One Year Anniversary: Our Favorite Stories

00:00 Speaker 1 In May, 2021, we presented our very first Lamplighters episode from Lubavitch International Magazine. It was about a Chabad rabbi and rebbetzin fighting to save the life of their baby, despite the advice they had gotten to give up that fight. Since then, we've brought you over 20 more memorable stories of the impact Chabad emissaries are making all around the world. You've helped us make Lamplighters a big success. So on the first anniversary of our podcast, we thought it would be a good time to take a look back at a sampling of some of our favorite stories. I'm Gary Wollek, 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 a community that supports and relies on them. These are their stories. In early 2016, Rabbi Eli and Rebbetzin Chaya Rachel Estrin, Chabad emissaries to Seattle, awaited the birth of a baby who had been diagnosed in utero with a series of cardiovascular and digestive system issues. They had been advised to prepare for the worst.

01:34 Speaker 2 But as soon as he was born, he began to cry. They suctioned him, they took some X-rays, and they brought the baby back over to me, and the doctor said, "This baby will not survive to see sunset tonight."

01:51 Speaker 3 And you're just looking at him and seeing, like, he looks so perfect. He looks like a normal baby. Are you sure that his insides are so messed up the way they're telling us they are? And I remember saying that to the doctor as well, like, "He looks like a normal baby. Are you sure?"

02:07 Speaker 1 I think that there'd be someone on the medical staff at that point recommending surgery. Was that happening at that time?

02:14 Speaker 2 That was not happening, and it was quite surprising to us. We were actually asking for a cardiologist, and nobody was coming, and we couldn't figure out why.

02:22 Speaker 3 There should've been a team of doctors, and they should've been making a group decision about what to do and weighing in different opinions. But really, there was one person who took over the case.

02:36 Speaker 1 That was Dr. Ralph.

02:37 Speaker 2 Dr. Ralph wasn't allowing any other medical staff to get involved, and he was trying to mercifully end this life as fast as possible. I remember the words going through my head, "Come on, kid, show this doctor that he's not God. At least make it past sunset."

02:56 Speaker 1 And how was he looking at sunset?

02:59 Speaker 2 At sunset, he actually was looking great. He wasn't in any pain. He was breathing nicely. He was chewing on a pacifier as if he had no care in the world. So, you know, at that point we thought, "Okay, maybe they've made a mistake here."

03:11 Speaker 1 The Estrins had tried everything they could think of, from giving charity to having their mezuzahs checked, to always thinking positive. They eventually brought their son, who they named Nessonel, or Nissy for short, to a different Seattle hospital. There they found a doctor who shared their resolve to save Nissy's life. After a series of setbacks and life-saving surgeries, Nissy stabilized. Now, the Estrins live with their six children in Florida, where Nissy is learning to walk. He goes to frequent therapy sessions, but-

03:45 Speaker 3 Every time we go to the cardiologist, he is amazed by how well he's doing. He's doing great. He speaks, he understands. He's incredibly happy and funny and social. He speaks in way more than full sentences. He sings songs.

04:08 Speaker 1 That's Nissy joyfully singing the blessings over the menorah with his father during Hanukkah of 2020. He's surrounded by family and grinning ear to ear.

04:19 Speaker 2 Yeah, he's, he's an incredibly happy kid. He's really kind of beyond the average happy kid.

04:25 Speaker 1 Nissy Estrin celebrated his sixth birthday this past February. There's a lot more hard work to do for Nissy and his caregivers, but-

04:34 Speaker 2 This is the challenge we've been given, but I'm so appreciative of what we've been given

04:39 Speaker 1 According to Chaya, one of the things the Estrins have been given is a Hasid in the truest sense of the word.

04:46 Speaker 3 Everyone he meets, it's like his smile is amazing. He relates to people, he connects to people, even on the street, even through a picture. Just seeing how joyful and happy he is despite everything he has been through and has to go through every day, it's so amazing. You know, that's really why I, I feel like it's our duty to share his story so we can give others some hope and some faith that things do work out. He has done so much good in this world. He has caused people to believe in prayer, to believe in miracles, to believe in, you know, something bigger than themselves.

