and the guys.

03:04 Speaker 1 And that your ten thousand soldiers will have their spiritual role.

03:09 Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

03:10 Speaker 1 With Hashem’s help. But what I’d really like to hear from you, Moishe, is your fascinating story from when you were a young man, forty-one years ago, about the Lag BaOmer parade. Please tell us about it.

03:23 Speaker 2 Well, I don’t know exactly when it was. The Rebbe sent Tzach[?]—the Chabad House was headed by Rabbi Leibo[?]—fifty single-dollar bills and said he wanted fifty parades in the Holy Land, like the parades held in New York on Lag BaOmer.

03:48 Speaker 1 Lag BaOmer parades.

03:49 Speaker 2 Lag BaOmer parades.

03:50 Speaker 1 Where were you when this happened? Where were you living?

03:53 Speaker 2 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. On Lag BaOmer in New York, there are parades with trucks carrying all kinds of—

04:01 Speaker 1 Displays.

04:02 Speaker 2 Displays of all kinds—the Jewish home and anything else connected to Judaism that you can think of. The children in New York come and march, and the Rebbe stands and watches. It’s a parade that lasts several hours. The army takes part, the police take part. The city government, all the important people in New York, take part in that parade. The Rebbe wanted something like that in the Holy Land too, so he asked Moshe Slonim, z”l, who was chairman and director of the Reshet, whether the Reshet could take it on, since it involved children. In short, he found a connection. Moshe Slonim called—wait—Halperin. He called—

04:50 Speaker 1 Yisroel Halperin, one of the—

04:51 Speaker 2 Rabbi Yisroel Halperin, yes, Rabbi Yisroel.

04:53 Speaker 1 One of Chabad’s courageous fighters.

04:56 Speaker 2 Yes, the shliach in Herzliya. He called me and Nachum Cohen, z”l—may we distinguish between the living and those who have passed on. We sat down at the Reshet and thought about what to do.

05:06 Speaker 1 What is the Reshet? Tell us briefly.

05:08 Speaker 2 The Reshet—

05:09 Speaker 1 Where did you meet, and what was going on there?

05:12 Speaker 2 The Reshet, the Reshet Oholei Yosef Yitzchok, was the central administration for all the Chabad elementary schools in Israel.

05:23 Speaker 1 Yes.

05:24 Speaker 2 The director of the entire Reshet was Moshe Slonim, and Reb Zushe Wilimovsky, the Partisan, was also on its leadership team. We sat there thinking. He was thinking: What do we do? How do we carry this out? Nothing like it had ever been done in Israel. We knew what it was and what it looked like, but no one had ever done anything like it there. And Chabad in Israel wasn’t like it is today, with three or four hundred Chabad locations across the country. It was in the larger places: Tzfas, Kiryat Malachi, and so on. There weren’t Chabad locations that could set up something like this. I don’t even remember whether there was a location in Be’er Sheva for this parade. Now, what they told me was, “Besides being on the organizing committee, your parents live in Tel Aviv, so you’ll go to the Tel Aviv area.” Thank you very much. So people who lived in certain places were assigned to those places.

06:27 Speaker 1 There were some serious guys.

06:29 Speaker 2 There were serious guys. Now, Lag BaOmer fell close to May Day, either a day or two afterward. Back then, May Day in Tel Aviv was a proper workers’ parade, just like the communist parades you read about, with all the ceremony and marching. The whole of Ibn Gabirol Street was closed, and workers from all the factories marched down it. Anyway, at the time I had a student I was very close to, whom I had brought closer to Yiddishkeit. His name is Rabbi Rami Antine.

07:11 Speaker 1 Can you tell us how old you were then, Moishe?

07:14 Speaker 2 I was about twenty-four years and three or four months old.

07:21 Speaker 1 A young man.

07:22 Speaker 2 Rami Antine had served in the navy and had been an actor. He was a few years older than me. I said, “I’ll try; we’ll see what we can do.” I contacted him, and we sat down together. We were both young married men, and we thought about what to do. The first thing was to prepare Ibn Gabirol Street: to have a parade with placards down Ibn Gabirol, from Mugrabi Square to Kings of Israel Square, and prepare displays from the schools and so on. But someone had to close the street—the police had to close it. We went to the police station, and they told us, “Absolutely not. We can’t close Ibn Gabirol twice in one week.”

