New Englanders Trudge Forward, Under Record Blankets of Snow
There’s snow, and then there’s the snow that has buried Boston and its environs. Since the start of 2015—as in, the last 40 days or so—Beantown has received nearly 77 inches of snow and more is expected by week’s end. Many say there’s simply nowhere to put it, with residents dealing with narrow roads and difficult driving conditions, as well as schools closed for days on end.
But that hasn’t stopped one rabbi in Western Massachusetts from trudging through three feet or more of powder and slush to deliver newspapers and more to the elderly.
Given the number of snow days, Rabbi Chaim Kosofsky, a teacher at the Lubavitcher Yeshiva Academy in Longmeadow, Mass., has turned his days off into days on, performing mitzvahs such as visiting some elderly neighbors in a nearby housing complex.
“I bring them a Russian-language newspaper that I get from Chicago called Shalom. There are about 25 people I bring it to, and I talk with them a little bit about their families, their grandchildren, and I put on tefillin with some of them,” explains Kosofsky, who traded in the snowstorms this week for a sandstorm on Masada, Israel, where he was leading a group of students taking part in a biennial school trip. “That’s become my snow-day activity.”
He also notes that school was also canceled last Monday, the date of theshloshim (the end of the 30-day Jewish mourning period) for Rabbi Dovid Edelman, the longtime director of the school who passed away Jan. 2, the day after he turned 90. Kosofsky says they had considered canceling the event because it had been snowing earlier in the day, but in the end decided to go ahead with it.
“It was a beautiful event,” he says, adding that “people came out for it, and we even had a bus full of people from Crown Heights,” the neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., where Chabad-Lubavitch has its world headquarters.
Helping Those Stuck Indoors
Schools throughout the region, such as the New England Jewish Academy in Brookline, Mass., have been closed for multiple days this month. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority canceled service on the area’s railroads Monday evening through the end of Tuesday. Roofs, especially flat ones, are collapsing from the weight of the white stuff, and people are reporting the snow as high as their elevated back decks and windows.
“Boston has seen record snowfall in the last two weeks,” Mayor Martin J. Walsh said on Tuesday. “The City of Boston needs your help to shovel walkways and hydrants. This storm clean-up needs to be a team effort, especially as more snow is predicted at the end of this week.”
He added that some 500 National Guardsmen will be deployed to assist with the snow-removal efforts.
While the totals aren’t quite as impressive in North Dartmouth, Mass., several feet of snow have piled up on the side of the roads, blocking walkways and forcing the cancellation of school there for three straight Mondays in a row.
“We usually get a lot of snow in the winter, but not so close together,” says Chani Benjaminson, co-director of Chabad-Lubavitch of the South Coast in North Dartmouth, Mass., with her husband, Rabbi Aaron Benjaminson. “This is so unusual; it’s been two weeks straight of significant snowfall. We walk to and from school, and that’s a challenge now because the streets aren’t cleaned well, and the snow is not cleaned well on the sidewalks.”
She noted that a number of seniors in her community have been stuck indoors because of weather in recent weeks. “They do not go out when it’s like this,” she says, “so we’ve been sending them meals and doing their supermarket shopping.”
‘Hard to Walk to Shul’
In New Hampshire, where snow is like “white gold” given that winter sports are a large part of the economy, the Krinsky kids in Manchester aren’t getting any time off from school.
“They’re in online school, so unless there is a loss of power, they are in school,” says their father, Rabbi Levi Krinsky, co-director of Lubavitch of New Hampshire in Manchester, N.H. ,with his wife, Shternie. “They do look forward to going outside afterward and building in the snow.”
Southern New Hampshire has gotten “a few inches less than a ton of snow,” the rabbi joked a day after the most recent storm had ended. “It does feel like a ton. We generally get a lot snow up here and people do go about their business, but when it’s snowy and very cold, it’s hard for people to walk to shul on Shabbat. When it’s five or 10 degrees, if you are an older person and walking a mile or two uphill, it’s just too hard.”
Noting that he and his family have lived in Manchester since 1990, he says that regardless of the snow, “life goes on. It’s not like we live in a warm climate and get these storms. The mindset here is winter.”
“I remember when we moved out here, we asked people how high the snow gets in the winter, and they said, ‘Just wait,’ ” he continues. “Some winters are snowier than others, and this year’s storms have been very active.”
Still, he did get a group of Jewish visitors recently who had some business to do at a government office in Bedford, N.H., and who came to the Krinsky home. to daven Shacharit.
With more snow on the horizon, the rabbi is looking ahead to the upcoming spring holidays, which theoretically aren’t that far away.
Given the current weather pattern, it’s very possible “we’ll have snow for the [Passover] seders,” he says. “For sure, we’ll have some for Purim.”
