The Magic of Quiet Chesed (Loving Kindness)

This is a story about two modest women who, after the Shoah, rebuilt their lives and were instrumental in a secret Chesed in Jerusalem.

A few weeks ago marked the 25th yartzheit of my mother-in-law, Leah Greenwald of blessed memory. I had known that she was a woman of great kindness, and since we married in 1976, I had many years getting to know her. My husband, Yaakov, remembers how, as children, they would carry pots of food to the indigent for whom his mother cooked. She also volunteered at the Jewish Institute for the Blind in Jerusalem and at Shaare Zedek Hospital, and more. 

Before making aliyah from Czechoslovakia, in 1949, she had been a teacher, but her Hebrew was not up to scale to teach in Israel. (In 1992, Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. My in-laws lived in the part that became Slovakia.) She eventually became the administrative director of the Baka mikvah, a position she held for 18 years, until her retirement in mid-1977. At that time, it was known as the largest, nicest mikva in Jerusalem. Even though she wasn’t usually the mikva attendant (who watched the women immerse), but the administrator, the Jerusalem Rabbinical court that oversaw conversion so respected and trusted her that they asked her to be the one to be personally present and involved with the female converts who came to immerse as part of their conversion process.

 But only about three years ago did I hear an incredible story of Chesed that involved Leah and her best friend, Piri Ganz, who passed away at the age of 105 and three months. Piri’s daughter, Judith Dasberg Savitz, shared a heart-warming story at Piri’s shiva.

But first, some background. 

Leah and Menahem, my father-in-law, were in hiding in a village on the outskirts of Trnava during the Shoah. Most of their families were murdered in Auschwitz, where two of Leah’s sisters (the three of them the survivors among 13 siblings) spent three years and even survived the death march. 

As my husband Yaakov relates, “In 1949 they got on a boat with my older brother David, and my younger sister Rivka, and me, and we arrived in Haifa. From there we were sent to Be’er Yaakov, where we lived for six months in a ma’abara (transit camp) next to Rishon L’Tzion. 

“We arrived in Jerusalem in 1950. My parents received two rooms in an old house in Baka from the government. It was a very poor neighborhood at that time – years before it became gentrified – and they were among a small group of Ashkenazi Jews who came mostly from Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania, who started the Emek Refaim shul [known today as the ‘Yael Shul’], and had a very close-knit community. 

“Our home was about one mile from what was in those years the Jordanian border.” During the Six Day War, Yaakov fought with the Jerusalem Brigade in Abu Tor, near the Old City of Jerusalem, less than half a mile from his home, and his brother, David, fought on Jerusalem’s Ammunition Hill as a paratrooper and was wounded there.

Judith’s parents, Piri and Menahem Yisrael Ganz, also came to Israel in 1949. They had lived in Bratislava but during the Shoah hid in a town called Nové Mesto nad Váhom; Judith said it means “the new city on the Váh River.” It was part of what became Slovakia. 

“In the beginning they didn’t have to hide,” says Judith, “because that town was ‘under the leadership’ of the local rabbi and the Nazis had said to him, ‘Whoever is under you is a Yehudi mukar [a “recognized Jew”].’ But then the Nazis took the rabbi and killed him and took his list of the Jews, and they all went into hiding.” 

Judith continues. “My parents came to that city by chance, for a visit, and they didn’t know any non-Jews [to hide them], other than a Christian woman my father had found in the street to help my mother give birth to my brother … it’s a complicated story … and my parents were hidden by their family, at first in a haymow [a part of a barn in which hay is stored], and when the winter came, they hid them in the cellar.”

Most of Piri’s family were also murdered in the Shoah. Judith says that her mother’s parents and her mother’s sisters were among the Jews who were herded into the shul in the town of Michalov on Simchat Torah and the Nazis burned the shul down with all the people in it. Piri’s two brothers survived Auschwitz but when the Allies gave the released prisoners food to eat, as happened with others, their bodies could not handle it and they died from it.

When Piri and Menahem Ganz made aliyah, they lived in the same transit camp as Leah and Menahem Greenwald and that is where they became friends. Judith’s father worked in a government office.  

“It was very difficult in the transit camp,” Judith said, “but then the government offices were moved to Jerusalem.” At that point they received an apartment from the government, also in Baka. Judith says that her father, together with a man named Fritz (Shlomo) Goldschmidt, were the lead founders of the shul. 

All the members of the Emek Refaim/Yael shul were survivors of the Shoah. Judith says she remembers the chilling moment when, during the reciting of Yizkor, every single adult remained in synagogue while the children left.

Judith relates that her mother had concluded her medical studies in Czechoslovakia and planned to become a doctor. But when it came time for final exams, the authorities removed the Jews from the school so they would not become certified. 

In Israel, in addition to raising her children, Piri sometimes administered shots, and, like Leah, she volunteered at the Jewish Institute for the Blind, working with the blind who were elderly and disabled, and at Shaare Zedek Hospital. Judith says that Piri was also very proud of a Parshat Hashavua [Torah Portion] class, led by various rabbis, that she organized for 25 years, when she moved to the Bayit Vegan neighborhood, a class that started in her home and eventually moved to a local shul where 200 women would attend.

Judith’s two brothers and her three sons all became paratroopers in Israel.

Here now is the story that Judith told at Piri’s shiva. 

A rabbi had already been accepted to lead their little shul in Baka, but later another rabbi, who they had known in Czechoslovakia, from the town of Vrbové, made aliyah. “There he was considered a serious rabbi,” says Judith. “He had led a shul and been a teacher. Suddenly he came here and nobody knew him and there was no job for him in Jerusalem.”

Judith told us that her mother, Piri, contacted a woman that Piri and her husband knew who worked in the Jerusalem Municipality. They made a deal with her. Every month, Piri and Leah Greenwald would secretly solicit funds from their small, financially struggling community, asking them to donate their ma’aser k’safim – their 10% tithe money – as tzedakah. They would bring the money to their friend in the Jerusalem Municipality, and she would write a check to the rabbi for the official position of neighborhood rabbi in Baka. 

The rabbi never knew that his salary came from his neighbors. He thought it was the city that employed him.

I checked with my husband’s siblings. They knew their mother collected charity, but they didn’t know it was for that rabbi. Both Piri and Leah wanted to ensure that it never got out, in order to not embarrass the rabbi. 

This story reminds one of Maimonides’ eight levels of tzedakah. In fact, the story combines levels one and three. Like the first level, it was providing someone with a livelihood, and like the third level, the donors knew the recipient, but the recipient did not know the donors (the neighbors).

Thus, two ladies, and their husbands and families, and their entire small community, among many other communities, began their lives again following the devastation of the Shoah. Their children and most of their grandchildren went on to serve in the IDF or perform National Service, and they also carry forth the torch of tzedakah handed to them by their foremothers and forefathers.

May it be a bright light for others, as well.

Toby Klein Greenwald is an award-winning journalist, theater director and editor-in-chief of WholeFamily.com. She and her husband live in Efrat and their children and grandchildren live throughout the land of Israel.