וְאֶת הַנֶּפֶשׁ אֲשֶׁר עָשׂוּ • מה זה משפחת פורטוגאל ? סיפור אישי מבעלת תשובה (שינוי קול כמובן).

it's not enough that my family got [Music] out unfortunately the world lost a phenomenal person the other day his name was harabi Shai Yak of Portugal of scen the skin of a bar Park and he was such a phenomenal human being that thousands came out to give him honor after his passing now my life was impacted by him and by his entire family so I want to share with you a little bit about my story and about the skin story itself so my story is that I became religious when was a teenager and I moved to New York from out of town and I was just kind of floating around I didn't really find my place but I knew one thing I wanted to make my way into the hidic world but all the doors seemed closed to me so anytime I met a person I would ask them is there somebody that you know of that might be able to help me and one day I was given the phone number of har raish Shai yakov's sister and I called her up and I told her I said you know I I would like to live with cdic family so it was during supper time when I called the kids were in the bed background and she was so nice she was so warm and she made time for me she said come over to my house I want to get to know you so I went to her house and we smoo and we hit it off right away and what she ended up doing was she rebuilt her basement which was an unfinished basement apartment in order that I should have a place to live I lived together with her and her family and they treated me basically like it was a daughter they helped me find my husband I got engaged I actually had my engagement party in this cin of his living room sorry his dining room actually and I became very very close with the family they paid for my wedding they made sure I had the finest of everything I had high quality Furniture I had beautiful clothing they spent thousands and thousands of dollars to make sure that I was set up very honorably and I kept telling them I'm like I don't need this I'm a very simple person I I don't need fancy things but they were so concerned with my feelings they said you know you're abolish tra you don't have a strong Community you don't have a huge family we want to give this to you want to make sure you feel very good with yourself so they made sure that I was really set up in style and the day of the wedding itself it was unbelievable we had a small wedding call but it was packed to the brim not only my husband's friends and his family but the entire scinic Community came out and it was just it was rcking away it was unbelievable and everybody treated me with such dignity leash yakob and his brothers and his brothers-in-law they actually danced in front of me as if I were their own niece so I had this cin was dancing in front of me it was an incredible honor and after my wedding I maintained a connection very strongly and even though I no longer am exactly the same as a skin Community keeping the customs in exactly the same way that they are I have a different view of judies in these days I still have the very close bond with them I love them I respect them very much and they too respect me as well so they're just a phenomenal phenomenal family and let me tell you a little bit about the history the scin dynasty began with harabi shyaka Portugal's grandfather heru Portugal who inherited the M of leadership from his own father when his own father passed away when har Portugal was only 17 years old this was in the town of scenia and what is now mova and her Portugal and his Ron re Shen Roo they took over the town of scen but they ended up moving to the city of chernich when their own Rabbi the SAR Rabbi came over to them and said you know Li this year I think you would be much more successful in the city of chab bit so I think you should move there so the Portugal family they picked up and with the chanov and it ended up saving their lives because in July 1941 the Nazis came to the city of sceni and they had the villagers dig a mass grave and they murdered them 300 people with more than 100 children but the Portugal family had moved away and they were in chernich and they were able to continue this cin Dynasty from the city of chernich now chernich had a special blessing that was given to it by the B who was a very righteous person and he blessed the city of trovich during a star during a time of suffering the city of chernich should suffer less than the surrounding areas and this blessing came to fruition because during the war trovich was not affected as drastically as the surrounding areas and many um people escaped the Holocaust and they came to city trovich and many War orphans actually found their way to the Portugal household which had its doors wide open for anybody so the portugals they ended up taking in between 60 to 70 War orphans during the time that they lived in chernich and after they lived in chernich they ended up moving to Bucharest and at that time the war was finishing and War orphans were trickling in from all over the place so of course the Portugal said these are Jewish children we have to help them and at that point in time there was also tremendous blessing because reiton chain Roo had been gifted years beforehand a huge sum of money by her sister who had been very well too her sister come to visit her when they when they were still back in scalini and she saw the way that this young couple was living and they didn't have much furniture or anything so R General sister said