Leah Gitl Shukhman
Dear readers! We present an interview with Rav Yisrael Levin and his wife.
This is a family that began its journey toward the Creator back in the 80s, when Communist rule was still in full force. They came to Israel in 1987. At present, Rav Yisrael is a longtime student at the Mir Yeshiva, and also teaches and writes books. Rabbanit Leah taught at Machon Tal for many years and continues teaching today. All their children have built wonderful families that follow the path of the Almighty.
Rav Yisrael: Our journey began with raising our children. This was the prevailing atmosphere, the shared direction. Every family fought to keep its children apart from the society in which it lived. We ourselves still knew little, but whatever we learned, we passed on to our children. After all, it was impossible for us to live one kind of life and our children another.
Leah: we began moving forward gradually, each family at its own pace, but we already understood that we could not remain part of the society around us. We began taking an interest in Judaism. We started going to synagogue, even though we were not yet observing anything. We were united by a sense of Jewish community. We said "Shanah Tovah!" to one another, still having only a very vague idea of what Rosh Hashanah actually was. But we already felt proud that we could say those words and that we had at least some understanding of what lay behind them.
R.I. It all began around 1981. By 1985, we already felt that we were completely different people.
Leah: Groups began forming in people's homes, where children were taught something Jewish: Jewish songs, some basic laws, Hebrew words. It was a major achievement for us when a child could sing a children's song in Hebrew. A kindergarten opened. The "Russian kindergarten" in our home, in Ramot Gimel — is a continuation of that very kindergarten in Moscow.
We gained the most, of course, at the Riga dacha. It was a sort of three-month "seminar" for families, where we studied nonstop. There were about fifty of us. Women took shifts in pairs, working 14 hours a day for a week, while everyone else studied. Then another pair took over. It really toughened us up. That was where I learned both to bake challah and to cook various Jewish dishes.
Please tell us what your first holidays were like.
Leah: It all began when we visited the Pyatigorsky family.
R.I. Ilya Essas sent us there. At that point, the Pyatigorskys had not yet received permission to leave, but they already felt they would be leaving any day. We came to collect some kosher dishes—a family that had already left for Israel had left them behind. We could no longer use our own dishes, so we came to get these. And there, in their display cabinet, I saw a shofar. I had learned about the shofar at the dacha in 85 with Ilya Essas. We were studying the tractate "Rosh Hashanah," which discussed the shofar—but at that point I had never even seen one. I did not know what it was. From the dacha, we went to the Riga synagogue—the only one that had survived the Germans. Written on it in Hebrew were the words: "You have broken the teeth of the wicked" (a quotation from Tehillim). Reb Gershon Gurevich, who was in charge of the synagogue, pointed out the inscription to us (it was high up) and said, "This is precisely why this synagogue survived." All the others had been destroyed. This one was left standing and turned into a stable. Reb Gershon himself was already a very elderly man at the time. He had been a student of the Chafetz Chaim! He was the only person slaughtering kosher meat for all of Russia.
So we saw meat (sent to us from Riga) twice a year: before Rosh Hashanah and before Pesach.
So when we arrived and told him we were studying the tractate "Rosh Hashanah," Rav Gershon brought out a shofar for us to look at. It was a little black one. "This is what is called a shofar," he explained. And I had thought a shofar was something enormous! "But I don't blow it myself," said Reb Gershon. "If anyone wants to try, go ahead!" Without knowing why, I reached for the shofar: "Let me try!" I took it, put it to my lips—and suddenly sounds came out. It worked! Then Reb Gershon said, "Well, you'll be the one to blow it!"
When I visited Pyatigorsky, I immediately noticed the shofar in the display cabinet. I stood there looking at it, feeling awkward about asking… And suddenly Pyatigorsky said to me, "I can see that you want the shofar. Take it. We're leaving soon, after all, and you'll need a shofar to blow on Rosh Hashanah."
That Rosh Hashanah, I blew the shofar at home, following what I had understood from studying the tractate "Rosh Hashanah." Several families were visiting us—the Kulvyanskys, the Zilbersteins, and one other family. And just six months later, we received permission to leave. It turned out that the shofar in the synagogue was not kosher. So when we were leaving, Sasha Ilyin, a professional trumpet player, asked me, "Your shofar is the only kosher shofar in all of Moscow. Please leave it behind." It was very hard for me to part with that shofar…
The only simanim we had for Rosh Hashanah were apples and honey. In Moscow at the time, getting hold of pomegranates or dates was simply unthinkable.
Leah: Yisrael went to synagogue on Yom Kippur and stayed there all day. He spent the night nearby, together with a group of young men. But before that, something very interesting happened to us—something that was nothing short of a miracle. We were getting ready for Yom Kippur in a rush, and we also had a family over for the meal before Yom Kippur. The husband was supposed to go to synagogue with Yisrael, while the wife was staying with us. Everything was rushed and hectic; I was bathing the children, running back and forth between the room and the bathroom… And suddenly there was a knock at the door.
