Rabbi Yonasan Abrams: An Unforgettable Simchas Torah Celebration For His Ailing Mother

00:03 Speaker 1 I'm Gary Wolk and this is Lamplighters, stories from Chabad emissaries on the Jewish frontier. Life as a Chabad emissary is often joyous, but it can be unpredictable and even dangerous. Chabad has become a ubiquitous presence in every corner of the world, but behind every Chabad house are emissaries, regular people striving to transcend their circumstances and the community that supports and relies on them. These are their stories. Rabbi Yonassan Abrams is a Shliach at Chabad of Temecula, about an hour's drive north of San Diego. There with his wife Natanya, he's strengthening Judaism in their corner of Southern California. As midday traffic whizzes by the house they run, he tells me about his mission.

00:59 Speaker 2 Our work here is building up Yiddishkeit from the ground up, and it takes a lot of work, but it's beautiful to see how just by caring about each individual one at a time, beautiful things happen, beautiful stories happen.

01:15 Speaker 1 In that sense, Rabbi Abrams' own story is similar to those of the other 5,000 or so Chabad emissaries all around the world. But in another sense, it's not. Because Abrams' story would not have been possible without the love and care of Shluchim who treated him like a family member, a mother with a vision for his future, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe, whose blessing made it all possible. Yonassan Abrams' story began on March 16th, 1986, when Yaakov and Chana Abrams were married. A couple of months later, the newlywed couple received more good news: Chana was pregnant. But she soon became extremely ill with hyperemesis, or constant severe morning sickness.

02:02 Speaker 3 She had no energy.

02:03 Speaker 1 That's Yaakov Abrams.

02:05 Speaker 3 She lay in bed day after day without moving. Her voice had no life in it, and she sounded like someone who had no hope.

02:16 Speaker 1 Chana wasn't eating at all. Doctors put her on an intravenous regimen, but she wasn't improving. Doctors felt her condition would endanger the life of her baby. They scheduled her for emergency surgery to implant feeding tubes. Yaakov Abrams was beside himself. The night before the surgery, Abrams called the home of Rabbi Dovid and Rebbetzin Chana Boas.

02:40 Speaker 3 The rabbi was not there when I called, so I spoke with Rebbetzin Chana, and I told her what the doctors said, and she said, "You've got to call the Rebbe. You must call the Rebbe. Promise me you're gonna call the Rebbe." I said, "Okay, okay, I promise."

02:57 Speaker 1 Very early the following morning, Yaakov Abrams went to his office and called Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn. He spoke with the Rebbe's secretary, Rabbi Leibel Groner. He asked for Chana's name and her mother's name and said he would go to the Rebbe immediately. A little over an hour later, Yaakov Abrams called home to see how his wife was doing.

03:22 Speaker 3 A female voice answers the phone, "Hello." A normal female voice. I asked her, even though I knew it was her, "Chana, is that you?" And she said, "Yes." I said, "You're better." And she said, "Yeah, it's amazing. I got up and I walked to the kitchen and I made myself breakfast and I held it down." I made a beeline out of work. I drove home at 80 miles an hour, and I saw her. It looked as if all of these last three months didn't even exist. It, it was astonishing and it was shocking. And that night she and I went out shopping together.

04:05 Speaker 1 The surgery was called off. Abrams calls Chana's sudden recovery an open miracle. The next day, Rabbi Groner called him back with a message from the Rebbe to him and his family.

04:17 Speaker 3 And the message is, is that it's Elul, and the king is in the fields. And if you don't understand what that means, ask your rabbi.

04:26 Speaker 1 Abrams did that, and he learned that the Alter Rebbe, the founder of Chabad, uses the parable, "The king is in the field," to describe the bond between God and the Jewish people in the month of Elul, a time when the king is accessible to all. In April 1987, Yonassan Abrams was born. Chana and Yaakov Abrams raised him in a Jewish home.

04:53 Speaker 2 We had a kosher house. We kept Shabbos. We kept all this stuff.

04:56 Speaker 1 When it came time for little Yonassan to attend school...

04:59 Speaker 2 They knew they wanted to send me to a Jewish school, but they weren't sure which one.

05:05 Speaker 1 The choice was between two Orthodox Jewish day schools. One was Chabad, one was not. Chana had toured both.

05:12 Speaker 2 My mother comes back and she says to my father, "You know, w- we're gonna send him to the Chabad school. The children, they just- I can see something in their smiles. The children, they smile nicer."

05:22 Speaker 1 Yaakov agreed with Chana's choice. But in October of 1991, Chana Abrams was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, and yet somehow her serious illness hadn't diminished her love of life and learning.

05:41 Speaker 2 She was just someone who connected with people, connected with Torah, and she just looked at the world in a different way than maybe some others do.

05:51 Speaker 4 Chana was a very special person.

