In My Parents Home

Rav Avrohom Kalmanowitz zt”l, Rosh Yeshivah of Mir Brooklyn, was renowned for his hatzalah work on behalf of World Jewry. His youngest daughter, Rebbetzin Maita Nelkenbaum, recounts to her granddaughter what it was like growing up in her parents’ home

I was born in 1948, three years after the Holocaust ended, so I wasn’t around when my father was busy fundraising and lobbying for the rescue of European Yidden, including the Mirrer Yeshivah. Many years later, my sister, Reichke (Rebbetzin Reichel Berenbaum), would ask me, “Do you remember when the FBI came to the house, during the war?”

And I’d answer, “I wasn’t born yet.”

Confidant of the Gedolim

BBefore moving to America in 1939, my father was the rav of Titkin, Poland, the city where my mother was born. He was part of the hanhalah of the Mirrer Yeshiva, the youngest member of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah in Europe, and a close confidant of Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzenski ztz”l and the Chofetz Chaim ztz”l.

After his wife passed away, leaving him with young children, he married my mother, Mina Hadas Lenchevsky a”h, who raised his children as her own, with great love and mesirus nefesh, enabling my father to continue his work for the Mirrer Yeshiva and as rav of Tiktin. When my parents got married, my father wanted to take my mother on vacation. She replied, “I’m married now and I can’t go, I have to take care of the children.”

That was my mother. She didn’t live life for herself.

Even as a young child, my mother shouldered responsibility. My mother’s parents, Rav Naftali and Rivka Faigel Lenchevsky a”h, were Gerrer Chassidim. Her father was the melamed at the city’s cheder. Although she was very young, she’d go collecting tuition on behalf of her father. Some families were so poor they would give her potatoes or onions instead of money for tuition.

When she was 15 years old, her father sent her to the Bais Yaakov Seminary in Krakow to learn under Sarah Schenirer. She was privileged to sleep in the same room as Frau Schenirer. My mother absorbed Frau Schenirer’s hanhagos, her behavior, which inspired her for the rest of her life. She always spoke of Frau Schenirer with such eimas hakavod, with the highest derech eretz. Frau Schenirer was like her rosh yeshivah. She never referred to her by her first name; she always called her by her title.