PART V
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
While a child is still in the womb a light burns above its head. The fetus is able to see from one end of the world to the other. It learns the entire Torah. But as it enters into the air of the world, an angel comes and strikes it directly above the mouth and makes it forget the entire Torah.
—Babylonian Talmud, Niddah 30B
1941–1942
The old rabbis of Stavishche relied on this ancient story to persuade their restless young grandsons to study Torah instead of frolicking in the fields on hot summer days.
In all probability, Rabbi Yitzhak Avraham Gaisinsky, known to everyone as Rabbi Pitsie Avram, must have shared a similar tale with his own son and grandsons.
A brilliant scholar of Gemara (part of the Talmud) and Shulhan Arukh (Code of Laws), Yitzhak Avraham was the fourth generation of his family to represent Stavishche as its spiritual leader and decision maker. His warm and friendly demeanor, combined with his self-assurance and determined strength, won the hearts of all those who knew him. Rabbi Pitsie Avram firmly believed that God looked after him, and in return for this divine protection, he felt a keen sense of responsibility to represent his people and to look after them. In this respect, he was remarkably successful.I
After narrowly escaping the fires in Stavishche in June 1920, Rabbi Pitsie Avram and his wife, Sara, fled the shtetl with another grandson in tow, eight-year-old Laizer Spector. The child had become separated from his widowed mother, Libby, and younger sister, Nina, during an earlier pogrom when the family fled into a forest. Pitsie Avram and Sara brought the boy to England, where they lovingly cared for him.II
Soon after Pitsie Avram’s arrival in England, he secured a position as a rabbi at the prestigious Philpot Street Synagogue in East London. He is pictured in a poignant photograph taken there during the Yom Kippur holiday of 1922.III
Laizer grew up in England under Pitsie Avram’s care and close tutelage and decided from a young age that he wanted to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and become a rabbi. He did not stray from what was to become his genealogical destiny: not only was his maternal grandfather descended from a long line of Jewish spiritual leaders, but his late father was Rabbi Aryeh Judah Spector and his paternal grandfather was the respected Rabbi Israel Nissan Spector of Zhivotov.
On July 28, 1925, the eve of his bar mitzvah, Laizer wrote a story in a careful Hebrew script describing his grandfather’s powerful religious influence on him. Although the child did not provide a source for the story on his paper, the tale can be summed up as follows: There were three merchants who were in the woods upon the entrance of the Sabbath. Two of them decided to go on with their journey and they came to a bad end; the one who remained in the woods was protected by a bear because he observed the Sabbath.
The proud grandfather marked the child’s paper with his personal seal of approval—a stamp bearing his name as rabbi of the Philpot Shul.
As the years passed, Laizer thought often about the fate of his young mother, Libby. Unknown to Laizer, after Libby lost sight of her son, she and her daughter (Laizer’s sister), Nina, traveled from one location to another in Ukraine, desperately seeking refuge. Finally, in June 1923, the resilient thirty-seven-year-old and her young daughter showed up in Kharkov, probably on the doorstep of one of her sisters, Golda or Fruma.IV
Libby tried applying for an international passport, which would enable her to leave for America, but she was unable to obtain a visa to enter the United States, probably due to the same heavy quota restrictions to which the Caprove family had been subjected.
So was it fate, destiny, or just a dose of old-fashioned luck that instead sent Libby and Nina in the direction of England? A bureau in Moscow granted permission for mother and daughter, easing their way to immigrate to Great Britain.V On November 21, 1923, they left from the port of Libau, Latvia, and landed on the shores of Southampton, England, on December 3, 1923. Later, other Stavishchers would sail from this Latvian port to Argentina, seeking freedom and a better life in Buenos Aires.
A little divine help from the rabbis above may have guided an unknowing Libby toward her son, who was waiting for her in London. Years later, her granddaughter Shirley recounted that “the family had lost contact for many years and according to Laizer, they met by an amazing coincidence, neither party having any knowledge of the others’ whereabouts.”VI
The Goldene Medina
After being reassured that his grandson was safely reunited with his mother and sister, and knowing that the child was well on his way to becoming a rabbi in London, Pitsie Avram and Sara made the long pilgrimage to America, sailing from England to New York, where they landed on June 19, 1928. The rabbi longed to live closer to his only son, Nissan,VII and youngest daughter, Havah (Eva), in America. The couple boarded the SS Majestic, carrying with them the precious Sefer Torah from Stavishche, along with its breastplate and two priceless antique silver Torah crowns, transported in oddly shaped cases.
