For over a century, Rebbetzin Malka Waltner and her husband traversed the globe on their mission to bring Torah to every Jewish child

"Look out through my window. Did you ever see anything so beautiful?”

I follow Rebbetzin Malka Waltner’s finger as she points to the panoramic view of Yerushalayim visible from her living room. I glance toward the window and then look back at the bright, intelligent eyes of a centenarian woman who has seen Germany and London, Gateshead and Morocco, Gibraltar and Belgium.

The Rebbetzin’s heart is a repository of stories from different times, and the silhouettes of yesterday’s greatness accompany her through her days. The view, indeed, is beautiful.

“It’s worth everything, no? When I have this, I don’t need anything else.”

I’ve come greedy for stories. A consummate hostess, the Rebbetzin, however, is absorbed first in offering me drinks and hearing about my journey.

“So, you want to hear about my husband?”

I shake my head. “No, Rebbetzin Waltner. I came here to hear about you.”

“About me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then no one is going to read it. Why would anyone want to read about me?”

I looked around the room, filled with mementos from around the world, and looked back into the eyes of this centenarian, bright with intelligence and humor. In German accented English, spiced with Hebrew and the occasional Yiddish, she has already questioned me on my travel arrangements (applauding my decision to travel by bus — “Here they drive like meshugaim”) and asked if her acquaintance, Mishpacha’s CEO Eli Paley will check the article himself (answer: “He has people who will check it for him”).

No one will want to read it? I smile and shake my head. “I don’t think so.”

Close Escape

How my mother developed her resilience, says her daughter Rebbetzin Golovenshitz, then you need to go back to her youth in Würzberg, Germany. Born into a wealthy, established family, the young Malka Habermann was only a teen when her mother passed away in 1934. Her two older sisters were living in Paris, and they urged her to join them, along with their father. But Malka had other plans.

Hitler’s soldiers may have been goose-stepping over the bridges of the Rhine, but Rebbetzin Waltner was slaking her intellectual and spiritual thirst in the famed Würzberg Teacher’s Seminary. The teaching staff featured the most prominent rabbanim of the day, and the pedagogical standards — recognized by the secular authorities — were famed across Germany. She wouldn’t move until she received her degree.

As the shadow of the German monster lengthened and darkened, Malka felt increasingly threatened. She’d been asked to spend the night with an elderly woman when the Gestapo came banging on the door. They sat together, frozen in silence, for long minutes until the pounding on the door subsided.

While they banged, Malka noticed an open window. It wouldn’t take much for her to jump out of the window and run to safety. In one of those split-second decisions that come to define one’s personality, Malka refused to abandon the elderly woman. She stayed until the morning and then returned to the seminary. It was only after the devastation of Kristallnacht that Malka felt compelled to flee without waiting to graduate.

Somehow, she managed to procure emigration papers. In 1938, legal permission to leave Germany was unheard of — and those papers carried the promise of life itself.

Just months before the fate of Europe’s Jews was sealed, the Rebbetzin traveled through France and across the English Channel. A work permit allowed her into England, and she was to work as a maid for a London family.

She took along two of her mother’s fine duvets, a pair of Shabbos candlesticks, and a couple of seforim. When she arrived, she discovered the duvets and candlesticks had been stolen. She was penniless; worse, all mementos of the past were erased. All she had now were memories, determination — and hope. But for Malka, that was a powerful elixir, one she’d carry wherever life would take her.