“I knew art was starting to heal me, that the real me— unafraid of expression, of judgment, of being misunderstood— was emerging”
His grandfather, Shmuel Levi Yitzchak Wadawski, was a chassid of the previous Skulener Rebbe, Reb Leizer Zusia; in later years he found his way to Chabad. He passed away when Moshe was young, but his grandmother, who lived for 16 more years, was an active part of the Shain family’s life growing up who visited their home often. She was fun-loving, on the ball, even active on the family chat.
In 2000, when Moshe was 11 years old, his grandmother was hospitalized for a minor procedure. She was recovering, she was fine — and then a message came the next morning: BDE Bobby passed away.
“We couldn’t wrap our heads around it,” Moshe, now 35, remembers. “She’d just texted a message seven hours before.”
When her second yahrtzeit loomed, Bobby’s children decided to hold a hachnassas sefer Torah in their parents’ memories, whose yahrtzeits fell out two days apart during the Aseres Yemei Teshuvah. Bobby had always wanted to write a sefer Torah in her husband’s memory, but she never got to it due to lack of money and energy.
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