After a brief visit with Nissan in Philadelphia, Pitsie Avram faced the untimely death of his wife. Not long after her passing, the elderly rabbi moved in permanently with Havah in New York, and became the spiritual leader of Agudat Achim Anshei Stavishche in the Bronx.
It was in this reconverted storefront that the resettled landslayt of Stavishche worshipped with the elderly Pitsie Avram at its helm. The precious items that he heroically saved in 1920 from the burning synagogue in Stavishche found their new home in the ark of this synagogue, which stood among several other Jewish houses of worship on 167th Street, just a few short blocks from the family’s apartment on Fox Street. The old rabbi conducted services in Hebrew but conversed with his Orthodox congregation in their native Yiddish. Havah, and her husband, David Zaslawsky, were among the regular group of worshippers who sat in the sections segregated by gender, according to tradition.
As in most Orthodox synagogues in its day, the men’s section had a superior view of the bimah and the ark, with a large window nearby to catch a much-needed breeze. The women’s section, on the other hand, was rather stifling; it was located to the side of the building, with no view or window, and was cordoned off from the men’s quarter by a drape.
The rabbi reveled in the fact that in his advancing years, he was blessed with one more grandson, a little boy named Moshe.VIII Pitsie Avram favored his grandson over his lovely granddaughters, for this was a child whom he believed would become a rabbi like himself. He took great pleasure in sitting the child on his lap, patiently answering questions from the bright and curious toddler who asked about the tefillin on his grandfather’s head. The old rabbi envisioned that the boy would become his spiritual heir and welcomed his curiosity. On Sukkot, after services, he enjoyed having little Moshe sit next to him every year in the sukkah, where they ate herring and walnut bread together. As the revered rabbi’s grandson, Moshe had complete run of the synagogue and his grandfather’s apartment. As far as the lively four-year-old was concerned, the synagogue was his playground to enjoy.
When the High Holy Days came around in 1941, Isaac and Rebecca decided to return to New York City for the first time since their departure in 1925. Their reasons were twofold: Rebecca wished to visit her ailing brother, Yunkel, in Brooklyn, and Isaac yearned to attend Rabbi Pitsie Avram’s Rosh Hashanah services at Agudat Achim Anshei Stavishche in the Bronx.
Rabbi Pitsie Avram, who at eighty-two had been too old to make the long journey to Philadelphia to attend Beryl’s funeral, welcomed Isaac to his shul. He sat Isaac in a place of honor, next to his son-in-law, David. During the service, the young shoemaker observed Moshe’s antics. Like most children, Moshe became restless in the heat, and started climbing in and out of the window. Nobody dared to stop the boy, for as Rabbi Pitsie Avram’s youngest grandson, Moshe was beyond reproach.
It was apparent to all that little Moshe exuded the same confidence as his powerful zeyde. Soon bored of climbing through the window, the four-year-old put on a short tallis, covering his head just like the rabbi. He walked up to the bimah behind his old grandfather, who was praying while facing the ark. Little Moshe began praying, too, mimicking Rabbi Pitsie Avram’s every move. The rabbi, deep in concentration, did not notice his grandson standing behind him, and only looked up when he heard the laughter of his congregants.
Looking at them curiously, the congregants signaled to the rabbi to turn around, and he caught sight of his young grandson imitating him. The rabbi never stopped praying and neither did Moshe. He smiled warmly at the child and turned the other way, signaling for someone to get his daughter Havah to come and take the child away while he himself continued to daven. It took a few minutes for the man to reach the boy’s mother, who was sitting in the women’s section. By the time Havah arrived to scoop Moshe into her arms, laughter had spread across the entire congregation.
When Havah asked her father’s assistant, “Why didn’t you stop my son?” he simply shrugged and answered, “He is the rabbi’s grandson; he can do whatever he wants.” Little Moshe was not reprimanded by his parents, and the old Stavishche rabbi was secretly delighted by the fact that his grandson davened and prayed in his image.
The rabbi’s enjoyment of his grandson, though, would be short-lived. On a sunny afternoon in March 1942, Rabbi Yitzhak Avraham Gaisinsky, while walking home from Agudat Achim Anshei Stavishche, was crossing the busy intersection at West Avenue and Fox Street when a taxicab turned the corner and fatally struck him. The eighty-four-year-old rabbi, who two decades earlier earned the respect of the murderous hetmans Zhelezniak, Zeleny, and Denikin while successfully negotiating with them for the lives of Stavishche’s four thousand Jews, died from massive injuries on a crosswalk in the Bronx. He rarely looked while crossing a street, believing that God was always with him.
