Meaningful Interviews: Mrs. Chana Sharfstein - From Stockholm to Crown Heights - Chabad Growth

good morning to everyone uh this is the meaningful interviews program dolphin and today we have mrs hannah scharfstein who needs no introduction but i'll introduce her uh mr scharfstein has been on my radar for 20 30 years ever since i had the opportunity to host her daughter in a camp that i ran in northern california crazy and um her good work both in habad and adafrapod her special tours and of course being the daughter of rabbi isro zuber i believe who learned in the babbage by the rebel ashab and everyone knows that one of my uh great loves is writing about hasidim of the past their history and i've documented much of this in many of my works my books so um mr scharfstein is is uh noted for her own right but also because of her family where she comes from and of course her late husband rabbi scharfstein who i would see around khan heights and recently i wrote a book called chabad and orthodoxy it's one of my last books between 1900 and 1950 and it's really a study of the freedom cadet of jose music schneerson's trip to america in 1929 and 1930 and i found out that the scharfsteins were very involved with a shul in manhattan i think on henry street i forget and um i have quite a bit of information i think mr sharpstein you'll be amazed at what we put together found out some intricate details from various scholars and historians about the various schools and i believe that defeated kadabra even said a my major citizen in the show that your late husband and his father and his brother uh belong to in uh in in the lower east side right so um it's it's it's very appropriate that uh we have you on and i say welcome to you and please tell us a little bit about your background and i i my understanding is that you as a little girl i imagine about eight to ten years old without divulging your age of course um uh met defeated caleb in sweden on his way out of nazi germany and he was saved from the holocaust and i think what i read and heard is that you remember that uh with the ten other people who who were saved and they went through sweden and your father oliver shalom was the main facilitator of that part of his journey so please tell us a little bit about it thank you well i grew up in stockholm sweden where my father was a rob uh he was a robbing a school called adas israel and yes it was a very high point in our lives when the friday cadet came to stop there and my father was so enormously excited because he hadn't seen him since they had been together in vega latvia which was in the 30s and this was 10 years later and uh i remember that we were all in a suite of rooms in a very very elaborate hotel which is still the most important hotel in stockholm even today it's the grand hotel and it's where the nobel prize winners stay when they come to get their awards and it's across the street across the water from the from the royal palace and i remember being led up by my father each one of us came up to the river to get a special broker and the rapper put his hands on my head and i felt that i was like in a cloud he was a very big man to me he was a big man physically he was like robust and he was seated in a wheelchair and he i was fascinated by this golden pocket watch that he had he had it in his pocket and then it went across his chest and he puts his hand on my head and he asked me what my name was and i was bilingual of course speaking edition swedish so i told him india dish that uh my name is hannah and he gave me a big brother and he said that's a beautiful name and i should always cherish the name beautiful and what was your father's um involvement as the dove he was the main lover of stockholm right he was the main rob of stockholm and i would say he was really the main rob of orthodoxy in all of sweden because stockholm was by far the largest center of jewish life in sweden and he was immorally traveled all around all the scandinavian countries before everything was closed up during the hitler era he traveled to make a bris to all the scandinavian countries to norway and to denmark and to finland and of course in sweden and he was in charge of the shrita which was a very big problem later on because there was a whole big thing about inoculating the animals so that uh according to you know the people who were very much into animal rights that they should be inoculated with all different problems and uh he was in charge of everything that had to do with halacha he even published a safer that was called which deals with special halachas that have to do what time you can what time you can dive and what time you can bench and things like that because it's like really hard for people to understand but summertime shabbos ends like midnight and shabbos begins like in the summer time in july begins like at nine ten o'clock at night so you have to really know when do you bend banking chakras and all these things so right now um what what year did uh did he and you your family leave the stockholm for america 1947. so is it your education your general uh was in in the in the local schools um and and could you what did you walk away with as a as a as a friend libavich girl in stockholm well we had a wonderful wonderful secular education in the schools there there were no day schools because there weren't enough people to make any day schools we had a little town with torah after the refugees came on the fishing boats from denmark then we ended up having a little bit of an international school they were it's hard to believe that in the city of stockholm with half a million inhabitants there were only two jewish girls besides me it's like hard to believe that and then when the danish jews came we had a teacher from denmark and we had a good daughter that was a rabbi her father had been the rabbi in norway he was never killed by the germans there her name was samuels and then there were some girls from denmark so we had like a whole little talmud tour and that was very exciting i think there were four or five of us uh the schools the secular education was incredible it was like like way above and beyond what was being taught in schools in most other countries even the united states and we are private tutors for hebrew studies that's very interesting that there