you know what I want to give you some money go buy yourself good Furniture buy yourself pran carpets to make sure that the house is nice and warm you know buy thick curtains so re took the money and she packed it away and she's like I don't know what kind of furniture I want so she held on to that money she took out this money after the war and she went to D out wagon fulls of potatoes and flour and she just started baking cooking for everybody she's like if you're hungry come and eat if you need a place to sleep come and sleep and the Portugal family ended up at adopting more than 1,000 children in the days following World War II now these children of course couldn't all fit inside of the houses they already had 607 children living with them from from the days of chernich but in Bucharest they realized that they needed much much more room so they ended up purchasing a building for boys and a building for girls and they also opened up a school now this was a religious school and the children learned about Judaism but there was also another school that was in the time book rest and that was a z a school for Jewish children and it's very interesting these two schools start out competition but over time one by one the children transferred over to the to the religious school after they saw how kmack how delicious it was there was so much singing there was so much happiness and they said you know what we want to be over there in scin everything was about helping these children to flourish and it was actually a group of orphans that arrived in the Portugal household shortly before Passover which is a very very busy very intense time of cooking and cleaning and getting rid of all the L products but these children they arrived at the Portugal house at this time and they said one second but we didn't celebrate perm how can we celebrate Passover without celebrating perm now perm is a holiday that is kind of like the nightmare of the days before Passover because it's full of leav food and it's just it's busy in a tactic and everything but the riton saw that these children were emotionally distracted they just come through the Holocaust and she said you know what these children need perm even though this holiday already passed and Passover was on the horizon she rolled up her sleeves she started baking comage these leav cookies and she prepared them costumes and she just made sure that they had everything that they could be as emotionally settled as possible because that's where the Portugal family is so these children were raised up with incredible Love by the Portugal family and they took the name Portugal upon themselves unless they had their own last name that they knew and that they wanted to carry on with them now the Romanian government was keeping an eye on all these activities and they did not like it har lasia Portugal was a very powerful person and he was respected but what was not respected was Judaism now her Portugal had been given a special dispensation during the war that if some was really important to the chernich community then he could have given them a um an a title that would prevent them from being you know taken away and murdered so of course whoever Liv of Portugal he found something really important and an incredible job that every single person was needed for and they weren't able to take anybody away so this power that the rabbi had combined with the children that he was saving and the Judaism that he was teaching it made him very unbeloved by the Soviets and moreover they saw that not only were just children trickling into them but he was actually going out to get children you see at that time there were trains that were arriving constantly into Bucharest and every day there would be children coming from all around Europe and they would just be trying to find family so the portugals would every day be down at the train station together with a bunch of other people and each of them would grab a child and say oh this is my this is my nephew this is my you know whatever it is because the law was if a family member claimed an orphan child then the communist government could not take them so they went out to save every single Jewish child because a Jewish child being taken away from Judaism is an absolute tragedy and the communist government that was trying to present itself as a non-communist government wanted nothing more than destroy the Jewish soul in fact the Romanian government at that time allowed Judaism to be practiced openly they allowed the synagogues to be open they allowed people to dress jewishly but people would just randomly disappear from the community children would be kidnapped and they would be sent to re-education camps where they would be psychologically and physically broken to the point that they accepted communism upon themselves so the communist government wanted to stop the portugals from spreading Judaism and they tried to find every way to incriminate the Portugal family they said they were spies and there were many times that Haria himself was imprisoned but also his son harabi s Abraham and his wife Ron razel were also imprisoned now Ron razel was actually imprisoned during the first year of her marriage when she was pregnant with harav Shai Yakov Portugal the person who we mentioned at the very beginning who just recently passed away she was imprisoned when she was pregnant and they beat her so viciously that it's a miracle that she did not miscarry but but she did become crippled