R.I. I was already standing there in my coat, with a tallit underneath. I was about to leave, since it was an hour's journey to the synagogue.
Leah: we looked through the peephole and saw a man we did not know. In uniform.
R.I. I stood there wondering whether to open the door. In the end, I decided that since we had a mezuzah, nothing bad would happen.
Leah: we opened the door, and he walked through the living room and sat down with his back to the wall. The cabinet against that very wall held all our Jewish religious items: siddurim, candlesticks, and so on. He did not look around and did not see any of it. Suddenly he began asking how we were doing, whether everything was all right, whether anyone was mistreating us… whether we had any problems with the neighbors…
R.I. By then, I had not worked for quite a long time. I thought he would start asking where I worked and so on. But he did not ask anything like that.
Leah: Of course I told him everything was all right, because I was simply afraid to open my mouth… He asked a few more questions like that (he sat there for about five minutes in all), then stood up and said, "Here is my business card. My name is Major Yakovlev. If you have any problems, questions, or complaints, get in touch." And he left.
We thought he must simply have been Eliyahu the Prophet. Shortly before that, many of our acquaintances had had their homes searched. Their books were confiscated; some also had the homemade wine they made for Pesach taken away… We were making raisin wine too.
R.I. And in 85, people were still being arrested. It was a very dark time altogether—one leader died, another took his place… It was only in 86 that signs of change began to appear, and in 87 the gates began to open. In 85, it was still very frightening. So as soon as he left, I went straight to the synagogue. This was already a real Yom Kippur. In Israel, everything is different—a person is immediately "thrown in at the deep end." Sometimes this can be such a shock that it is hard to recover from it. So this gradual process of becoming observant was a great chesed from the Creator for us.
I told Yanika, my eldest daughter, everything. Everything I discovered, everything that happened—we shared it all with her. She was 6-7 years old at the time. When she started school, that was a story in itself. We already wanted her not to go to school on Shabbat. That meant we had to get a note from a doctor… And on top of that, here was a child with such an unusual name…
Leah: I went to a neurologist and said, "You know, she gets very tired by the end of the week. So tired that she has no energy at all to go to school." The neurologist said very sympathetically, "You know, that does happen," and gave me a note valid for six months. When I gave the note to her homeroom teacher, she was very skeptical. After all, she saw Yanika and noticed no signs of tiredness at the end of the week. Yanika missed one Shabbat, then another… On the third Friday, the teacher called: "Will the girl be coming to school tomorrow?" I said, "No, she's tired…" "Why? She doesn't seem tired…" And so she called every Friday for six months. We had to put up with it. She surely suspected something, although she said nothing.
R.I. They began calling her "the foreigner" in class…
Were you able to celebrate Sukkot in any way?
R.I. At the synagogue, no. I went to Eliyahu Essas and said I wanted to build a sukkah. But on the other hand, there was a sukkah at the synagogue. He replied that if I wanted to build one, there was a mitzvah (though not an obligation) to build my own sukkah.
Leah: This was already 86. Baruch, the son of friends of ours, lived nearby and would come to us for Shabbats and holidays. He was 19, and he was the first in his family to become observant. His family did not accept any of it, so he came to us every Shabbat. So the two of them decided to build a sukkah. We lived in the Kuntsevo district. Not far from us was a large, beautiful wooded park, and beyond it were government dachas. There was also a military base nearby. And it was there, at the edge of the forest, between the base and the dachas, that they decided to build a sukkah. It was the safest spot: people at the military base might think that this structure belonged to the government dachas, while the people at the dachas might think it was something military.
R.I. The sukkah was built from individual planks and covered with white wallpaper. The whole thing seemed to glow. It was especially beautiful when snow fell on it. We made the schach from weeds we had cut down when clearing the site for the sukkah. Another problem was water—we needed water for netilat yadayim. There was no eruv, after all. So we had to bring the food and everything else in advance. What did we come up with? We buried a metal box in the sukkah's floor and put bread, honey, and apples in it ahead of time so we could have a meal. We took water from a spring at the foot of the hill, about thirty meters away. We had not intended to build the sukkah in such a "dangerous" place; we were simply looking for a place with the best conditions for celebrating Sukkot.
The families who had been with us for Rosh Hashanah came for Sukkot as well. The sukkah was quite large, and everyone fit.
We all sat down together and began singing Jewish songs. We sang so loudly that the songs could be heard even at the military base. We sang like that all week, and on the last day, Shemini Atzeret, we finished the meal, said Birkat Hamazon, and heard a rustling sound. We stepped away from the sukkah and saw soldiers in padded jackets creeping toward us to see what was going on in that sukkah. One of our friends wanted to go back and defend the sukkah. But we told him it was better to leave, since the time for the sukkah was over anyway… And we left without knowing what happened to it. Then, some time later, on a weekday, I took Yanika with me and we went to the sukkah. I thought it must have been destroyed. But it turned out they had done almost no damage—they had only torn down one poster with an etrog and a lulav drawn on it. I put everything back in place, and afterward we would come and visit our sukkah.