05:52 Speaker 1 That's Rabbi Dovid Schmoler. He taught at Chabad Hebrew Academy in San Diego.

05:58 Speaker 4 She was an artist, very artistic. She designed a lot of beautiful Judaica. She designed beautiful mezuzah covers. She taught art in our school.

06:09 Speaker 1 But in addition to those talents, there were other qualities that became apparent as Chana began to deal with the challenges of chemotherapy and radiation.

06:19 Speaker 4 Her upbeat outlook on life, her faith in God. You know, when she wasn't well, people would come to, uh, cheer her up or to visit with her, and the person that was sick would actually be the one that would be lifting up those that came to her.

06:38 Speaker 1 The Abrams family had become closer to San Diego's Chabad community. When Yonassan was nine, Rabbi Schmerler had him in his fourth-grade class at Chabad Hebrew Academy. When you first met him, how did he strike you? What kind of a person and what kind of a student was he?

06:54 Speaker 4 You know, the year Yonassan was in my class was, uh, unfortunately a very difficult year for him. There was a lot going on, unfortunately, in his life. His mother was not well. But Yonassan was an eager student. He loved to learn. He was a very creative boy, and at, at a young age I think he really had a, a love for Torah and love for Judaism.

07:15 Speaker 1 How was he dealing with his mother's illness when you first met him? How did he seem to be doing?

07:20 Speaker 4 Some days were good and some days weren't good. He was a little boy. It weighed on him.

07:24 Speaker 1 And in 1996, Chana's illness got worse. As Simchat Torah approached, she was bedridden once more, staying in the Abrams home a block away from the Chabad shul they belonged to.

07:37 Speaker 3 Chana was in significant decline. By this time she was only able to, with help, to walk from the bedroom and sit in a chair in the living room.

07:51 Speaker 1 On Shemini Atzeret, Yonassan and his father went to shul to dance with the Torahs. But as for Chana...

07:58 Speaker 3 There was no way she could actually go to shul and, uh, see everybody dancing with the Torah.

08:04 Speaker 1 Yonassan celebrated, but something was missing.

08:08 Speaker 2 And I was just thinking, "We could dance to our house. It's not that far, like we're only a block away." And so we're coming home from shul on Shemini Atzeret night. We had just danced in the street, and I said, "Abba, can we bring the Torahs back to our house tomorrow and dance so that Ima can see the dancing?"

08:29 Speaker 3 And I said, "Well, people don't do that. We do the hakafot around the shul, and then, then we might take it outside and dance right outside the shul, but that's about it." And, um, he started crying. And, uh, I said, "What is it, honey?" And he, he said, "I want Ima to be able to kiss the Torah." And I just, I broke out into tears.

08:59 Speaker 1 Yaakov asked the rabbi if that could be arranged. The next day, on Simchat Torah...

09:04 Speaker 2 The whole shul came out, and we all danced to the house.

09:08 Speaker 3 We walked with the Sefer Torah all the way to our lawn, and, uh, we were just singing and dancing on the lawn.

09:17 Speaker 2 And my mother didn't know that this was happening. She's lying in her recliner chair in the living room and not feeling very well, and she hears these noises. They start getting louder and louder, and boom, she sees it right outside. We had a big window to the front yard, and she sees the men in their tallisim, the women pushing the strollers with the pretty dresses, the children on their parents' shoulders, and the Torahs are there. They're all just dancing in the street right in front of our front yard. Went on and on and on.

09:49 Speaker 3 I've never seen anything like this in my life. Just the, the love and the support and the, and the simcha was overwhelming, and I took the Torah inside so that she could give it a kiss.

10:02 Speaker 2 That was a moment that touched her core.

10:07 Speaker 3 So my son's tears won the day.

10:12 Speaker 1 Rabbi Dovid Schmerler was there, too.

10:14 Speaker 4 It was something that I think Chana needed, and I'm happy that we were able to give it to her, and I think Chana knew that her kids needed it. Really, really special.

10:24 Speaker 2 And I remember the feeling of wow, this happened because of me. This was my idea. I had a good idea, and it really made my mother feel good.

10:35 Speaker 1 But unfortunately, Chana's illness got much worse.

10:39 Speaker 3 Chana died at 10 minutes to 2:00 PM on a Friday afternoon, so Erev Shabbat.

10:45 Speaker 1 In January of 1997, Chana Abrams passed away at the age of 43. The family was devastated. Yonassan was just nine years old.

10:57 Speaker 2 It definitely changed a lot of things.

11:02 Speaker 1 Yaakov Abrams remarried about a year later. The Abrams adjusted to life in a blended family. Yonassan, remembering his mother's example, only grew in his Judaism.