were only two two jewish girls in stockholm those days that's that's amazing let me ask you did you feel envious of your non-jewish girlfriends friends why would i be envious of them there was nothing to envy they had you know they were all very good friends with me in school uh i participated in all the activities and things they even had school on shabbos because i was home and they would come every job this afternoon from school they would come and bring me the work so i could cover it on sunday because they had to have special permission from the king to stay home you have to cover the work but no why would i be envious of them i mean i had the home was very very strong the home was really really the center of our lives your father talked a little bit about his days in uh and his family see them from the candy i think he told me they came from going back that the democratic you know was the one who made those colonies for the barbecue see them and others did he talk a little bit to you and do you have you had siblings yes yes i was the youngest i have i had two older brothers and i have an older sister she was a schlocher and springfield for all the years that she was right so did your father talk about the box about his using your shoe uh yes he did yes he did they were very very difficult years because he went there as a young boy i don't even know if he was bar mitzvah yet and of course there was no cell phone and there were no phones and there were no letters from home and you went to live there in tomret tomreitum and uh the food was very meager they had like really really not large amounts of food and he became a chain smoker people smoked because that was a way to steal their hunger and keep them awake he told me about how they used to take little cat they would learn all night because they loved learning and they would learn by candlelight because they didn't have electricity in those this and then they would take when the candles became very small they would save the little stumps of candles and then melt them together and make new candles out of it like everything had to be done very sparingly and the only time that they really had a good meal was when they went on shabbos when they were treated by hosts in the city did he talk about the rabbit that are shocked did you remember anything he said about that uh just that he sent him uh when he was when he was just a young brother he must have been like no more than 1819 and uh he sent him that there was a war going on of course there were all these wars going on the bolshevik revolution whatever and he sent him to read uh to read the magilla for the people at the army and that was the first time that he acted as a shliya and he went to the army and he read it to them and then when he came back the rebel rashad wanted all the details of what happened and how it worked out and he wanted every single iota of what had happened he was so interested in it who did he who was like a very good friend of his that made it to america that he would speak about any anyone in particular um well he knew all the people that were here it was a very disappointing experience because he was in riga together with the laboratory and the entourage they were all in vega in the late 1920s early 30s and he had four siblings in the united states he had three sisters and a brother and you needed a visa to come so of course like once you had left russia and you were in riga latvia you were on your way because latvia was an independent baltic country already so you were never going to go back to russia from there because russia was communist revolution with stalin and it was just an awful situation and so they were waiting to get visas from the united states and guess what nobody gave him a visa because he was a father with a small family with three children at that point i wasn't around yet and it was terrible because the situation in america had just had the market crash and people were on bread lines and nobody had money so nobody was going to say i am going to vouch for this man to come with his family when they could barely support themselves so that's why he ended up in sweden actually the friday canada told him to go to sweden and gave him a big profit to go there and that's very interesting so he comes to america um and he survived the war because they didn't come into sweden how was it that he survived yes we were really really lucky we were really lucky it was like we were in the midst of everything falling apart around us i mean sweden and norway have a common border that's the scandinavian peninsula norway was invaded and half of their men were killed as soon as they came to auschwitz and their really jewish community was really scattered and taken apart on the other side south of us was denmark and denmark they were very lucky in christian the 10th he was the one who said that he doesn't separate his citizens the jews are danes like everybody else so he said they don't have to wear a star and if anyone wears a star then i'm going to wear the star too because we're all one group of people and so they were able to rescue 98 of the danish jews and they came to sweden and finland that was very interesting finland fought together with the germans on the side of the germans against russia but they sent their children for safekeeping to sweden so we had a little finnish boy living in our home for two years until the parents came after the war that's that's amazing amazing that's gossip brothers the divine providence how your families are saved and other people now so you come to america of 1947. did you come straight to boston or to new york or elsewhere well actually my father had a contract and i have a copy of the contract it was a legal contract signed by rabbi gurari it was a contract that told how much money he was going to make as rosh yeshiva of tom tamim of the whole barbecue shivan bedford indian he was going to be the rosh yeshiva the really big top man there and uh that was just a position i was totally suitable for him he was a scholar and he was a talmud and this is what he really would have been very good at and so he packed up his precious library and he came on that tonight but then while in the interim he was waiting for my sister because she was over 18 and she had to get her own passport so it