08:13 Speaker 1 You went to the Tel Aviv police?

08:16 Speaker 2 In Tel Aviv, of course.

08:18 Speaker 1 Yes.

08:18 Speaker 2 But we said, “Listen, the Lubavitcher Rebbe said—” “Sir, with all due respect to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, we can’t close Ibn Gabirol twice in one week, in the afternoon. We can’t do that to the residents.” Today they’d say it wouldn’t pass a Supreme Court challenge, but back then they said they simply couldn’t close a street like that. What could we do? So Rami said to me, “Let’s hold a gathering. A gathering—”

08:48 Speaker 1 Who said that? Rami Antine?

08:50 Speaker 2 Rami said it to me, yes. I said, “But the Rebbe said a parade, not a gathering.” We asked here and there, then said the best thing would be to ask the Rebbe. How? Pick up the phone, one of those rotary phones, you know—

09:04 Speaker 1 Those old black rotary phones.

09:07 Speaker 2 Those old black ones. We called and kept trying until we got through. Anyway, Binyomin Klein answered. I said, “Hello, this is Moshe Dickstein from Tel Aviv.” “Yes, how are the parades coming along?” That was the first thing he asked: “How are the parades coming along?” I said, “We’re working on them now, and we have a question.” I explained the problem and asked whether a gathering would do. He said, “I’ll pass it on to Rabbi Hodakov. Call back in two days.” I said, “We’re not calling you back in two days. You call us when you have an answer, because getting through to you is…” All right. I told him to call Tzach[?], Rabbi Leibo[?], at the office. Two days later he called, and Rabbi Hodakov had said that a gathering was also good. Great. So if a gathering was good, we could now… What do you do at a gathering? First, you have to draw children in. Second—

10:04 Speaker 1 Moshe, when he said a gathering was also good, he didn’t mean you needed both a gathering and a parade?

10:09 Speaker 2 No, no, no. He meant that a gathering also counted for what the Rebbe intended by a parade. In other words, it qualified to receive the dollar.

10:19 Speaker 1 I see. Good.

10:20 Speaker 2 In other words, it met the criteria for... that. Of course, a gathering—a parade needs a gathering. There has to be a beginning and an end. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Fine, how do you attract the children? Now, when Rami was young—Rami Natin—he had been at the Cameri Theater and Habima Theater. He knew all kinds of actors, so we could call them. No, that wasn’t going to work. In short, we said, “Hagashash Hachiver.” We called Pashanel, their manager. Pashanel, Deshef[?] Pashanel. “What... Rami!” He remembered him. “You were a kid, you played Kofiko, you played Chipopo.” Rami said, “Listen, I want Hagashash Hachiver for a parade, for children and all that.” “How many children will be there?” How could I know? There would be children. I didn’t know. “Is it an open venue or an enclosed one?” So he said it was open, because it was in Kikar Malchei Yisrael. “No, no, no, no. Hagashash Hachiver always performs in enclosed venues, enclosed halls. They aren’t set up to perform outdoors.” “Maybe you could still do a sketch for us, two sketches, a song, something?” Nothing, absolutely nothing. We kept looking and looking. Then we came across Moti Giladi. Moti Giladi is a singer, an actor, and above all an impressionist.

11:44 Speaker 1 Religious?

11:45 Speaker 2 No.

11:45 Speaker 1 No.

11:47 Speaker 2 An impressionist—he imitates people. When you hear him without seeing him, you hear Sharon, you hear Peres, you hear the one from Egypt who came to Israel back then. What was his name...

12:01 Speaker 1 Sadat.

12:02 Speaker 2 Sadat, Sadat.

12:03 Speaker 1 Rabin, everyone.

12:05 Speaker 2 He spoke just like Rabin. It really was... And that was the last thing we tried. So through Pashanel we reached him and spoke with him. “Let me check my schedule.” Great, fine, he was available. “But I’m not coming alone. I have a band, I have [unclear], and all that.” “No problem, no problem, no problem.” I kept saying, “No problem, no problem, no problem,” while in my head I was thinking: Where’s the money? Now, in Tel Aviv there was a Jew named, uh, Gurary. Shmuel Gurary. Rabbi Shmaryahu Gurary.

