Dear Friends,
He had sent his wife and children on a precarious journey to freedom. He too had a train ticket that would have gotten him out of the Soviet Union, but decided at the last minute not to leave. There were still Jews who needed his tending there, and one doesn’t flee from the battlefield – not he, anyway.
His name was R’ Mendel Futerfas. A legendary Chassid, who, even then, when there were many Chassidim who endangered their lives for the sake of Judaism, was a role-model and a symbol of courage and power, devotion and dedication to the cause. He paid a heavy price for his decision to remain behind the iron curtain: he was arrested and sent to Siberia for ten tortuous years. And when he was released after Stalin’s death, he spent a further ten years behind the iron curtain, far from his wife and children.
He had pictures of his children, and when he would look at them, he would then close his eyes and sing loudly the Yiddish song, “Papirene kinder hab icht,” a song coming straight from the heart of a longing father:
“I have children of paper… Oy, how can a mother’s heart not burn inside her when her own children are hanging on the wall?
Children of paper, where are you? Who knows? Ay, how my flesh and blood have turned to paper, I don’t know.”
He knew that they were living a good life; that it was good that they had left Russia. And it was good that he had remained behind, because he had to tend to persecuted Jewry. The head understood that it was good this way, but the heart – the heart was bursting from his yearning to see them, and it was from there that the cry came out: “Oy, my beloved G-d, have mercy on me. I want my children and not a piece of paper.”
This description, which is engraved in my brain and on my heart from my childhood, came back to me this week when we sent our daughter and our son to school away from home. It is difficult, and we miss them – we are here and they are there. True, in the age of the WhatsApp they are not “paper children”, rather “electronic children,” and still, it is difficult and one needs to be strong. When I tried to find this strength, what came to mind was that description of R’ Mendel sitting in the home of his friend, my grandfather, R’ Moshe, and in the middle of an ordinary day closing his eyes and singing from an aching heart about his “paper children.”
My heart is filled with gratitude and joy: these are not times of enforced separation, exile or imprisonment. Those times are gone! Our children went to learn Torah out of choice, of their own free will and even happily. My prayer to the Creator of the world is that they should be blessed in all their endeavors, and that we will have much true, Jewish, Chassidishe Nachas from them.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zalmen Wishedski