05:28 Speaker 1 In 1983, the Lubavitcher Rebbe sent Rabbi Mordechai Abraham to Johannesburg, South Africa, to teach Jewish law. But Abraham found another niche there. In 1993, he was asked by one of his student's fathers to visit someone in a local hospital. He visited on a regular basis and began meeting other people dealing with addiction. For the next few years, Abraham visited them in hospitals and prisons. He ran meetings and placed people in public and private rehab facilities all over the country. He owned and ran a halfway house, and often paid for their care out of his own pocket. He's helped hundreds, including a man Rabbi Abraham refers to as Steven When Rabbi Abraham met him, he was in bad shape, but Abraham saw the positive qualities in him

06:18 Speaker 4 He would be every Jewish mother's dream for their daughter. Tall, handsome, smart, humble, well-educated, capable. A dream. And he's humble. He's really humble, and he has a good feel for Yiddishkeit. So we met, I put on tefillin with him. We talked, we connected, and we hit it off right away.

06:39 Speaker 1 Rabbi Abraham says that Steven was from what he describes as a troubled family. Steven's father was an extremely successful South African businessman, but-

06:50 Speaker 4 His father had divorced his mother when she got ill. She had a brain tumor

06:55 Speaker 1 ... to which she succumbed

06:56 Speaker 4 And that upset him, and the father remarried to a non-Jewish woman, and that very much upset him, and he was caught illicitly buying drugs, prescription drugs, so he's in jail.

07:08 Speaker 1 When Steven got out of jail, he had no home and almost no possessions.

07:14 Speaker 4 This was a guy who was a CFO for a big company, who drove fancy cars, wore designer suits. He lost his job, and now he had nothing. He had no food, just the clothes he's wearing, and they weren't clean. Okay?

07:30 Speaker 1 Steven's father told him he was no longer welcome in his home.

07:34 Speaker 4 He was on the streets. He had nowhere to go. Then I took him in, and I called his father, and his father said, "Don't help him." His father not only had wanted nothing to do with him, he didn't want me to help his son.

07:47 Speaker 1 What did he tell you?

07:48 Speaker 4 Told me, "Don't help him. Leave him."

07:51 Speaker 1 What reason did the father give for not wanting you to treat him?

07:55 Speaker 4 His father didn't tell me, and his father wanted to have nothing to do with him. So in my opinion, Steven had hit rock bottom and was ready to come right.

08:07 Speaker 1 Steven was still using, so Rabbi Abraham couldn't place him in his halfway house.

08:12 Speaker 4 And, uh, ultimately I took him into my house with my own family.

08:16 Speaker 1 Most people would decline to accept someone using drugs into their own home. But Rabbi Abraham did so willingly. He says that was a turning point for Steven.

08:27 Speaker 4 He was just so grateful, so humble. He befriended my kids. My kids befriended him. At that time I probably had something like eight, nine, 10 kids in the house, and became the best friends. They would play games. This is how bright he is. My kids would race him with a calculator, give him some multiplication to do, and he would race them, and they were astounded. They just, to this day, they're so fond of him. He just took to the Yiddishkeit 'cause he's in my house. He kept kashrus, he kept Shabbos, he kept everything.

09:01 Speaker 1 Around the same time, Rabbi Abraham brought Steven to a doctor.

09:05 Speaker 4 We got a prescription for what's called methadone in America. It's called physeptone here. The plan was to wean him off until he was able to manage without any sort of crutch.

09:17 Speaker 1 With the proper medical care, support, and love from Rabbi Abraham and family, Steven's treatment ended. He counted his first clean day on Passover in Abraham's home.

09:29 Speaker 4 And he's been counting ever since, all his clean days. I got him a job with a friend of mine that had a big company, and he did well, and there was no looking back.

09:46 Speaker 1 Rabbi Abraham, I have to ask you, a- are you doing this sort of work simply to get more recovering addicts to do more mitzvahs?

09:54 Speaker 4 The Yiddishkeit is not my agenda. My agenda is to save lives. I don't want people to mistake my agenda. I'm not doing it to make them Frum. I'm doing it to save their lives, and where I feel it'll work and it'll help their recovery, then I gently suggest tefillin, Torah, Shabbos, kashrus. But my agenda is to save their lives. I'm happy if they live. This is what keeps me going too. It's such nahas.