12:38 Speaker 1 Shmaryahu Gurary, right.

12:40 Speaker 2 He was a man with money. I went to Shulbrand[?] Brotman, who was somewhat closer to me, someone I knew better. I said to him, “Shulbrand[?], we need this.” “Wow, a gathering—the Rebbe said...” “Yes, yes, yes.” “Great, fine.” But I told him, “It also takes money.” He said, “I’ll speak with my Shmuel, and after I speak with him, you’ll speak with him, and it’ll be all right. And if he doesn’t give, we’ll see to it that he does.” Now, the Chabad community in Tel Aviv was two and a half people. There wasn’t much of one.

13:10 Speaker 1 Who was? I didn’t understand.

13:12 Speaker 2 The Chabad community in Tel Aviv was two and a half people.

13:14 Speaker 1 The Chabad people in Tel Aviv. Yes.

13:15 Speaker 2 The Chabad people in Tel Aviv.

13:16 Speaker 1 There were two and a half Chabad people. Got it.

13:18 Speaker 2 Something like that. Anyway, he told me, “Go to him.” So I went to speak with him. He said to me, “Why do you need this? What for?” I said, “Why do I need it? I’d be happy sleeping at home. The Rebbe needs it.” So he said to me, “Someone who wants to lie places his testimony far away. What do you mean, the Rebbe? What does the Rebbe have to do with it?” “If not the Rebbe, then what am I doing here?” Anyway, I had a very difficult conversation with him. But afterward, he apparently wanted to test me, to see how far I would go... I mean, I didn’t have the money. I had only just gotten married, so he probably wanted to test me. He said, “All right, who’s helping you?” I said, “I have Antya[?].” “No, [unclear]. Choose that young man. He’s strong. He’s strong. I know him.” That was it. In short, I got a promise out of him that I would receive money.

14:14 Speaker 1 How much money are we talking about? How many liras?

14:16 Speaker 2 I didn’t know yet. I didn’t know yet. There was a stage, there were loudspeakers, there were ice pops, there was signage, and, as you’ll soon see, advertising. There was a lot. And the performer himself and his band. In short, I had his agreement; I had money. I didn’t know how much he meant, but he told me, “The money has a limit. It’s not unlimited.” I knew there was a limit. Fine. Now what? Advertising. I went to Shmuel Hefer, a"h, and told him we wanted to hold a parade in Tel Aviv, and I needed the girls from the seminary to go around to the schools and publicize it. He asked me, “How will that work?” I said, “I’ll hire a tiyulit”—back then there were those buses used for outings. “Fifty girls will get on in pairs and start in south Tel Aviv. Two at a time, they’ll go to all the schools. At twelve o’clock the bus will start picking everyone up. The first girls dropped off will be the first picked up. The next day they’ll go to the schools and kindergartens. We’ll do that for a week and cover all the educational institutions, elementary schools, and kindergartens in Tel Aviv.” “That’s an idea. And where will you get the money for the buses? A bus every day.” I said, “Shmuel Gurary.” “He’ll give it to you?” “He promised.” “Very good, fine. What are you going to advertise?” I showed him the flyer. The flyer said there would be a big gathering for children in Kikar Malchei Yisrael, with a display and a magician, and Moti Giladi would be there, and Tal Brody too. Tal Brody is a basketball player. That year, or a few years earlier, Maccabi Tel Aviv had won the European championship and beaten CSKA Moscow, and he coined the phrase, “We’re on the map, and we’ll stay on the map.” So children liked him. I said he’d be there too; we had spoken with him, and he agreed to come without payment. Fine, great. Now—

16:19 Speaker 2 Those notices were published in “Kol Tel Aviv.” The girls from Kfar Chabad got on the—back then—it was—they got on the buses and went off, went—

16:33 Speaker 3 Got on the tiyulit.

16:34 Speaker 2 On the tiyulit, and they went out and spread across the city. Everything was organized according to a list. [Unclear] coordinated it; she organized the girls into groups and told them what to say. Great, everything was fine. In the afternoon, an uproar began. A tremendous uproar. It was like today’s Facebook, or TikTok, I don’t know, Instagram. An enormous uproar. Someone had shown the flyer or told people in Bnei Brak that they were holding a parade in Tel Aviv with a magician and music—Moti Giladi and his band, with music. Then the Steipler came out against it. The Steipler was the father of Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, a"h.

