109. The Girl Who Lost Her Eye Sight While Watching TV

00:16 Shalom aleichem, kindalakh. Gimmel Tammuz is around the corner, so I wanna share with you an incredible story with the Rebbe that I heard from the son of the person whom it happened to. His son in California told me this story, and I'm gonna share with you now. Let's go back before the war, the famous World War started in Europe. As you know, the Germans, the Nazis invaded Europe, and they made a big war, right? They tried to conquer all of Europe, and they killed six million Jews. So before the war, in Poland, there's a small town called Belz. In Belz, there was a very famous tzadik known as the Belzer Rebbe. His first name was Reb Aaron. The Baron of Belz, during the war, survived and managed to escape and come to Eretz Yisrael. He passed away on Taf Shin Yud Zain, nineteen fifty-seven. Now before the war, this man the story is about, his name is Mr. Feiner. He was a little boy. He was four years old. Uh, his mother had died, and it was very hard for him to stay at home because his father remarried, and the new wife was not very nice to him, so he ran away from home and went to the Belzer Rebbe. And the Belzer Rebbe saw this boy that he's so lonely, and he's not happy, so he decided to keep him in his house, and he raised him. And then he became a helper to the Rebbe. And so he grew up in Belz,

02:17 in the sh- in the Rebbe's home. Thousands and thousands of Hasidim came from all over Europe to see the Belzer Rebbe, and he was there in the home all the time. He was part of the family. Then came the war, and the Nazis invaded Poland, and they conquered Poland, and they made concentration camps and sent all the Jews to concentration camps. Many of them, unfortunately, were killed by the Nazis. Before the Nazis came into that part of Poland where the Belzer Rebbe lived, they realized they all had to run away. So the Belzer Rebbe called over this little-- this boy. He's-- wasn't a little boy anymore. He was now maybe a teenager, and, uh, told him that, "I know we're going, we're going away. We're all l- running away to different places, and I'm not gonna see you. But if you have a problem, you ever have a problem, you should always imagine-- close your eyes and imagine my face, and then m- mention your name and your mother's name, and I'll be able to help you." And he told him that this thing, to do this, he says, is something that he learned from his father, his father learned from his father, and his father from his father, from the first Belzer Rebbe, who learned from his rebbes all the way from the Baal Shem Tov. That those talmidim, those rebbes and tzadikim who are connected to the Baal Shem Tov's teachings, they have a way to connect to their people, their Hasidim, their

04:10 students, when the student is far away from them. But if the student closes his eyes and is imagining the face of his Rebbe, and he's mentioning his own name and mother's name, and is asking, "I need help," then the Rebbe will come through, will, will respond to this. Says, "This is what you should do." Then he said to him like this: "I know you're in the age," he was seventeen, eighteen, "so they're gonna draft you in the army. But don't worry. In Poland, they're not gonna draft you because the Polish army is gonna fall apart right away. There's not gonna be any Polish army. The Nazis are gonna come in, and the whole Polish army will fall apart. But if you go to Russia," he says, "I don't have any control over Russia." See, tzadikim sometimes have control over the country they live in. They can, you know, uh, ask Hashem to, to make things this way or that way. "But Russia is a different country. I don't have so much control, but I can tell you for sure you'll come back. You'll survive. But remember, every time you're in trouble, close your eyes, think of me, think of my face, and ask me for help." And that's it. It was the last words the Rebbe told him. And then they left. The Rebbe left. He left. And then there was a very difficult years, you know, with concentration camps, but he survived. He survived and came to America. He got married right after the

05:45 war ended. They were still in Europe. He was still in Europe coming just out of the camps, and they, um, the, uh, the, the Americans and the Europeans governments, they organized, like, a special camp for all the refugees. Refugees are people that ran away from the concentration camps and now need a place to go. They didn't have anything. They didn't have a home. They didn't have anything. So they would stay in that camp until they found a place where to travel to and to move to and then start a new life. It's called the DP Camps in Germany. And so he was in a DP camp, that's where he got married, and then moved to America, to the United States, and lived in New York, in Brooklyn, in Brownsville. He got to know the Rebbe, and, um, he had many... several miracles, great miracles with the Rebbe. But this story that I'm gonna tell you now happened in 1957. This was like two weeks after the Belzer Rebbe had passed away. The Belzer Rebbe, who was his Rebbe in Poland, Mr. Feiner's Rebbe, was, um, in Eretz Yisrael. He managed to go to Eretz Yisrael after the war, and he lived till תשע"ז, 1957. And something happened a few weeks before the Rebbe passed away, the, the Belzer Rebbe. Mr. Feiner had two kids, a boy and a girl, and they had a neighbor, an old Jew who had a television, and the kids would always sneak into the a- apartment of the neighbor, and

07:36 the neighbor would let them in, and they would watch television. Then the old man died, and the children of the old man decided, "You know what? We see that the kids love watching television. We'll give it to the neighbor, you know, to the father of the children, so the kids can watch in their own home." And so Mr. Feiner thought, "You know what? Rather than have the kids watch television somewhere else, and I don't know what they're watching," sometimes there's some things that a Jewish child should not watch. It's nonsense. It's rubbish. It's bad stuff. "So this way it'll be in my house, and I will choose what they can watch." But of course, uh, it was not a very good idea. The Rebbe spoke very strongly about not even bringing into the home a television. But in those days, people didn't know, and they brought in a television. And so every night when the kids came home from school, the tati would turn on the television in a special channel where there was a children story, and they were watching, and then they went to bed. Then the Belzer Rebbe passed away, and two weeks later, this story happened. The children were watching television, and in one of the scenes they made believe that the person, um, you know, was cut in half. That means that the per- you know, in, in television, they can make it look like that, that the person's upper half of the body was cut off from the lower