The day that he died, his daughter, Havah, went into hysterics. Later, when she was sitting shiva for the father that she idolized, her three daughters Frannie, Ruthie, and Sylvia “staged a revolution.”IX Worrying that their young brother Moshe was not receiving an adequate education in English while attending the local yeshiva, they burned his Hebrew school clothes and took him to a barber.
With their larger-than-life grandfather now gone, the girls wasted no time in putting an end to little Moshe’s future as an orthodox rabbi. His payas was cut, and his sister Sylvia, who was the closest in age to him, lovingly picked up and pocketed her baby brother’s curls from the barbershop floor. A child without payas and yeshiva clothing would have to attend a public school; when the children returned home, their grieving mother did not even recognize her own son.
Little Moshe grew up to be a scientist, like his cousin. Showing great promise as a young scholar, his older cousin, the first Moise, met with him once in New York in the summer of 1954 when he was visiting from Paris, where he was soon to become the director of France’s National Center of Scientific Research in 1955. The rabbi’s oldest grandson wanted to bring his young cousin to study alongside him at the Sorbonne.
Little Moshe, who did not speak French, chose to remain in the United States, where he became a respected nuclear engineer. He worked at Livermore, Los Alamos, the Fermi Lab, the Savannah River Lab, and in Washington, DC, on a number of programs. At one time he directed a US Israeli Technical Assistance program for the US State Department where he was a guest lecturer at the TechnionX on seismic issues and structural engineering. As part of the Technical Assistance Project, he led a group of engineers at both the Technion and Livermore. He was the youngest among a select group of elite scientists representing the United States; many of his elders in this group had worked on the Manhattan Project back in the 1930s. One colleague was a much older Hungarian-born scientist, Edward Teller, known today as “the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb.”
The older Moise became one of France’s top scientists, and the younger Moshe was a noted scientist in the United States; they were first cousins with deep roots in Stavishche. In Russian, the letter H is often replaced with the letter G. Related surnames that begin with these letters, such as Gaisinsky and Haissinsky, are often spelled in different ways. It was not widely known to the outside world that the two men were related, since they were decades apart in age and the spellings of the surnames differed within their families.
Neither of the Moshes became a rabbi as their strong-willed grandfather desired, nor did the oldest and youngest grandson of Yitzhak Avraham Gaisinsky ever meet or communicate again as each pursued landmark careers on different sides of the ocean. Instead, the two progenies of the brilliant Stavishche rabbi became leading scientists of their day, each representing countries on opposite corners of the world.
Rabbi Pitsie Avram’s magnificent headstone,XI erected in the First Stavishter Benevolent Association section of the Old Montefiore Cemetery, is befitting a rabbiXII; his epitaph is befitting the man. Brushing aside the now overgrown ivy, one can read the Hebrew which states across the top:
Man is established from dust
And his end is to dust.
Here lies
The rabbi, the righteous, our teacher
Rabbi Yitzhak Avraham son of Rabbi Yisrael
Gaisinsky
Straight and righteous his pathXIII
The holy flock he led
Loving-kindness and mercy on his tongue
Unyielding as the pit (she’ol) his fear (of God)
Our brothers from death he rescued
Blessed is his memory forever
Chariot of Israel and its rider
He saved Israel from affliction
His rest is in Eden.XIV
Our beloved father
Died on the 1st day of Nissan
In the year 5702
May his soul be bound in the bonds of everlasting life.
March 19, 1942
To those once led by the great rabbi of Stavishche, the powerful words of the acrostic poem etched across his remarkable headstone rang true. Twenty-three years later, they could not forget the vision of their courageous leader as he calmly gathered his shaken community that was seeking refuge in nearby Vinograd after a brutal pogrom in Stavishche. Pitsie Avram led the long walk in front of his people as they trekked on foot all night through miles of fields. Along the way, refugees from Belaya Tserkov, Tarashcha, and Lukashifka ran out and followed him and his flock as they headed back home.XV
In America, on March 18, 1941, one year before his untimely death, Rabbi Pitsie Avram petitioned for naturalization to become an American citizen. An affidavit of witnesses was completed, and the petition was signed and stamped by both the rabbi and the deputy clerk of the Southern District of New York. Rabbi Yitzhak Avraham Gaisinsky was killed before swearing the oath of allegiance, the final step before obtaining citizenship. On January 3, 1946, nearly four years after the heroic rabbi’s death, his petition to become a United States citizen was formally denied.