took a few months till everything was cleared up and in the interim the one who had been in charge in atrotsk in poland of the chabad yeshiva is rabbi guzman he reappeared on the scene and everybody had thought that he had well he wasn't alive anymore but he had ended up in russia during the war and of course till he got out from there and he was able to communicate all of this happened and then the rebbe said that he needed to get the position back to him because he had had it before and that's how we ended up in boston and did someone call him down to boston how did white boss uh they feed a good episode in there and to send them there what to be out of uh he sent him there to be involved at the chabad shul in dorchester massachusetts which is part of boston and to be uh part of the day school that they had there but they had a children's day school that they the barbecue sheep in boston right right um now i heard from [Music] your your nephew rabbi israel adelman who's named after your father right right he told me that your father uh attended rabbi salvati showed him and he had a very good relationship with rabbit salvation do you does anything come to mind when i mentioned that well my father was like very good friends with all the rabbi there was a rabbi savitsky in boston also and my father became very quickly a member of the vatarabhanam in boston and he was recognized as one of the authorities there and uh they all respected him and he respected them so he was on good terms with all of them right but did you know the celebration girls growing up well they really kept very much to themselves they really didn't associate with any people they went to school and they stayed home they didn't belong to any of the organizations or participate in any of the activities that the rest of us did very nice now i i also recall reading uh in various publications that uh howard anders and you had a very special relationship in the early especially in the early years in in the 50s am i correct and i think it had also to do with your off schaefel i i it's you know mixed up but maybe you want to share a little bit about that well it was very very unfortunate and very tragic that my father lived through the bolshevik revolution he lived through the era of stalin he lived through like really hazardous times uh the world war ii era all the terrible things and of course needless to say uh even though we were not thank god thank god involved in world war ii purse say we were very much touched by it because when the white buses came and took the refugees from the camps the survivors and brought them to sweden they were the first stop that they had so my father was like the first one to really hear all the terrible stories of what had happened to them so he was aware of all the horrible things that had happened during that entire era and then we came to the united states and we thought that boston america you know boston cradle of liberty and all that stuff uh my father was actually killed there and that was really a big tragedy it was only five years after we came and uh he was nobody ever solved it it was like you know mystery crime but he was attacked apparently by probably we think a group of young teenagers and uh they threw him to the ground they suffered a brain concussion and the next day he was sniffed there so that was only after five years so that was very tragic and of course i was left farther less at a young age and then five years later my mother was nifty but in between that like uh we went to see the rebel and i got very much involved with that and he kind of like became a substitute father i must say how old was your father when he was murdered when he passed away 55 55 and that was in 1955 52 1953 1953 so just tell us one thing that stands out from uh uh uh with the rapper during those years with you something that really shows not just him being like a father to you which of course is very significant but how that ebb understood women i think one of the reasons i really wanted to interview you and i want to continue with other women is to show the young women today the future you know the future of our people how women can and need to be leaders like yourself and i mean it is to to to to bring the the message of trader and and yiddish guy and khasit to to the world so so tell us something about that that the rebbe and you conversed and discussed and even made me debate is an argument just i want to hear well it was amazing because the first time i came to see the leba was just a few months maybe two three months after my father had been lifted my mother came to see that because she was like completely overwhelmed and lost it was a new country a new experience new language new culture and there she was left a young widow and it was just overwhelming so uh i sat quietly and listened while she was talking to the rep and then he started talking to me and i was amazed at how easy he was to talk to and he would sit there and you know you felt that he was listening to every word that you said he was like an incredible listener i think today people have lost the art of listening every so everybody's so busy with twitter and facebook and all these media things that they have to always give information and give and give but nobody knows how to listen and the rebbe was an incredible listener so uh when i came to new york by myself i just felt like seeing him because he was such a great listener and what amazed me tremendously was that he could recall a conversation that we had had three four months before and recall in detail what we had discussed and what i had responded and it was like i could barely remember the whole thing until he started to say it and then i remembered that yes i did say all those things and that was like really really overwhelming uh he amazed me because he brought up the subject about love and that was like like you know everybody wants to know about that you feed us no it's not written down it's not in a letter it was a conversation and uh i had no intentions of discussing anything like that with the rabbit because i didn't think that that's what you do so he brought up the topic and i was amazed because i had told him before he asked me what my hobbies were and what i enjoyed doing and i said i loved reading so he said to me