This coming Shabbos is the yahrtzeit for both of my parents. They died in different years but on the same Hebrew Date, 28 Teves. I would like to recount two intertwined stories that show how their survival, and thus our family’s existence, could easily never have happened.

My father, Meyer Oberstein, was born in 1905 and came to the United States in 1924, at the age of nineteen.  He told me how he almost died. After World War I there was a war between Poland and Russia.  As always, the Jews were in the middle and suffered greatly. My father lived in Tiktin, Poland.

During this fighting, there was a curfew, and no one was allowed out of their homes. To go outside was to risk your life. But there was no food in the house. As a lad of 14 or 15, he went out to sell something and purchase some food. He was caught by the Russians. There was no trial, anyone outside during the curfew was shot. It was assumed he was a spy.

My father recalled seeing dead bodies lying all around him as he was put before a firing squad. At the last minute, an old man with a beard, riding a mule appeared on the scene. He was obviously someone of importance, they called him “Commissar”. He inquired of the soldiers why they were about to shoot the youngster. The soldiers answered that my father was a spy because he was caught outside during the curfew. The old man on the mule told them, “let him go, he is just a kid. He is not a spy.” That is how close he came to death and it made an impression that never left him.

Whenever, such as on Yom Tov, we would sing the Bircas HaMazone, my father, like clockwork, would remark. It says “Naar hoyisie, vegam zokanti, velo roisi tzadik neezov vezaro meakesh lochem”. King David said in Psalms, “I was young and now am old, yet, I have never seen a righteous person abandoned and his children begging for bread.”  That was the cue. He would tell me and anyone else who was listening how maybe King David didn’t see it, but he sure did. He would tell how close he came to be shot by a firing squad.

He could and often did sum up his life in one sentence. “I have lived through a lot of storms.”

My mother’s story is not all that different.  Around the same time that there was a war going on around Tiktin, there was another war going on around the shtetle in the Ukraine where my mother and her family lived, Polnoa. There was a Civil War, the Whites against the Reds. The Whites were anti-Semites who massacred thousands of Jews throughout the Ukraine. The Reds were the Communists, who, in this instance, were the saviors of the Jews.

My grandfather, Eliezer Weinstock, had only one eyeball. My mother told me that his other eyeball had been “knocked out in a Pogrom”.  As I have grown older and learned more history, I realized that this occurred during that horrible time of mass slaughter of Jews, as many as 200,000 were murdered. My mother didn’t tell me any near- death experience, but, it is obvious, that, if her father was so mutilated, he could just as easily have been murdered in the same Pogrom and his wife, Leah and children Moshe, Pessel and Rochel could also have died.

Interestingly, my mother never recounted this horror. She was positive and did not dwell on the storms in her life.

Why did a near-death experience so affect my father and not my mother? I have a theory.

My father was a “yosom”, an orphan. His mother, Chaya Sora, died of blood poisoning when he was a nursing infant. He never knew his mother. His father was distant and absorbed in his learning. He was a masmid who learned day and night and he left raising the children to his second wife. As my father remarked, “First, she would feed her children and if anything was left over, she would feed us (our father’s children).”

He came to America at age nineteen, all alone. He was preceded by his sister Tzivia (Celia) who was the one who brought him over and preceded by his older brother Kiva and his sister Elka.  Celia and Kiva totally rejected the orthodoxy of their father, Elchonon. They did not have warm feelings for what he represented to them, hunger and neglect.  Celia and Kiva lived in Pensacola, Florida, where they were part of a group of “Freethinkers”, who believed in social justice, but had little, if any, use for religion.

My father was a scion of learned people. Tiktin is “Litvish” and he came from a town and an environment that valued intellectualism and scholarship. Though he did not have the chance to become a Talmid Chochom, like his father , he was a “thinker” and would try to analyze and understand the events of the day.  He was a HEAD JEW. Litvaks intellectualize their Judaism and thus can also decide to abandon it. My mother came from a different line, which we will get to soon.

My father, Meyer, was not happy with the Freethinkers of Pensacola. He decided to go up to Montgomery, Alabama where his sister Elka, Elsie, and her husband Sam Katz, had settled. Unlike his siblings, he went to shul whenever he could and, in Montgomery, he went to Congregation Agudath Israel that Friday night. My zayde, Eliezer, a pious Jew with a long beard, saw this handsome young man and invited him to come home with him for the Friday night meal.  Zayde was in Montgomery because his oldest son, Yosef, Joe, had come before World War I in 1914 and brought over his family in 1923, father, mother, brother and sister.

Rochel, by this time was married to Abraham Chudnovski and not able to come on the same family visa. She and her husband, instead, went to Havana, Cuba, with the idea that one day they too would come to the United States.

Two major differences between the Oberstein’s and the Weinstock’s. Zaydeh Weinstock was a Chossid, not a cold Litvak. Uncle Joe may have come alone but he brought over his entire family, it was a real family, in a home full of Tradition and warmth. It was a “frum” home. My zayde never worked a day in America and my Uncle Joe was Shomer Shabbos his entire life.

Meyer Oberstein, the orphan, was very attracted to the warmth of the Weinstock family. More than that, he told me, “I looked at your mother and she looked at me and we both knew we would get married. We didn’t say anything right away, but we both knew.”

Meyer Oberstein gave up his job delivering milk for the Pensacola Dairy owned by his sister Celia and her husband. He opened a grocery store in Montgomery and stayed for the rest of his life. Meyer and Pessel (Pauline) were married in 1927 in Congregation Agudath Israel and gave birth to Herman, Elsie, Albert and Leonard. As long as they lived, the Zayde and Bubba, Eliezer and Leah, lived in the Oberstein home and they brought Yiddishkeit into the lives of their descendants.

My mother, in her own way, also had the positivity of the Chosid instead of the intellectualism of the Litvaks. She did whatever her mother had done. That means we had a “blech” on the stove on Shabbos and they did not eat “treif” in or out of the house. My mother was the President of the Ladies Hebrew Charity Society. These women had monthly meetings and raised money for worthy charitable causes.

My mother’s brother, Uncle Joe, was not blessed with children. But he was the happiest person you would ever meet. He was a HEART JEW, not a deep thinker, but a “frum” Jew, who davened in the shul morning and evening, every day, minyan or not. He sang zemiros and he did whatever he had seen his father do. He was not a chosid of a specific Rebbe, but, maybe, I think, he was a Chosid of Medinat Yisrael.  He lived for Medinat Yisrael. It was never far from his mind.

If there was a tragedy, a bombing, etc. in Israel, he was sad. If something positive happened, he was happy. He never ever uttered a negative word about anyone and only saw the good in others. Uncle Joe and Aunt Rose visited Israel many times and he gave tzedakah, specifically to Israel, far beyond his means.  His favorite cause was the Jewish National Fund, which planted trees to make the Land of Israel come to life again after centuries of neglect. Somewhere in Israel, there is a Weinstock Grove.  He summed up his life in one sentence. “I never had a bad day in America.”

That is the heritage that I pass on to my children and grandchildren. We are a combination of HEAD JEWS AND HEART JEWS, intellectuals who want to understand the deeper things and neo Chassidim, who value the warmth and camaraderie of the Jewish People, the family we all belong to.