Hidden Power

F
or me, the hardest columns are those written while traveling abroad, usually in the wee hours of the morning after a full Shabbos of speaking. The easiest, by contrast, are those written upon returning home, since I have always heard many stories that I’m eager to share.

This last trip was no exception. Last Erev Shabbos I met with Anthony Moshal, a South African expatriate entrepreneur now living in London. I had heard that he enjoyed a relationship with Rav Moshe Shapira ztz”l and asked him how that came about. Anthony told me that in 2001, Rabbi Avraham Edelstein arranged for him and Damon Hoff and Dr. Michael Setzer, two fellow directors of Yad Mordechai, the charitable foundation Anthony and his older brother Martin had established in honor of their paternal grandfather, to travel to Israel to meet with a number of gedolim to discuss what ought to be the foundation’s priorities in tzedakah.

Each of those consulted emphasized the importance of supporting Torah learning. But Rav Moshe also told them that if there were Jewish lives in physical danger and it was possible to save them, that should take precedence.

Rabbi Edelstein began researching whether there were clear instances of Jews under physical threat, and discovered that there were thousands of Jewish children in the former Soviet Union (FSU) who were roaming the streets, at best semi-orphaned, homeless, and vulnerable. Some of these children had eventually died of starvation. Yad Mordechai approached Rabbis Shlomo Bakst and Refael Kruskal of TIKVA Odessa and Rabbi Moshe Fhima of Yad Yisrael in Pinsk and asked them to save 100 Jewish children. Yet even though the Moshals committed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the effort, the rabbis refused unless the commitment was for at least three years, lest their organizations end up bankrupted by undertaking a major project for which there would be no funding down the line.