Stories Of Greatness

Natan (Anatoli) Sharansky was arrested in 1977 for his activism: his insistence on the right of Russian Jews to make aliyah to Israel. However, he was accused of the much more serious crime of treason: for spying for the United States. He sat in prison from 1977 to 1986, including eight years in a Soviet prison camp in Siberia. After continuous public protest in the West, spearheaded by his wife Avital, Natan Sharansky was released in a spy exchange between the US and the USSR in 1986. After making aliyah and establishing a Russian immigrant party in 1996, he became Israeli Minister of Industry and Trade and later of the Interior. His memoirs of the Soviet period are filled with sparkling anecdotes about the power of the few against the many, the power that derives from “fearing no evil” and laughing in the face of oppression. The phrase “Fear no evil” is taken from the little Sefer T’hilim, which he carried with him through his long imprisonment.

One of the well-known maggidim in Eretz Yisrael was once invited to speak at a mesivta in Jerusalem to deliver a shmuess and words of chizuk. He began by retelling a story that he had heard firsthand.

Mayanei Hayeshua Medical Center (MHMC) was established in 1990 in Bnei Brak, Israel, as a community hospital with a unique mission to provide modern and sophisticated medical services that adhere to Jewish tradition and halachah. Dr. Moshe Rothschild, Founder and President of the Medical Center, initiated the establishment of the hospital out of a belief that a city like Bnei Brak, with a populous religious community, calls for a medical center that will provide its inhabitants with high-quality professional medical services while strictly adhering to the values of the sanctity of life and human dignity. As a medical practitioner in Bnei Brak, Dr. Rothschild had long seen the necessity for a local hospital that would provide for its medical needs, without compromising the spiritual level of the environment distinctive to it. By making such an option available to the population, they would be spared the necessity of traveling out of the city, and many lives could be saved.

Before one of his overseas trips, a woman asked Rabbi Yerachmiel Milstein, a lecturer in Aish HaTorah’s Discovery Program, if he could take a suitcase to Eretz Yisrael for her. Reb Yerachmiel was happy to do the favor and she was appreciative of his graciousness. Rabbi Milstein made it to the airport in time. After take-off, he prepared for some of his upcoming meetings at Aish HaTorah, and then sat back and reflected on the possibility of visiting his grandmother’s kever.

There’s no panic quite like discovering that your suitcase has disappeared from beneath the bus you had just traveled on, right before a two-day Yom Tov to another city. It wreaks havoc on one’s psyche and causes extreme panic. That’s what happened to Shlomo and Meira Weber just a few hours before the onset of Rosh HaShanah in Ramat Beit Shemesh.

In 1942, two years after the German invasion of the Netherlands, Johan Van Hulst – the son of a furniture upholsterer – was the principal of a Christian training college in Amsterdam. The school was in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Plantage, just east of the city center. Across the road from Van Hulst’s school was the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theater seized by the Nazis in 1941 to be used as a deportation center for the Jews of Amsterdam. In total, 107,000 Jews in the Netherlands were sent to death camps; only 5,200 survived. Historians believe that about 46,000 people were deported from the old theater over an 18-month period, up until the end of 1943. Most of the Jews who were deported ended up in concentration camps in Westerbork in the Netherlands, or Auschwitz and Sobibor in occupied Poland. Sadly, most did not survive.