From Otwock to New Jersey

by Dovid Zaklikowski for Hasidic Archives

It was a harsh winter night at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport. The Toronto Balter family had just returned from Baltimore, Maryland, where Mrs. Carmela Balter’s extended family resided.

They had gone there to celebrate an early bar mitzvah for their son Ephraim, so all the family members, not used to the Canadian snow, would not need to shlep there. However, at that moment in the freezing upstate New York weather, they were looking for their car under heaps of snow.

Also at the airport was Abba Raichik, who was also returning from Maryland, where his parents are shluchim in Gaithersburg. He was waiting for the Megabus to return to yeshivah in Toronto. While he waited, the Balters dug their car out. When the family was done, Abba was still waiting. They asked him what he was waiting for, and when he told them, they offered to give him a ride to yeshivah.

The Raichiks and the Balters were no strangers. Ephraim’s grandfather, Yehonoson Balter, was sixteen at the time when he went to the Lubavitch Yeshivah in Otwock, Poland. It was 1939, and being young and unfamiliar with Lubavitch surroundings, he came to the yeshivah with a measure of trepidation and uncertainty about his bearings.

There, a young man approached him, took him around, and made him feel at home. When Yehonoson asked where the sleeping quarters were, his newfound friend responded that he should not worry about anything. “It’s all settled,” he said, and showed him a bed. The teenager was relieved and slept well in his new lodgings.

Weeks later, it occurred to him that space was at a premium at the yeshivah, and he wondered why he had been so fortunate to obtain such a bed. As time progressed, he wondered even more. One day, an older student bluntly told him, “Your friend gave up his bed for you.” Taken aback, he asked where that student had been sleeping. “On a bench in the study hall.”

Back in the car, there was no discussion about the Raichik-Balter connection. But Abba took a liking to Ephraim, gave him Chanukah gelt when they arrived at the yeshivah, and told him to keep in touch.

Nostalgic by nature, Ephraim said, “I connected to the Lubavitch aspect of my grandfather’s life.” It didn’t take much to push Ephraim to keep in touch with Abba. The two were soon learning together every week at the Toronto yeshivah. “It gave me a much stronger foundation for my connection,” Ephraim said.

During that time, grandfather Rabbi Yehonoson passed away. After learning for many months, Abba completed his studies at the Toronto yeshivah. While Ephraim at the time wanted to join a Lubavitch yeshivah, his father Akiva said: “While Abba is well connected in Chabad and can easily find a position as a shliach, Ephraim needs a degree to be able to support himself.” He thus continued his studies at a local yeshivah high school.

However, Ephraim never did connect there to the yeshivah atmosphere, and his parents agreed that he study at the Baltimore Lubavitch yeshivah, close to his mother’s family. There he ended up being roommates with Shmuel Dovid Raichik, a brother of Abba. The two soon learned of their grandparents’ connection.

“Rabbi Raichik was emblematic of a chassid,” Rabbi Yehonoson is quoted in Shadar: Touching Hearts, One Person at a Time, “entirely selfless, dedicated to the well-being of others, with no regard for worldly comfort, much less his own.”

In what began with another Raichik, over eight decades later, Rabbi Ephraim and Shprintza Balter went on to selflessly dedicate their lives to the needs of the Jewish community in South Bergen County, New Jersey.

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