At 92 years of age, Baruch Mordechai Lifshitz walked slowly to the podium at Chabad-Lubavitch of Midtown Manhattan. His back was slightly stooped and his beard was fully white.
But when he began talking, people in the audience were taken aback by the vibrancy and strength of this one-time Soviet prisoner’s voice. Speaking last month, years since being sent to Siberia for giving encouragement and assistance to Moscow’s Jewish community at the height of Communist oppressions, he sounded like a man on a mission.
Former Soviet Prisoner Tells Stories of Oppression and Jewish Pride
At 92 years of age, Baruch Mordechai Lifshitz walked slowly to the podium at Chabad-Lubavitch of Midtown Manhattan. His back was slightly stooped and his beard was fully white.
But when he began talking, people in the audience were taken aback by the vibrancy and strength of this one-time Soviet prisoner’s voice. Speaking last month, years since being sent to Siberia for giving encouragement and assistance to Moscow’s Jewish community at the height of Communist oppressions, he sounded like a man on a mission.
With his grandson, Rabbi Levi Haskelevich of the Lubavitch House at the University of Pennsylvania, translating from the Yiddish, Lifshitz related for the crowd a few of his life’s experiences.
Born in Ukraine in 1916, Lifshitz – known affectionately in the Lubavitch community as Reb Mottel der Shochet, roughly Mottel the ritual slaughterer – entered the world amidst a revolution at home.
“When I was six years old, my father said it is time to go to religious school,” Lifshitz began. “My teacher was an old and bent-over man named Reb Faikin. There were only two other children in the class.
“One day, the police came and they said to our teacher, ‘What you’re doing is illegal! We are going to put you on public trial,’ ” continued Lifshitz. “At the trial, the prosecutor declared that our teacher had been corrupting us by teaching us Yiddish and the crowd reacted with a raucous round of applause to this accusation. Reb Faikin, being 90 years old, was allowed to go free on condition that he would no longer teach. Yakov Maizlik, a teacher at another school, was not so lucky. He received a two year prison sentence.”
As the years went by, Communism’s grip strengthened.
