I heard the following story from Rabbi Aaron Lispker, the director of Aleph institute in Bal Harbor, Florida.
It was summer, 1995, one year after the Rebbe’s passing. Aaron and his friend Shlomie Grossman were traveling across Florida on a mission for the Aleph Institute, visiting Jewish inmates in jail. One evening, they were running out of gas and they also needed to find a place to stay for the night.
As they drove through some backwoods town near Daytona, some 250 miles North of Miami, they found a gas station. A man who seemed like the owner, a big and burly guy, filled up their tank with gas. As he looked at them, he asked them if they could accompany him to a back office.
The two young Chassidim got nervous. "I don't know why we agreed," Aaron recalled. “It did not make sense to follow him to an unknown location, but for some reason we complied.” Aaron and Shlomie followed him to a back office behind the gas station. An old man was sitting there.
The younger man turned to the older man, pointing to the two Chabadniks: “Dad! They came to get you!”
The two yeshiva students were dumbfounded. This seemed absurd. They came to get gas and here they were in some forsaken office.
The old man turned to them and asked in Yiddish, "vemens zeit eir?” Who do you belong to? Where are you guys from?
Aaron, a witty young man, replies: “We are Rabbi Schneerson’s boys! We're Chassidim of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The Rebbe wanted each of his pupils to try and help every Jew in need. So we have been traveling this week to visit Jewish inmates in the area, Jews behind bars who may want to learn Torah, wrap tefilin, do a mitzvah, or yearn for some encouragement and inspiration to try and rebuild their lives for the future.”
The man burst into bitter tears. It took some time for him to recover and to tell them his story.
His story began before the Holocaust when he was a newly wedded young man from a Chassidic home living in Eastern Europe. Just as he began his new life, his entire family, including parents, brothers, sisters, and wife, were transported to the death camps and murdered by the Germans. Out of his large family, he was the sole survivor.
He survived the camps, but he was completely devastated. He arrived in the U.S. and settled in Williamsburg, but could not fathom how Jews could go on living normal lives. In particular, he could not understand how religious Jews could continue keeping Torah and Mitzvos after the war. He was so angry, bitter, and broken. He was determined to leave behind every trace of Judaism and Jewish identity. He would run as far as he can to try to forget his past and begin anew.
At first, he lived in a different town in Florida, but since there was a Reform Temple, this wasn't remote enough from Judaism for him. He moved to this town near Daytona, with nothing Jewish in it at all. He married a gentile woman and had three sons, one of whom had filled their tank with gas.
Years passed, life was not very eventful for this former Chassidic Jew who was now completely estranged from his people. He never even shared with his own family about his Jewish origins.
One night, when he could not sleep, he turned on the TV and began flipping channels. To his surprise, he discovered a channel on Cable TV, where an elderly man, a bearded Chassidic Jew, was speaking in Yiddish.
He was stunned. He has not heard this language in decades. His childhood memories kept him glued to the screen, listening to the rabbi speak on TV for an exceptionally long time. The subtitles that scrolled across the screen said this was the Lubavitcher Rebbe, addressing an audience at a “farbrengen,” a Chassidic gathering at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.
Suddenly, all of the Chassidic memories of his youth returned to him. He was overtaken by deep emotions, but he knew that it was too late. He has made his choices decades earlier. “I am lost to my people forever,” he thought.
And then he heard the Lubavitcher Rebbe say on the screen (it is actually something the Rebbe would say frequently), “We were promised that G-d will gather every Jew, one by one, taking each of them by his or her hand, and bring them to the ultimate redemption. No Jew will be forsaken, no Jew will be left behind. When Moshiach comes, G-d will gather every Jew from wherever they are, no matter their level of observance. No Jew will be lost to our people.”
This man felt the Rebbe was talking directly to him. The words made such an impression on him that in the morning, he gathered his family and told them he was Jewish. At first, they didn't know what he was talking about since they had never been in contact with Jews before. He explained to his children where he came from and about his Chassidic origin. He told them that one day, The Rebbe promised, Moshiach, G-d, or some Jew would come to get him …
"That is why," he concluded, "when you came here, my son came to me and said, 'Dad, they came to get you'”!
Aaron and Shlomie sat with this older Jew and sang Chassidic melodies from his youth. They came back the next day and put on tefillin with him. They kept up a connection with him via letters; they sent him a Chanukah menorah to light candles on Chanukah and got him involved again in Jewish life. Around a year later, they heard that he had passed away.
This remains the legacy of the Rebbe. In our final journey from exile to redemption, no Jew will be left behind, not even a forsaken Jew somewhere near Daytona. All the three groups will ultimately unite, redefining themselves as Divine ambassadors to reveal cosmic oneness.
From the sefer מרן, a book about Rav Ovadyah Yosef by Rabbi Michel Stern.
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