And in Adar, when we received permission to leave, we came to the sukkah and saw that birds had built their nests there. There was so much chirping!
Really, if only a person understood that everything they do later becomes part of history… The help from Above was incredible.
- Now, so many years later, that is clear to see.
R. I. Yes.
L. When children see their parents' mesirut nefesh and take part in it, it has a powerful influence on their upbringing.
R.I. It is not just mesirut nefesh—it is an expression of love for what you do. When a child sees how important it is to their parents… A child has no worries about how they will live or what they will eat tomorrow. In general, Israel puts a person through severe trials—here there are serious worries about making a living and so on. We did not have that there. So beginning to observe there, gradually, was precisely what enabled us to continue here.
And what was it actually like here? What were your first holidays like?
- It was a shock. We were guests in someone's home and felt that the spirit of the holidays here was different. In Russia, we had to make an effort to create something out of nothing. Here, everything was ready-made. You could go and buy everything in a store. We realized we were better off spending the holidays at home. Each person develops their own approach to each holiday, after all. Everyone celebrates it according to the way they have shaped it for themselves. Someone else's framework may not suit you. In general, the transition was very difficult. It had not been easy in the Soviet Union either. But there we were swept up in such enthusiasm and romanticism, and material concerns were not as burdensome as they are here. No one there talked about money at all. We lived very, very modestly. There were times when we did not know what to buy—potatoes or rice. But all that was in the background. We were always doing a great deal with the children; I made costumes for them for the holidays, and so on. When we came here, I continued doing that. I wanted them to enter the world of Torah through a sense of their parents participating in the holiday together with them. So they would not feel that the children had something separate and the parents something separate. It was something we did together. For example, the children helped us a great deal on Sukkot: they made decorations. The whole sukkah was decorated with their crafts—nothing was store-bought or ready-made. The girls saw that their father made everything himself with his own hands and followed his example.
- Do you think this is how you can convey the importance of the holiday, and the joy of the holiday, to children?
L. When you put effort into it yourself, and they take part and put effort into it too.
R.I. Someone who enters the world of Torah, rather than growing up in it, has to internalize the holidays for themselves—by preparing for them, studying their details and what they consist of.
L. For the holidays, we were always inviting people to our home—both people we knew from Moscow and the dacha, and others. We put so much into the sukkah, decorating it and making it comfortable, that it was extraordinary and we did not want to leave it. On the regalim, we would visit Rav Ezrachi.
When the children were little, it was physically demanding. I hardly ever went to the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services. Yanika did go, though—she was already ten or eleven when we arrived, so she went and knew all the prayers. When the children grew older and I started going too, Yanika would "teach" me—showing me where each prayer was, and so on. Of course, when I prayed at home, I felt I was missing something, a certain distance from the community. But I understood that this was what was required of me at that time. Once, while I was praying, I suddenly heard five-year-old Rachel, who had climbed onto the windowsill, talking to her friend. We did not have bars on our windows at the time. I had to stop and rush over to her. She was sitting there with her legs dangling, talking. And we lived on the third floor. That taught me not to envy those who were in the synagogue.
R.I. Besides, our women's class, which we have been teaching for twenty years now, baruch Hashem, provided Leah with spiritual nourishment. You simply cannot do without that nourishment. The girls listened to those classes too.
L. In recent years, we have been inviting our children over in turn. Sometimes we invite only the grandchildren. For example, Yanika's daughter—she is already fourteen.
- A woman has so many different things to do, especially during the holidays. She has to cook, clean, welcome guests, keep the children occupied—and still find time to pray herself. What do you think she should focus on? What matters most?
- I always tried to make sure everyone was happy (laughs). I wanted everything to be ready by the time everyone arrived. So no one would be kept waiting—even at the expense of my own prayers. After all, that is a woman's main role: to make sure everyone is happy. There is so much to get done, and it is impossible to do it all. If you try to do everything, you end up feeling completely drained. So you need to calm down and understand that your main responsibility is the home. You need to make sure the home feels festive. And that depends on the woman: making sure everyone is in a good mood, the table is beautifully set, and everyone arrives and sees that the holiday has begun. At the same time, you can speak to the Creator all the time. It is better to say only the minimum prayers, or pray later, and have everyone happy. There will be a holiday atmosphere at home.
There was one turning point for me. It was Simchat Torah, and we had many guests. Everyone went to the synagogue (the girls were older by then and went too), while I stayed home alone—I had to get everything ready for the meal. Thoughts came into my head: "There, they've all gone and left me alone at home…" Suddenly I heard something crash in the kitchen. The sink had come crashing down. At first, it was simply "the last straw." But then I suddenly felt that I needed to change my attitude toward everything. I needed to take it more calmly— yes, I am the person responsible for everything. Preparing the food, setting the table—preparing the holiday. That is a very important and honorable "position."
You can read more about the Levin family's journey in their wonderful book, "Pure Olive Oil."