17:20 Speaker 3 Ah.

17:21 Speaker 2 He came out saying, “How can they have music during Sefiras HaOmer? How can children go—Haredi children, religious children, any Jewish children—go to see a magician?” And they wrote a huge notice against the Rebbe and against his Moshiach and against Chabad, and against this and against that. What a notice—

17:43 Speaker 3 Where? In Bnei Brak?

17:44 Speaker 2 Throughout the country.

17:45 Speaker 3 Oh, throughout the country.

17:47 Speaker 2 And I have it somewhere. Really... I came to the seminary in the morning, and several teachers saw me and started cursing me in Yiddish. They cursed. “You little pipsqueak! You young, soft, green kid! What have you done to us? The dispute between the Litvaks and Chabad was already over, and you’ve ruined the whole thing again. And you, and you, and you... Why are you getting involved?” In short, I went to Shmuel Hefer. Shmuel Hefer said to me, “Tell me, don’t you have anything better to do? Do you know what you’ve done now? You’re not getting the girls. I’m not letting the girls go.” Well, that already got my...

18:30 Speaker 3 Your redhead temper came out. The redhead came out.

18:33 Speaker 2 It went to my head. My redhead temper went to my head. “You’re going to tell me I can’t have your girls? What do you mean, you’re not letting the girls go? Who are you to stop them?” And Rami started talking to him the way we talk in the navy. It turned into quite an exchange between the two of us. In short, I left, and Simona ran after me and said, “Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry. Get the tiyulit, arrange the bus, and I’ll convince Gittele.” In short, the girls rebelled. Fifty girls on her list started walking from Kfar Chabad Bet to Gittele and the kiosk—

19:13 Speaker 3 Really?

19:15 Speaker 2 They walked there, got on the buses, and went. The next day there were other girls. Shmuel Hefer called their parents and spoke with them. The parents said, “Our daughters are old enough and mature enough to know what they’re doing.” Shach, Rabbi Shach, and all that—it meant nothing to them. “The Rebbe said to do it, so we’re doing it. We’re publicizing the Lag BaOmer parade. And if the people making the decisions decided on a magician, then there’ll be a magician. If they decided on Tal Brody, then Tal Brody will be there. Moti and... There are bands in Meron. In Meron, on Lag BaOmer during Sefiras HaOmer, there are lots of bands, lots of music. What, is that not all right?” In short, Chabad split in two, right down the middle. One side was fiercely against it, and the other side was fiercely for it. Wherever I went, there were always arguments and shouting. I said, I... There were days—at that time I was living in Kfar Chabad—when I stayed home. Whenever I came to shul, the arguing would start during davening.

20:25 Speaker 3 And you were a twenty-four-year-old young man.

20:27 Speaker 2 I was a young married man, twenty-four years old.

20:29 Speaker 3 The milk has barely dried on your lips.

20:33 Speaker 2 Yes, the milk has barely dried on my lips. Now, I was afraid it would affect the family too. My father-in-law lives in Kfar Chabad, and... so I started feeling things out. I got married on the 13th of Tammuz, the 13th of Tammuz. We’re talking about Lag BaOmer, the 18th of Iyar, a little before that. How long had we been engaged? A year? Six months and a bit. So I started feeling things out, to see what... Then my father-in-law told me—he said: “I went over to Rabbi Mendel and said to him, ‘My son-in-law, my son-in-law, my daughter’s groom, he’s the—’”

21:15 Speaker 3 The same Rabbi Mendel who was your mashpia at—

21:18 Speaker 2 Yes, my mashpia. Yes. So my father-in-law tells me: “I went over to Rabbi Mendel, and Rabbi Mendel said, ‘Yes, yes, [unclear], I know him, I know him. And you should know, what he’s doing—he’s doing good.’” And my father-in-law says to me, “From then on, I’ve been at ease. I don’t care what people say. The shul, all that... Rabbi Mendel said it’s all right, so it’s all right.”

21:41 Speaker 3 Well, Moshe, I think we’ll take a short break here.

21:44 Speaker 2 Ah, right in the middle of the suspense.