11:13 Speaker 2 There were a couple rabbis who I became very close to. One of them was Rabbi Horowitz. I was in seventh grade, and he had just moved to Temecula, which is about an hour away, and he was just the coolest rabbi. He was the most friendly guy.

11:31 Speaker 1 Temecula is a small town about an hour north of San Diego. So on Fridays before Shabbat, Rabbi Yitzi Horowitz would gather eighth-graders from the San Diego yeshiva and drive them to his shul to help make a minyan.

11:44 Speaker 2 Eighth grade came, and I, I went once, and I just would come back every week. I became very, very close with their family, and I spent holidays there, Pesach, Shavuot, and I saw their family, and I said, "I want this for myself."

12:03 Speaker 1 Even after Yonassan went off to yeshiva in Toronto a year later, he stayed in touch with the Horowitzes.

12:09 Speaker 2 And every time that I was back in California, San Diego, we'd drive by, and we'd stop off at the Horowitzes' just to say hello, even for a few minutes, because I wanted to have a connection-

12:19 Speaker 1 The years rolled by. When he was 22 years old, Yonassan Abrams married and became a rabbi. He began to teach to support his growing family, but he and his wife Natanya wanted something more.

12:32 Speaker 2 We both knew that we wanted to go on shlichus. We wanted to do the Rebbe's work. And every time I would go to the Ohel and I would write to the Rebbe, I would write, "Please, we wanna do your work. Please send us somewhere." And, you know, we're getting older, and we had one child, and two children, and three children, and it was hard. The only two rabbis who I know well enough that they would do a favor and try to help us out are just not in a position to bring anybody else on board. No doors seemed to be open to us.

13:09 Speaker 1 He decided to call Rabbi Yitzi in Temecula.

13:12 Speaker 2 And I just wanted some technical advice from him. And I called up Rabbi Hurwitz and I said, "Hello, Rabbi Hurwitz." And he started talking, but something sounded off. I said, "Rabbi Hurwitz, the connection's no good. Let me hang up and I'll call you back." And he said, "No, it's not the connection." He said, "My, my voice is going and I am a couple days away from getting a diagnosis, but it doesn't look good." And I, I said, "Is, is this yenemach? Is this cancer?" He says, "No, it's worse."

13:44 Speaker 1 A short time later, Hurwitz went public with the grim diagnosis: ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. Abrams and his wife went to visit Hurwitz and his wife Dina.

13:55 Speaker 2 And he said, "Yonassan, I, I want you to come out to Temecula." Dina, she said, "We feel like you're a son to us. We want you to take over."

14:10 Speaker 1 Abrams reached out to Rabbi Smoler in San Diego. He said there would be challenges.

14:16 Speaker 4 Temecula's a, you know, it's, it's, it's not Brooklyn. It's a small community, and you were also taking over for someone who was so dynamic and so loved by the community.

14:28 Speaker 1 But the Abrams agreed to accept the Hurwitz's offer. They moved to Temecula in 2014. Yonassan realized that in order to do the job well, there was a particular challenge: to stay strong.

14:42 Speaker 2 I realized it's not gonna work to be emotional and crying. I have to do the work. Th- they gave me a job, and if I'm gonna cry all day, that's not what they want of me.

14:56 Speaker 1 Now, Rabbi Yonassan Abrams and family are growing the community in Temecula. He says he loves to see that, and he points out that experience has helped him grow as a person. It's all a part of a cycle that Rabbi Dovid Smoler says is important.

15:13 Speaker 4 It means so much when you see that you're part of a much, much bigger picture. That itself is inspiring, and I think that through that, you're able to then go home and inspire others.

15:26 Speaker 1 That cycle for Rabbi Yonassan Abrams includes Rabbi Yitzi and Rebbetzin Dina Hurwitz. Rabbi Yitzi is still sharing Torah insights with thousands, even as he struggles with ALS. Now Hurwitz is no doubt inspired by Abrams. And then there's Channa Abrams, whose faith and love are responsible in no small part for her son's full circle story. But Abrams says none of this would've been possible without the Rebbe's blessing.

15:56 Speaker 2 I look back and I wonder, "How did I end up where I am now?" And I wonder if the Rebbe said, "And he's gonna be mine."

16:04 Speaker 1 If you'd like to make a donation to support Rabbi Yitzi Hurwitz and his family as he battles ALS, please go to hurwitzfamilyfund.com. That's H-U-R-W-I-T-Z familyfund.com. I'm Gary Wollek. Thanks for listening to Lamplighters: Stories from Chabad Emissaries on the Jewish Frontier. We welcome your questions and comments about what you've just heard on Lamplighters. Please email us at podcast@lubavitch.com. And if you know of a great story involving Chabad emissaries or the people they inspire, please let us know about them. That's podcast@L-U-B-A-V-I-T-C-H.com. This is a Lubavitch International podcast.