They’ve lost four young children to a rare genetic disease, but Rabbi Yisrael and Aviva Deren carry on with simchah and emunah,
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“A
re we rich?”
It’s a question asked by almost every child as they gain a burgeoning awareness of society’s strata. The Deren children too asked this question.
“Yes” Mrs. Aviva Deren always answered without hesitation. “We’re baruch Hashem very very rich.” The answer remained true even as the family faced illness and grief. “I always wanted our children to feel that we’re a blessed family” she says. “Among the gifts my parents gave us is that they never apologized for our lives.”
Mrs. Deren tells of her parents Rabbi and Mrs. Zalman Posner. Chabad shluchim in Nashville Tennessee the Posners were the only shomer Shabbosfamily under the age of 70. But this wasn’t viewed as a hardship — they loved the community and loved what they were doing. “Shabbos was special. Mitzvos were special. And they conveyed that.”
Young Aviva grew up hearing stories of heroes — those spiritual warriors who learned Torah under the Communists who kept mitzvos in the concentration camps those people who kept Shabbos at tremendous cost when they first arrived in America. She identified a thread that ran through all these stories: The people who kept their Yiddishkeit intact were those who did so b’simchah.
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