10:23 Speaker 1 That same sort of nahas was also evident a third of the way around the world from South Africa in Teaneck, New Jersey, where Rabbi Efraim Simon and his wife Nechami run a Chabad house. In August of 2009, Rabbi Simon became a kidney donor. He saved the life of a father to 10 children.

10:44 Speaker 5 Today, he's as healthy as you and I are, and that was an incredible experience to bring life and light back to this person's life, and to bring a father back to his children, and a husband back to his wife, and a grandfather back to his grandchildren.

10:58 Speaker 1 You might be thinking that this story is over almost before it began, but no, because Rabbi Simon wanted to do more. Since he had donated one kidney, he couldn't donate the other, so he reached out to Chaya Lipschutz, who runs the kidney donation website that matched him with a recipient. It turns out that she dabbles a bit in liver donation as well. Chaya matched him with Adam Levitz, a Long Island man in his mid-40s who desperately needed a new liver. The surgery was scheduled for December 20th, 2018 in Cleveland. Simon and Levitz talked once a week on the phone.

11:36 Speaker 6 And I'd be like, "Are you sure you're gonna still go through with this?" And he's like, "I told you, I'm doing it. Don't worry, I'll be there."

11:40 Speaker 5 I just told him, "Listen, I'm not gonna back out. I know that's always a fear that the donor's going to back out. I'm healthy. I'm strong. I so want to do this. I want you to know I'll be there for you."

11:51 Speaker 6 Rabbi Simon, he never asked me how religious I was, never asked me anything, which to me meant something.

11:57 Speaker 5 He is a human being, and I wanted to save the life of another human being. I didn't care at all what level of observance he was. It was completely irrelevant to me.

12:07 Speaker 1 Early on the morning of December 20th, Rabbi Efraim Simon was brought to a Cleveland clinic operating room.

12:14 Speaker 5 I was just so Thrilled. That was really all I felt. Throughout the entire testing process and waiting for the surgery, I never felt scared or nervous. I just felt real happiness to be able to do this.

12:29 Speaker 6 He was wheeled down before me. They started his surgery, like, an hour before mine. So when I got down there, they said, "He's already in. They've already started the surgery."

12:36 Speaker 1 The operation to remove part of Rabbi Simon's liver took about six hours, but the operation to graft it onto Adam's liver took about 12 hours.

12:47 Speaker 6 So they took my whole liver out, they took my gallbladder, took my appendix out at the same time. I got 33% of his liver.

12:55 Speaker 1 The surgery was successful. After 24 hours in the intensive care unit, Simon was brought to his own room. Doctors told Simon that Adam was doing well.

13:06 Speaker 5 And they asked me do I wanna go see him. Of course I wanna go see him.

13:09 Speaker 6 After about an hour of being in my room, they said, "You have a visitor who wants to come in," and he came in and held my hand.

13:16 Speaker 5 He was like a different person. His color had come back. He was vibrant. You could see the light in his eyes.

13:24 Speaker 1 Do you remember the first thing he said to you?

13:27 Speaker 5 He said, "Why are you crying?"

13:31 Speaker 6 Afterwards, my doctor told me how bad my liver actually was. He said, "You were at the end stage of liver disease." A healthy liver's pink, beautiful. My liver was black, shrunken, and hard. So I don't think I realized how sick I really was, but surgeon said, "The minute we took the liver out of him and then connected it to you, it pinked up and it started pumping blood." He goes, "You got a perfect liver. You couldn't have asked for a better liver."

14:01 Speaker 1 With that transplant, Rabbi Simon was one of the first people in the country to become a dual donor. More hospitals now allow that, and in just a few short years, many more lives have been saved. Simon recovered in Cleveland Clinic for two weeks, and returned to Teaneck, but he didn't resume work for another six weeks. Adam returned to his home in Long Island after a month in Cleveland.

14:29 Speaker 6 And that really was the beginning of our lifelong relationship and connection.

