Here’s My Story: It’s Written On My Forehead
Rabbi Eluzer Elimelech Kowalsky
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As a young yeshivah student in 1939, my father, Rabbi Sholom Dovber Kowalsky, had an inkling that there was going to be a war in Europe. His father, Rabbi Chaim Nachman Kowalsky, was a staunch Lubavitcher chasid, and had sent him to study in the Chabad yeshivah in Warsaw. Shortly before the war, he had been accepted to the prestigious Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin, but then he heard a man named Ze’ev Jabotinsky give a speech warning the Jews to leave Europe. My father decided to take action. Without permission from his family, he borrowed a few hundred dollars, took a volume of the Talmud – Tractate Shabbat – got on a boat, and went to America. His parents and two sisters followed him shortly after, getting out just before the war.
My father received his rabbinical ordination from the Ner Yisrael yeshivah of Baltimore, and after I was born in 1951, he went on to serve in rabbinic positions in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and later as the rabbi of Young Israel of Hillcrest, in Flushing, Queens. In between, we also lived for a couple of years in Crown Heights.
When we moved to Hillcrest, and I was eight years old or so, my family went to receive a blessing from the Lubavitcher Rebbe. I didn’t know any Yiddish, or much of anything about the Rebbe, except that he was a very holy man. At one point during the audience, the Rebbe opened his drawer and gave me a little Mincha-Maariv – a small prayer book for the afternoon and evening services – as a gift.
The next time I came back was before my Bar Mitzvah. This time the Rebbe gave me a full prayer book, as well as his blessing for the occasion. That visit endeared me more to the Rebbe and to Lubavitch and I began praying according to the Chabad custom, like my grandfather had done.
In tenth-grade, I was attending Williamsburg’s Torah Vodaath yeshivah, spending all week in the dormitory and coming home every Shabbat. One week, my father invited two or three young men from Lubavitch to Young Israel of Hillcrest. They spent Shabbat with us, shared chasidic teachings, and as a gift, they gave me a copy of the Tanya, the foundational work of Chabad philosophy; later on I also attended a weekly class on the Tanya.
On Sunday mornings, I used to schlep back to Torah Vodaath with a fellow named Freddy who was a few years older than me. He would drop me off at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, a few blocks away from the yeshivah on South 3rd Street.
That particular winter weekend, the weather was bad. Sunday morning was cold and there was freezing rain. So I asked Freddy if he could take the Metropolitan Avenue exit off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and drive me, along with a friend of mine who joined me for that Shabbat, straight to the yeshivah. Being a very nice fellow, he agreed to take us to the door.
As he drove, we became engrossed in conversation, until suddenly I realized that we were passing Metropolitan Avenue.
“Freddy!” I said with a start, “That’s the exit!”
The road was empty, so he made a quick turn. But we were going 50 miles an hour, so the car slid, and then it slammed into a solid cement wall. It was an old-style Mercury with no seat belts, so I flew out of my seat, and my head went through the windshield.
I was out cold and in really bad shape. Once I was taken to the hospital, the police got a hold of my father. “Rabbi, you’d better hurry,” they told him. “We don’t know if he’s going to make it.”
Before he came, though, my father called 770 and spoke with Rabbi Leibel Groner, the Rebbe’s secretary, with whom he had a good connection. He gave Rabbi Groner my name, and asked if the Rebbe could pray for my recovery.
Thank G-d, after the second or third day, I started coming back to consciousness. I have no memories of those first couple of days – at first, I didn’t even know who I was. I was severely concussed, and I ended up with over ninety stitches on my forehead and over my eyes. After being laid up in Long Island Jewish Hospital for a while, I came home and recovered for a few weeks until I was ready to return to yeshivah.
“We have to go to 770,” my father told me, once I was able to get out of the house. We went there for the afternoon prayers, which the Rebbe prayed in the smaller study hall near his office. When the Rebbe was returning to his office after the service, my father approached him.
“This is my son,” he said, presenting me. “The one I called the Rebbe about.”
The Rebbe turned to me and said, quoting the words of the prophetess Chanah in the Book of Shmuel, “For this boy, did I pray.”
Hearing this from the Rebbe, in no uncertain terms, took me aback. I felt a personal sense of gratitude, but my eyes opened up to something beyond that: Here is a man leading hundreds of thousands of people all over the world, and yet he has the time to care about every single Jew – even this fourteen-year-old kid.
The Rebbe’s prayers had their effect: He interceded on my behalf and G-d saved me!
Thank G-d, I had a full recovery, except for one thing: One of my teachers in Torah Vodaath, a Breslover chasid named Rabbi Wasilsky, told me not to do plastic surgery to clean up my forehead. “You should leave a sign to remember the great miracle,” he advised me, “and to remember that the Rebbe prayed for you.” So I still have some scars to remember this story today.
Alongside a career in finance and computer science, Rabbi Eluzer Elimelech Kowalsky has worked extensively in the field of kosher supervision. Semi-retired and a longtime resident of Midwood, Brooklyn, he was interviewed in January 2024.
