A holy ancestor’s photo sparked a roots journey across time and space
INsummer 1935, a boy named Nathan boarded the train in Berlin and traveled east to celebrate his bar mitzvah with his grandfather, in the land of a thousand shtetls.
The sleepy Polish town that was his destination was no ordinary one. It was Lizhensk, the storied home of the early chassidic master, Rav Elimelech Weisblum, known to posterity by the name of his work, Noam Elimelech.
Young Nathan’s grandfather was also no ordinary zeide. He was Rav Shmuel Yeshaya Birnbaum, the town’s beloved dayan. A descendant of Reb Meilech, as the chassidim call the legendary rebbe, and married to a granddaughter of the Noam Elimelech, he was known interchangeably as Reb Shmuel Dayan, or Reb Shmuel Tchitcher, after his birthplace. For a full six decades until his passing in 1938, he paskened sh’eilos, settled disputes, and served as mohel for generations of Lizhensk boys.
So, when a crisis hit the town on Erev Shabbos of the bar mitzvah, it was to the tall, saintly looking dayan that the townspeople turned. The emergency in question involved fish, the price of which had soared, making the Shabbos staple unaffordable for the struggling locals.
Create a free account to keep reading.
