Seventeen-year-old Yanky Stein was at his best, energetically assisting in the massive cleanup at the Brooklyn Armory after thousands of Satmar chassidim had celebrated the group’s yearly Yom HaHatzolah the previous evening. But something went terribly wrong: the cherry-picker lift he was in suddenly wedged underneath a low-hanging balcony, pinning his neck like a hangman’s noose as he was suspended between life and death. A true story of faith and miracles.
Throughout the ages Jews have experienced events that clearly superseded the limitations of physical nature; they’ve performed boundless chesed — people superseding their limited selves to bestow goodness upon others; and together they’ve formed a metaphysical entity we call Klal Yisrael a confederation of souls that often appears fractured but is never more than moments away from a wondrous unity of spirit. The following lines tell a tale of all three.
The days leading up to Chanukah are always filled with anticipation but those days are doubly special in Williamsburg’s Satmar community because it is then — on the 21st of Kislev that the kehillah comes together to mark the deliverance in 1944 of the Divrei Yoel ztz”l from the Nazi inferno. After a brief sojourn in Eretz Yisrael the Rebbe Rav Yoelish Teitelbaum made his way to America where he established his Chassidus anew with a literal handful of broken survivors.
Each year since then on the evening of the Yom HaHatzolah — the Day of Salvation as this day is known a seudas hodaah is held at which the Satmar community now large and burgeoning gives thanks to Hashem for what He did for its beloved rebbe. This festive gathering also serves as the annual dinner of Satmar’s sprawling network of chinuch institutions known by the shorthand acronym of UTA which together educate 9 000 talmidim and talmidos.
This year’s seudah held on Motzaei Shabbos Parshas Vayeishev marked 67 years since the Rebbe’s escape to freedom but it was auspicious for another reason too. This was the first time in 15 years that the seudah was celebrated in the cavernous expanse of the Brooklyn Armory perhaps the only Brooklyn venue that can comfortably accommodate the crowd of between six and seven thousand attendees.
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