Institutionalized all their lives as lepers, they nevertheless accepted the Divine decree with love and happiness. A portrait of two great souls.
“They Were Always Happy”
His first visit to that sad place was on the happiest holiday of the year — Purim.
“A friend of mine, Yankele Levine, invited me to go with him to read Megillas Esther at the Hansen Lepers’ Hospital in Talbieh.” Rabbi Ephraim Holtzberg recalls. He is one of the first residents of Jerusalem’s Old City, and son of Rabbi Simchah Holtzberg, z”l, known as the Father of Israel’s Wounded Soldiers. “I went with him, and from then on, I went there every Erev Shabbos with my friends. People were afraid to visit them. The image of people hospitalized in a lepers’ hospital frightened even close family members.”
He remembers the blind Arab patient who always sat and wept, bemoaning his bitter fate. One of the nurses told Rabbi Ephraim that no one ever visited this man. His family told him, “If you pay us, we’ll visit you,” and that broke his heart.
“The germ is highly contagious,” Rabbi Ephraim explains. “So there were stringent precautions, and the staff dining hall was separate from the patients’ dining hall.”
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