remember you told me you loved reading he says what kind of books do you like to read and of course i was going to be honest i was going to say you know i like to read documentaries i like to read historical novels i like to read books of science and philosophy because i didn't and i said i love to read novels and it's just incredible that the rebel knew exactly what a novel was and and he even like responded to it to say that novels don't describe real life that it's all make-believe and he he just knew about those things and that was really amazing that he was so on top of it and he could discuss it and explain it and he had all the patients in the world so you're talking about the schaetel and that was like uh before i was getting married he asked me if i was going to wear a shadow and had no problem no hesitation at all i said absolutely not and instead of him looking at me and being upset or annoyed or any kind of thing he just smiled and he said and why not and then i started to explain to him that young people don't wear shade love because nobody in boston was wearing a shadow and it was something that old women do and i certainly was not going to do it and i had a very lovely crowd of friends and most of us were college students and threw nice girls but nobody was going to wear a shadow it just wasn't on the agenda and then he asked me why i said because you know this is not what young people do and none of my friends are going to be doing it and i have no intentions of doing it and and that's all there is to it and then he said well you're planning to wear hats or cover your hair i said yeah yeah i'm going to wear hats i was excited about wearing hats that was like being grown up you know that hats with feathers and flowers and veils and all that kind of stuff and uh and that was it and then a year later a complete year later because i got married to shoulders evil a year later in the series he sent me a letter and i was just amazed that i got a letter from him and it was addressed just to me because usually it was to my husband than me that he would send you know rosh hashanah greetings or whatever it was and here this was just for me and i hadn't asked him anything or been discussing anything with and i was like really stunned and it was a letter and in the letter he recalled all my arguments oh i have said i didn't want to wear a shadow and he brought them all up and he said well if your friends are not going to wear it why can't you be the first one to wear it and be the leader and like put the whole thing all around that this is something that he wants all the women in the chabad to wear shaytal and he wants people to really influence other people and he thinks that i could be one of the people to do it and things like that what year was it what year uh 1956. okay so you got married in 1955 uh 1954 well it's like 54 yeah 54. yeah so it was 55 well it was like the end of 55. it was it was the end of 55 it was tishrei 55. so i said would be six because that was the year my daughter was born and i was pregnant then and i was getting tired of wearing hats because when it was springtime and summertime and you wear a skirt and a blouse it kind of feels silly to put on a fancy hat it just doesn't go with it and what the people i was living in crown heights then it wasn't boston anymore and everybody was wearing not everybody but the young women in khabad were wearing shade love so i saw it you know it's not such a bad thing so when that ever said uh he wanted me to do it so i told my husband to send back a note to say that i decided that i'm going to do it and then a day later my husband came back and said you can't believe what happened you can't believe what happened and so what could have happened you know you went to 770 like what's the big deal what could have happened and he pulled out an envelope and he says look what that ever sent to you and he sent me a huge check to buy the most beautiful schedule i could buy but that was his response to make it like to make you happy to make you feel proud to make it feel good and he just understood all of those things but that's only part of what he did for women because uh women at that time there was no women's lib and it's hard to understand that but women kind of like accepted that they were second-grade citizens and things but the rabbit told us we should make our own newspaper and that's when we started here to shaheen which was a magazine and i used to write articles for it and then he started to say that we should be active in ptas which the older women had been also but he said we should make a young shaykh and we should have conferences and conventions and he took such an interest in our conventions he wanted to know what our theme was and we would represent him like 10 different choices of themes and he would choose the theme for us like he was very actively involved in anything and everything you know every article that went into the year to shaheen he read through all those articles and he actually corrected some of the things that he felt that word should be changed he was very careful with phrasing and wording and things like that and he took such a great active part in making the women rise to the occasion of being forefront runners of things so in in in continuation of that thought how you were you were with the babbage from birth but you were with lubavitch in in crown heights from the 50s till now right at 7 70 out of 70 years you you've seen you've seen the development um how do you um how do you explain that what what what do you say you know and it goes in line with with all the work you've done over so many years but but this is amazing because very few people can say they were there from the 5th of the day and barack hashem they're on the zoo being interviewed so it's it's fascinating especially as i said a woman a jewish woman or a baptist woman i mean this is fascinating so you spoke you spoke about the beginning that what you know your relationship with the rep in the 50s and his and his um you know putting the foundation down for for jewish women now continue with the development in the 60s 70s 80s and and one more point my mother-in-law was it was a survivor she was raised in costa rica she came she married my father he would learn to know babaji shiva narcissa and she