14:35 Speaker 1 In 2021, Adam and his family celebrated his son's bar mitzvah at Simon's Chabad House in Teaneck. One of our most recent stories involves two women, Rebbetzin Miriam Moskowitz of Kharkov, Ukraine, and Rebbetzin Esther Wilhelm from Zhytomyr. In February, both fled Ukraine with their families, hundreds of members of their communities, and in the case of Wilhelm, scores of children from the orphanage in Zhytomyr. But they're in constant contact with their communities in Ukraine. Moskowitz says it's been a big adjustment.

15:13 Speaker 7 It was a little bit of a, a daze. Where are we? What are we doing? What happens now? My whole 32 years of life in Kharkov is in three suitcases.

15:21 Speaker 1 But also like the Wilhelms, Moskowitz and her family are doing everything they can to care for members of their community who've joined them in Israel, are leaving Ukraine, or have stayed behind. As I wrap up my conversations with Miriam Moskowitz and Esther Wilhelm, it occurs to me that although circumstances have drastically changed for each of them over the last few weeks, their missions remain essentially the same. Moskowitz and Wilhelm agree.

15:54 Speaker 7 The mission is the same. I be honest, it's not the way I want it to be. I prefer the more simple kind of mission where I'm living in my city, I'm running things the way I feel that, you know, I can do the best job.

16:07 Speaker 8 The circumstances have taken our shlichas and the tests of our shlichas to places where we never imagined it would be, but we're very thankful for the fact that our shlichas is continuing, that we still have a chunk of our community here with us, and that we're living with the shlichas of the moment.

16:32 Speaker 1 I ask Wilhelm and Moskowitz what they need in order to continue to serve their communities.

16:37 Speaker 8 We're definitely going to need funds, because whatever happens with these people we have here, and some of them might end up making Aliyah, and some of them will still be waiting things out and s- to see how things develop, and we have all these kids who are totally our responsibility because their parents are back there. So somehow we're going to have to get everyone settled no matter what happens, and we're going to have to help all these people rebuild their lives wherever it's gonna be, and that's going to need a lot of financial resources.

17:10 Speaker 7 You know, financial help is definitely necessary for all the work, but I think the emphasis should be on doing good. I have seen so much darkness, so much suffering, so much pain, and so much senseless destruction, that I couldn't even believe this is something that could be happening in our century. At the same time, we ourselves have seen such a hug from the Jewish people, how much people wanna do, how much people wanna care, people who tell me, "I started lighting candles, and I never did before. I started adding a prayer." And it just shows that the world is a much better place than it seems like. And the Lubavitch rebbe always said that your good deed could be the last thing that's gonna change the balance of the scales and make the world a better place.

17:58 Speaker 8 What the rebbe always said is that we have to increase in goodness and kindness, and I think that's what each and every one of us has to do, is to think about going out of our comfort zone and doing-

18:10 Speaker 9 Anything which can add to the, uh, goodness and kindness around us

18:15 Speaker 1 Esther Wilhelm, Miriam Moskowitz, their families, and their communities in Israel, back home in Ukraine, or on the move from one place to another, wants nothing more than a peaceful end to the war, and for everyone to return home as soon as possible. But Moskowitz, still in Israel, says there's one thing that would be even better

18:37 Speaker 9 That the redemption should come, Mashiach should come, and everyone should come over here as fast as possible. That would be the best option.

18:44 Speaker 1 The Wilhelms are still in Israel, where she says they'll be for at least the next six months. She recently told me, with a tone of relief, that life has improved for members of her community still living in Zhytomyr. The Moskovitzes are still in Israel, too. They sent a group of people to Kharkov to run a Passover Seder in their synagogue. They managed to get one ton of matzah, one and a half tons of kosher meat and chicken, and 300 bottles of grape juice to Passover celebrants. There were at least 200 people at each Seder. They also held a week-long seminar for 300 refugees from Kharkov and Kiev. Many of the stories we've told on this podcast series have come from our listeners, and we're always looking for more, so if you know of a great story involving Chabad emissaries, please email us at podcast@lubavitch.com. We would absolutely love to hear your ideas. That's so important to us that I'll repeat that email address in just a moment. You can listen to the full-length versions of these stories and all of the stories we've presented on Lamplighters at www.lubavitch.com/podcast and on all major podcast platforms. I'm Gary Wolik. 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 at L-U-B-A-V-I-T-C-H dot

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