Even more than they needed the brachah, those survivors needed to bask in the reassuring glow of the tzaddik’s presence

Poalei  Agudas Yisrael

Bnei Brak, Israel

Rabbi Moshe Grylak

Idon’t remember being inside a shul until I was ten years old.

Until then, I’d been a child refugee on the run from the Nazis. By the time I was six years old, I’d already fled from Belgium to France and then to Switzerland. I’d been separated from my parents and forced to assume responsibility for my little sister in a strange new country.

In 1945, our family was reunited and we left a scarred Europe behind to make aliyah. We settled in the fledgling city of Bnei Brak, and I began to reclaim the childhood that had been snatched away: friends, games, cheder, and shul.

Our shul, known as the “Pai Shul” — an acronym for Poalei Agudas Yisrael — was housed in a classroom in the first and only Talmud Torah at that time in the city of Torah and chassidus: Talmud Torah Rabi Akiva. All week during regular school hours, young boys learned there. During off hours, the desks and chairs served as the shul’s furniture, with the addition of a plain aron kodesh, the type found on army bases today.

Most of the mispallelim were Holocaust survivors, still reeling from the traumas they’d been through. Each of them had left someone behind — a father, a mother, brothers and sisters, a wife and children, if not all of the above. During the daytime routine, they’d try to rebuild. But after davening, they’d linger in little groups and talk.

As a little boy, I would hover in the shadows and listen as they reminisced about their horrific experiences in Auschwitz, in the ghettos, in hiding, in the forests, and so on. I don’t remember much of what they said, but the atmosphere in that classroom-turned-shul still lives in my subconscious.