“I’m standing on the land that was Hashem’s messenger to save our lives”
As they said goodbye for the last time in the small Batei Machseh apartment in Jerusalem’s Old City, they must have made an interesting contrast. The sweeping robes and tall, saintly figure of the Yerushalmi tzaddik, Rav Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, and the fashionable modern suit and European air of his young visitor, Herbert Kruskal from Frankfurt.
“Listen to your parents and return to Germany,” the aged rav told the energetic, idealistic young man he’d got to know over the past five years. “But it’s important for you to maintain your connection to Eretz Yisrael — so buy some land.”
The year was 1924, and as Herbert Kruskal, my wife’s grandfather, went off to buy a plot on Jerusalem’s barren hills and give up his dream of settling in the Holy Land, he little imagined the fateful chain of events that the tzaddik’s advice had just set in motion.
A set of giant wheels were now turning that would culminate in one of the most dramatic, little-known rescues of the Holocaust.
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