you know as you was you know went to a public school there was no there was no girls school and um there were women in crown heights uh one name comes to mind was esther chagallo who i'm sure you know mr chagall and it seems to me there was like an organized group of women who were mohammed who educated these new these new women of all the laboratory guys and many of them flew him and they married nala barbara because robert piney cough married none of the babies have married girls and had mental vision and and and and about friends mostly did not marry them they were happy that they met a from girl that you know my father was so happy that that here's a girl that wants to and she also got money from the rebbe and put on schaefer so it i always had this in mind it seems like that there were women in the community who like took the role of you know educating these these women to become you know uh women and and and therefore their children will continue in that way that does this uh ring a bell to anything that you remember happening in the 60s in particular no i think it was more the schools i think it was more the schools the curriculum of the schools that changed through the years for example uh if you go back to the 60s i don't think they were teaching tanya at that point and that was that was introduced later and it was also more of an emphasis of the girls did not go to seminary in those days because i think that past world war ii period uh i wasn't really here then but i think at that time most people didn't really have much money and they needed the daughters to go to work because they really needed people to help to support families expenses were high and people really needed every child in a large family to go to work so people did not go to seminary so seminary became initiated that was a new thing and it was really it's a way of extending education so it was the education of the young people that really blossomed and i think it was the young people who more or less influenced the families themselves also because the women were too busy raising their children so they didn't really have all that time but then they made like nishay haba they had gatherings and things and people had opportunities to go to classes and so on and so forth but i think the schools had a very very important part and that ebb was very i mean you know hana for example that was something that came in for balachivas that didn't exist before the 60s there was nothing for father children so it's really systemized school education and the emphasis of extending education and uh the rapper was very very not happy with people going straight from high school into college he wanted them to be more mature and older so that they could really be able to deal with all the things that were going on in higher education um did did robert jacobson or be strolled jacobson did you have a relationship with him uh as you were you know growing up in his 50s in the 60s did you have any connection with robbie jacobson he was a friend of your father's i know he was a friend of my father's actually yes but he really had nothing to do with us after my father was sniffed there uh no not really i uh i was very good friends with uh ruffalo altine she was one of the first people to actually become involved with the yiddish shaheen and uh she was in the english part of it and tamagurari was in the hebrew part and also the other thing was that then went out of the different places uh the rebbe was very concerned about the shlokhas and he would send speakers from new york to come to different women's events he was very interested in should be women's events in all the towns not just for men so they would have like special events during pouring time they would have women's week and so on and they would send rep i remember going to different towns to speak and that was also a new thing that he wanted people to come to encourage the people who were so that they should see people from new york and get a little strength from them and all of that was part of this whole thing of women's organization women's activities activities for women by women very very much i don't think any other hasidic group had that to the extent that we did even had radio programs i remember being in the catskills going to a radio program and speaking on the radio every week before shabbos and uh these whole things after that encouraged us to do right so about yourself what did you do in the 60s and 70s you know um were you teaching were you i i understand you did you led tours for many years can you tell us a little bit about that well i was very active in the pta in the cerrifica and i took it for one year and i ended up doing it for four or five years that's the kind of thing that happened uh you become involved with the school and so on uh i started with the tours that was very interesting because uh i loved traveling and my husband was a chauffeur and we really couldn't afford traveling and then when my children started going to camps and i had summer vacations because i was teaching and some of the vacations i i was awful summer i decided i wanted to become a tour guide and uh i asked the dev about making my own business i had no idea what business meant because nobody in my that my mom i had a brother in business but my father was a robin you know i wasn't used to the idea of business i had no idea what it meant and i was on the dollar line and i hesitantly asked that ever if i had i have an idea to make tools to scandinavia and the debit just his smile was so big and he was so excited and he gave me an extra dollar and he was like so encouraging about it and he really was very supportive and every year he would ask me to give reports what happened in scandinavia and every year when i came back and it was a little time and i went for dollars he was saying in scandinavia in any of those countries so i felt that i was the unofficial shleaf that was giving regards to what was happening in all those places and it was really really exciting because uh the rapper really wanted to know the internal politics and so on and so forth and he cared he cared about every single thing that happened i remember telling him one time we were in a hotel in norway up on a mountaintop it was totally up on the mountaintop in no man's land and my