Rather than allowing the enormity of her situation to overwhelm her, she embraced her task with total simchas hachayim and dedication. When her son’s bar mitzvah approached, it was obvious that he would not be able to put on tefillin, so she decided to have a sefer Torah written in his honor. She worked on this project for an entire year before the bar mitzvah, and she managed to get dedicated people involved to help her raise the funds. On the day of the bar mitzvah there was a grand parade to bring the sefer Torah to a yeshivah in Jerusalem’s Ramat Eshkol neighborhood. Rechov Bar Ilan was closed, and with police escort, a few thousand women turned out to support this heroine.
“I was there, singing at the ‘bar mitzvah,’ as the mother walked under the chuppah with that sefer Torah, pushing her child in a wheelchair,” Shlomo says. “Later, she showed me these words of gratitude she’d written on the morning of the bar mitzvah. Although she carries a heavy burden, she sings praise. I brought her words to Yitzy Waldner, and the song just flowed.”
(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 890)
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