A Business, Not a Handout
by Dovid Zaklikowski for Hasidic Archives
When Mr. Misha Bliner arrived with his wife, Lena, and son, Ilya, to the United States in 1974, he was greeted in Crown Heights as a hero. He was one of the organizers of the Lubavitchers who smuggled across the border out of the Soviet Union. Ultimately, together with a group of the organizers, he did not make it out. He was arrested for those activities in 1950.
When Sara Deitsch traveled to the Soviet Union in 1972 to visit their family, they met Mr. Misha Bliner at the home of Hendel and Chana. At one point Sara told him that if his family came to the United States, Dovid would surely give him a job. Soon after they arrived, Mr. Bliner went to see Dovid at the office.
The businessman told him that he could work for him. “I would be very happy. But a man like you should not work for anybody.” Dovid said that he would assist him in establishing a business.
Mr. Bliner found a warehouse in Brooklyn, and the New Haven businessman supplied him with second-quality rolls. Mr. Bliner then exported most of the merchandise to Africa.
At first Mr. Bliner thought this was a new venture that Dovid had conceived. But then he heard from Mr. Meir Malka, whom Dovid had sent to him, that he used to purchase second-quality rolls directly for Deitsch Plastic. “I am out of this business,” Dovid told Mr. Malka, “and now it is Misha’s line.”
The two soon became very close, and the Bliners would regularly visit the Deitsches in New Haven, even vacationing with them in Florida. “They understood each other,” Rochke Sandman said, “comprehending the similarity of the lives they both had lived, fraught with fear and danger.”
When Dovid joined the Rebbe’s farbrengens, they would sit next to each other. If the businessman was late, Mr. Bliner would hold a place for him. At 770 they became a duo, and you could never tell which one was the recipient of the other’s kindness. “Dovid Deitsch was one of the most impactful people on our life,” Ilya Bliner said. “He never treated [my father] as a lesser, but as an equal.”
An excerpt from the new book Yards of Kindness: The Life of Dovid and Sara Deitsch, available at HasidicArchives.com.