09:19 part of the body, which was very scary to watch, even though it wasn't true. It was only pretend, you know. They make it look that way. But when the kids watched it, they were so shocked and so scared that the girl started screaming, and she said that she couldn't see anymore. She stopped seeing. She couldn't-- She lost her eye vision, the vision of her eyes. She was screaming, "I can't see. I can't see." And so the father rushed the daughter to the hospital to doctors, and they didn't know what to do. And so then he brought her back home, and that night he put them to sleep at nine o'clock at night, and he didn't know what to do. He was thinking, "What can I do? My daughter can't see anymore." He was thinking probably, "I made a big mistake to bring television in the house. Television is a דבר טמא. I shouldn't have let my kids watch. Maybe that's why it happened." But he didn't know. That night he was very, very upset. He went to lie down. His wife went to sleep. The kids went to sleep. He also tried to go to sleep, but he couldn't sleep. He was very, very upset. So he got out of bed, and he felt like crying. He sat down in the living room all by himself late, late at night, like maybe midnight, and he started crying and crying, and he opened up a Tehillim, started saying Tehillim, asking Hashem, "Please, please, I went through

10:56 the war. I suffered so much from the Germans, and now my child can't see. Please help me." Then he remembered what the Belzer Rebbe had told him many years before, before the war, before the Belzer Rebbe left Belz, the city of Belz, and he never saw the Belzer Rebbe again since then. But he-- the last words he told him, "If you're ever in trouble, just close your eyes, think of me, imagine my face, and tell me that... Give me your name, your mother's name, and, and tell me what the problem is." So he decided to do it now. He's closing his eyes, and he's still crying and crying, and he says, "Rebbe, please help me. My daughter can't see." And as he's crying like this, suddenly the phone rang, and by that time it was two o'clock in the morning. Who would call a house two o'clock in the morning? It's crazy. Nobody calls that late at night. So but he picked up the phone, and there's somebody on the other line, on the end of the line, and he says, "Are you Rabbi Feiner?" He says, "Well, I'm not a rabbi. I, um, I don't pasken shailas, right? I don't pasken give answers for halachas. But what can I help you with?" He says, "If you're not a rabbi, why is it listed in the phone book you call Rabbi Finer?" He said, "Eh, because it was... You get a discount if you tell the phone company y- you're a rabbi, then they charge

12:38 you less money, um, for the phone line, right? Your phone bill is lower. So that's why I called myself rabbi, but I'm not a rabbi." He says, "Okay, then I've been looking for you for hours. For a while. Not for hours, but for a while. Maybe half an hour." And he says, "You know who I am?" He says, "I am Rabbi Chodikov, the Lubavitcher Rebbe's secretary. I already went home for the night, went home to retire to go to sleep, and the Rebbe also went home. But suddenly, like half an hour ago, I get a phone call from the Rebbe, from his house, to tell me to come back to 770. And I met the Rebbe in 770, and the Rebbe said to me that I should take a phone book and look up for a Finer. And there's trouble in his house, ask him what the trouble is." Strange. So I said to the Rebbe, Rabbi Chodikov says to Mr. Finer, "I said to the Rebbe, 'How many... There are a lot of Finers in the phone book. What should I do?'" He says, "Call all of them and ask each one do they have a problem. If there's some trouble in their home, then you'll find out which one you need to contact." So I started calling Finers from all over New York, and many people were mad at me. "You're calling, like 1:30 in the morning, you're waking us up." Right? They go, "No, there's no trouble in my house." And so

14:10 finally, there's only one Finer left that says Rabbi Finer. So I said to the Rebbe, "I called all the Finers and they say... Everybody said it's fine. There's only one Finer. It's called Rabbi Finer, but I don't think it's him. He's a rabbi." So the Rebbe said, "No, no, no, no. Call him." So I called you now. And he says, "The Rebbe wants to know what the problem is. You seem to have trouble in your house." And he said, "Yes, my daughter lost her eye, uh, vision in her eyes. She can't see anything, and I don't know what to do. I'm very upset." And so Chodikov said, "So why didn't you say so? Why didn't you call right away? You should have called the office and say, 'My daughter can't see.'" Anyway, so he said, "I'm gonna talk to the Rebbe now." So he gets off the phone, he goes talks to the Rebbe, and he comes back, he says, "The Rebbe said that you should take your child tomorrow to Kings County Hospital. There there's a certain doctor by this and this name, and you should take him to him, and he will take care of it. She will see again fine, 100% fine." And so the next morning he took her to Kings County, went to that same doctor the Rebbe said, and the doctor said to him, "Listen, you stay outside. I'm gonna, uh, look at your daughter here in my office." And then after, uh, like a few minutes he br-

15:33 he brings her out and he says, "You know, she's seeing fine." And she saw fine since then. That was the story. So the story was that the Belzer Rebbe said, um, "Whenever you're in trouble, think of me." But the problem was that the Belzer Rebbe had already passed away, and that's what he told the Belzer Rebbe when he closed his eyes. He said, "Rebbe, you're no longer here. How am I gonna communicate with you? How can you get me an answer?" But just then the Rebbe called, and the Rebbe was the answer. We don't know what happened. Nobody will know what happened. What, how the Rebbe knew. The Rebbe knew, the Rebbe had ruach hakodesh, but that there was some connection between the Rebbe and the Belzer Rebbe, who knows? But all we know is that he did what the Belzer Rebbe said after the Belzer Rebbe had passed away. And right away then and there, the Rebbe sends Rabbi Chodikov to call him and ask him, "What's wrong? What's wrong? Why are you so upset?" Two o'clock in the morning.