men went out before dinner and they were standing and dabbing outside and i saw a man watching them very intently and i kind of like was wondering why and then i asked him why he was if he had any questions or anything and he said he was an american and he was jewish and he couldn't believe that such orthodox people could travel like that and come to such far away places and just keep the religion and be so cool and comfortable of it and he was just so overwhelmed with the whole thing and then the next morning before breakfast the men were outside davening and they were putting on twilight and they were with the talisman it was so dramatic because you're on top of the mouth and your mama's like you feel you're touching the sky and and the atmosphere was just splendid it was just a gorgeous day and that man was standing there again and as he was standing there watching i thought to myself oh wow he really should be putting on twilling but i can't go up and do that so i went up to one of the men in the group and i said could you please put filling on that man and the man said why so i said oh because he might like it he says did you ask him i said no maybe you could ask him and the man was very nice and he said i don't think so and then i went up to somebody else and was the same response and then the third person said okay i'll do it i said okay so we went up to the man asked if he wants to put on twill and and lo and behold he says yes i would love it he says i haven't put on twill and since i was by mitzvah and now i'm 50 years old and then he put on the tilling and then at the end he said whoa this was like the most exciting part of my whole trip i just really felt invigorated by all this so when i was on that dollar and i told that story to that but he was so happy to hear it he was so excited so like this was part of the kind of thing that happened on my tours okay so now bring now let's uh transition to the last uh your last endeavor the the last project that you told me about uh i'd like to please share it because it's important what you're doing now uh what i'm doing now okay so as a result this is so annoying as a result of all all my travels uh i ended up this uh katzman casper from across the street from me had a cable tv program yes yes and years ago he asked me to do some programs on his cable tv program so i did a program uh that was discussing something with somebody with another woman and then i did something about travel to sweden and my troop and i also did tours to spain and this woman in california was putting together a film about matchmaking in the in the among from people and she found these these uh interviews that i had with him and she contacted me and asked me if i could be in it and i said well i'm not a professional shotgun i've made a few of him and yeah i'd love to because i like to do anything so like i'm with you now you know it just asked me to do something i like to be part of things so as she was interviewing me for that i said you know nobody has ever made a documentary on scandinavia and it's really like somebody should make a documentary on it of how scandinavia was there and how people in scandinavia were supportive in sweden of the people that came from the war and so on and so forth and so she made the film and it's called passage to sweden and i'm a star in the film and i do a lot of narration and stuff and the film is being presented just so many places she got like eight to ten awards for it and we've had it presented in toronto we had it in israel i was just in bed shemesh in israel and we had a beautiful event there and uh it's just very very interesting but can i add something on that you didn't ask me something else okay so one of the things that uh came onto the scene which i had never really thought about you know how things happen in your life and you don't think about them they just come up so like i think it was like four or five years ago i had a phone call and i was just mystified by a woman calls me up and she says are you hannah scharstein and i said yes and she says i'm so relieved i'm so relieved i've been looking for you for a long time and i'm like you know who are you what's your name she tells me i have no idea who she is she says i'm not really looking for you i was looking for your father i said my father my father was gone a long long time ago like why would you even look for my father so she tells me this interesting story that her mother had been if there and she was going through her mother's belongings that she had in a safety box in the bag and in those belongings there was a very important document and the document had a stamp on it a wax steel you know that they used to heat up wax and then you put a stamp into it so you could see the name where it was from it's almost official kind of thing and in that stab it said haravyakov visual super stockholm sweden and she looked at this document she knew it was very important and the document seemed to state that her mother had been freed and she said to me what does that mean i said oh i know what you're talking about then it all come rushing back to me from the time that the first survivors came to sweden my father was busy night and day day and night day and night night and day that room was always filled with young women who were agonate and they heard that my father could help them get it get please explain for our audience are actually women who are i would call chained they are not able to go on with their lives because they don't have an official divorce from a husband so how do you get an official divorce that happens if the husband is alive he can give you a get if he wants to if he doesn't want to there's a lot of problems to make him give you a get but you need an official jewish divorce in a in order to be able to remarry of course they did not issue death certificates so here was a very big problem they came to sweden and all the survivors were placed in displaced persons camps all throughout germany and i guess poland and in sweden also the men and women were in separate camps and they used to issue weekly or bi-weekly lists of names of who was in the place because hitler marshmallow was such a horrible person he messed up people to such a point that nobody knew where anybody was and so the only way you could find out