from that point on so throughout the years the devs would be taken and imprisoned the very last time they were imprisoned both Dev were picked up both the father and the son in two different locations and so Abraham was picked up from his house in the middle of the night he was ripped out of his bed the revon that I lived with she watched her father being ripped from his bed in the middle of the night and she rumors her father telling her kin pray pray that we should be reunited cuz he don't know if he was ever coming back because that's how it go sometimes people just disappear and they would never come back she was around 9 years old at the time and for 6 months they didn't hear from the deas she didn't hear from her father she didn't hear from her grandfather nobody knew if they were dead or alive and it was a very very traumatic very scary time then when they took hadab so Abraham they took him and they threw him into a car and they had three people sitting on him one in his head one on his back one on his legs and they sat that way for a very long time and they drove around and around and around in the end come to find out they only went a few blocks away but they were trying to create a psychological torture and at the same time he felt like he was suffocating that he couldn't breathe underneath it so the the ne were taken into this deep dark dungeon where there was no artificial light and there was no um there were no windows and they were put down there for 6 months from until shab and during this time they were separated and it was very hard for them to keep track of time and they were only able to keep track of time just by monitoring when the guards were changing so they were able to get a rough estimate of time now both of these Adas even though they were separate they were both completely committed to God to Judaism and they knew that they were not going to give up an ounce of their Judaism so both of them ended up keeping shabas for two days because they couldn't know if their calculations were correct or not moreover during the time that they were in prison they didn't have access to kosher food so both of them subsisted off of a single sugar cube and a little bit of matah that they had that they rationed throughout the six months of they being imprisoned so when they both came out they were both extremely fro extremely mated and R Portugal he was so mated that his coule his um yamaka head covering actually fell all the way down to his nose because he had lost so much weight now while they were in prisoned they were also beaten they were also tortured in order to try to get them to crack to admit that they were spies or to that or to admit that other Jews were spies now r z of Portugal he was treated a little bit less intensely but his son was treated very very very very badly to the point that many times he thought that his sha was just going to go out they would do things like they would smash his head repeatedly against the Smith wall they would take his hands they would slam a door top of his fingers and it was one time that they were beating him so viciously with these wide leather straps that he was down on the floor and he he thought he was going to die so he raised his hand for a second and he raised his hand just so I could get a breath of air but they thought okay he finally is going to crack and when I realize that he's not saying a word he will never implicate another Joe then I told him I said not even your ashes will be going back home and they continued to viciously beat him thank God he survived that encounter and at that moment that he thought his soul was going out he actually created he was actually given from God a beautiful nigan called that is well known in Glen circles and the song Tell this day and that's one thing that was known for he used to always carry tape recorder with him because he would always have these very very holy neum that would come down and he would just sing these beautiful beautiful songs and there are many hundreds of them that are recorded for posterity in Glend circles and they're really truly very very beautiful so how did the scin end up getting released what was what was asce what was the Divine Providence that took place in order for them to return home to their families so while they were imprisoned there was an American Jewel named Rabbi Harry brunstein that was on his way to Russia and he was going to perform circumcisions there but he had heard about very holy SCA and he wanted to come visit him so he made to stop Romania on his way and he wanted to spend chabas there together with the sken community so he lands in Romania and he heads over to the family's house and he shows up at the door and riton Razo opens the door and she's like okay you're an America do the authorities know that you're here do you have permission to be here she was very scared because they were already being you know called spies and then an American should show up at the door that would seem very highly suspicious and you know they were under such scrutiny at that point in time that even the neighbors wouldn't come directly into the house except for during players they all walk all the way around the blocks so they wouldn't go anywhere near the Portugal house because that's how high the danger was but the Jewish people would always dobing together with a minion so during dobing times everybody would come running in and they would go running back out as quick as they could so Rabbi