if you had a sister a brother a family member a cousin anybody was when you looked at those lists and you saw who had survived then you could connect with them so these women would look at the list and they would look for their husbands right they would have the name and the and the city but if two three months would go by and you didn't see the name you presumed that the person was dead but there was no way that my father could just take that as a sign that they were dead so my father would have to contact people that came from the same town in whatever camps they were in sweden where they had men and asked them to come for interviews to say if they had seen that person in camp if they had been with them and everything had to be done and reported by hand because they didn't have i mean these were not the dark ages but they didn't have all the equipment electronic equipment that we have today you didn't have cell phones you didn't have computers you didn't have ways of doing this so it had to be done by hand and he had to have the people personally come to him and they had to tell all the details and he had to write it down and he had to get several witnesses to see if the reports matched and if it made sense and the reason for that is because you have to be so extremely careful so my husband must have been able to give a get to several hundred women because there was so many young women who were left among us in those days without again not your husband you mean your father my father my father i'm sorry and then they didn't have the get and in all those cases in the hundreds of cases that he did and he freed the women there was only one single time that it happened and it was just just a tragedy that the woman got the get she got to be married and after she got remarried lo and behold three months later the husband reappeared oh my god he had gone through woods he had gone through hell he had joined resistance groups and he had ended up in ukraine and then lots of time to come back from ukraine to the western part of europe and then he came back to the western part of europe he looked through all these reports and he found so great excitement that his wife was alive and she was in sweden so he went to sweden and what happens when he comes to sweden he finds out that she's married and what happens when he finds out she's married she had to divorce her new husband and she could not remarry her first husband either and the tragedy was so enormous to after the war have lost two husbands that this was my father had to avoid at all costs so this was an enormous enormous problem so when i told this woman your mother was freed your mother must have been married and she says absolutely not my mother was only married to my father and i said well there would have been no reason for her to come to my father to be freed if she had been not married and then it came out that her mother had gotten married in the ghetto had been married a very short span of time and then the husband had died and then she remarried and had that this woman but uh that that was like such a difficult chapter and i think that was part of why my father just didn't want to stay in europe anymore because it was so overwhelmingly sickening and sad and tragic to hear all these people talk about their experiences in the war that uh it was above and beyond words right okay i want to just one final thing and then we'll finish although i could talk with you further so so much longer the time behind the short so what would you say to the young laboratory girls in bassrivka high school in the seminaries all over the world thank god we have lebacha schools for bad schools for women all over and yiddish schools base yackles i mean it's flourishing but in particular in chabad and i'm asking you this because of your seniority and your you know in yiddish you know what you went through and you saw an entire generation so words of wisdom really words of wisdom experience so it's almost 28 years since jimmy thomas you know did that but we don't see him we don't hear him um there's a lot of questions that young people have what's your message to them one thing that i'm very concerned about is do not be overly impressed with the world around you don't be overly impressed with twitter and facebook and all the modern technology because a lot of that can be a tremendous amount a waste of time i really feel very concerned about that i think computers are fantastic and you can gain a tremendous amount of knowledge but you have to be selected you can go on zoom and you can hear wonderful lectures and while you're doing things in your house while you're taking care of family or children or whatever you're doing you can do a lot of learning so i think that learning learning learning is a tremendous tremendous importance and i think that a lot of people as they finish high school or seminary many of them kind of feel that they're done with the books you close the books and you go on and there are so many exciting things to pull your way in different directions and i think it's so important to know that learning is lifelong and that you always have to stick to that and you have to strengthen yourself and learn more and more and more and i think being a level-headed decent human being with good meters you really need to build yourself up you really need to have a lot a lot of inner strength and so there's so much time that you can waste on nonsense and being overly impressed with what's happening in this in the world around you uh that really is not healthy and that really is not worthwhile and meaningful you see like it can be so important this year and then year around it's like forget it that's old stuff that doesn't make any sense anymore so like to really know what the values are and to really enrich yourself and be very strong and i think that girls who are not married yet and girls who are still single i think that if you're waiting to get married don't sit back and wait but use your time well use your time be occupied always be occupied always be busy do worthwhile things get along invested activities all kinds of worthwhile organizations and things and be active and be the best that you can be and what's your feelings about the machines coming no comment i guess this is the end of the zoo thank you very much