Harry brunstein he didn't realize what a significant danger he posed to the Portugal family with his American bort and he actually ended up getting arrested a short while later and he spent the shabas evening in jail and he was interrogated by the Romanian guards and when they realized that he had no prior connection to scen and he was really speaking the truth they let him go and they allowed him to go spend um shabis warning daving together with the S community so re brunstein he went into the shore and rivon risel saw him come in and she picked up a sitter a prayer book and she opened it up and she was standing and watching everything pretending to pray really she was looking for a moment in which she could communicate with re bronstein she could tell him what what was happening so re bronstein he's looking around and he's like look okay wear's the St that I came to see and he he's looking and he doesn't see him and he doesn't know what's going on but the community is Ding and they get up to the braa of M servant which is to release the bound and everybody starts bowling they're crying and they're crying he realized is that something's going on so he sees hero and he enters his way over to her and they're standing next to each other both of them pretending to pray but they're really whispering to each other and she tells them the whole story that her husband and her father father-in-law were both imprisoned in a Romanian prison and he understands that he has to do something so mat shabz when he left scen he ended up flying to England and he made such a rocket that the world could not ignore it any longer and actually I think the Secretary General of the UN dog Hammer I can't say the name um he actually ended up getting involved and he put such pressure on Romania he told them he said you better release this Portugal family get them out of Romania otherwise there is going to be a price to pay so Romania ended up taking it seriously and they actually let B scinet of his go but they had to make sure they tortured them up until the last minute so first off they came to them actually on chabas and they told them they said you know it's chabis and you have to sign your release paperwork but of course the de said they said no no it's chabis we don't sign on chabas they held true to the Judaism it didn't matter if they were going to be released they said we'll wait we'll wait a little longer here in this horrible prison but we are not breaking God's commandments so they didn't um they ended up being released on a Monday happens to be but when they were released they were taken outside after being in a dark dungeon for 6 months and they were pushed outside in the middle of the day when the sun was at its bright just to make sure they had a little bit more moment of torture when their eyes had to try to adjust to this thank god um a Jew passing by found them and he had a car and he put them in the car and he drove them home and the skin were reunited with their families and one year from the time that they were imprisoned by that time they were packed up they were ready to go they were out of Romania and as soon as the plane landed in Budapest Portugal he got off the plane and he asked for telephone the very first thing there in the airport and he started making calls he said it's not enough that my family got out he said I need every single Jill to be able to leave Romania and he put such pressure on Romania that all the Jewish people who lived Romania whether they were religious or not religious were given the choice of if they wanted to stay in Romania or not and this was a tremendous salvation for Romanian jewry who was suffering at that time now the Portugal family ended up moving to America America and they have the beautiful scin Dynasty there the brothers are spread out and they continued taking care of people the same way that they took care of them in Romania nowadays there are two very wellknown organizations one of them I guess more wellknown than the other one that is that are run by scin so one of them is called and that is an organization that helps to outfit Brides they give them everything that they need same way that I was given they give them furniture they give them clothing they give them whatever it takes to establish a household in an honorable fashion the other organization is called and it's an in Israel and it is a orphanage system that takes in children that even the government feels that they can't handle children who were drug addicted children who suffered extreme abuse children who were so problem I that the government says these kids are just too hard we don't know what to do with them S Glenn says we're not giving up on anybody we take them we take them all every single Jewish child is a precious Soul unto themselves and they take them man and they raised them up and they married them off and it's just it's truly an unbelievable organization so what I want to tell you is that if you want to know how I was treated by the cic community specifically by the Glen hassed community I would just tell you that I have never experienced such incredible kindness I'm not going to say that the community doesn't have problems every Community has problems and there are things that need to be worked on there are ideologies that might need to be straightened out but overall CID kindness that's the overriding factor inside of the c community as I have been exposed to it so that's my story and I'm sticking to it [Music]