Rebbetzin Chana’s Memoirs: Purim in Exile

In this 18th installment of the series, Rebbetzin Chana describes how she prepared Hamantaschen for the holiday of Purim, and shared them with two unappreciative Jewish guests.

Hamantaschen

The festival of Purim arrived. We had a Megillat Esther, which I had once included in a food package I had sent my husband.

For Purim we were visited by two evacuees, a young Jewish man, inclined towards Communism, and his female neighbor, an engineer who had once studied Yiddish and was interested in Judaism.

Some time before, I had set aside some white flour, with which I baked two hamantaschen. Although it’s a minor custom, it played an important role in our lives, reminding us that we were still human and still Jews, and that not every day was the same. We were reminded that we could be concerned with loftier concepts— not just with thinking about our daily bread, and drawing the pail of water from the well and hauling it though the mud, always spilling some and making the already swampy ground even muddier.

The two guests were our company for Purim. They regarded hamantaschen as an excessive extravagance and, as was prevalent in that culture, inveighed against the “old-fashioned” customs.

Bat-Sheva Althaus

Passover approached, and with it the end of my husband’s five year sentence.

One morning, on my way to get milk, I saw a young woman carrying a suitcase, whose clothing and appearance indicated she was not local. When she came closer, she stopped and asked, “If I’m not mistaken, aren’t you Chana?” I was somewhat startled, but when she began talking, I recognized her as the daughter of Eliyahu Chaim.

She had traveled specifically to meet us. I was unable to bring her to our home, however, because I had to prepare food supplies for the next 24 hours and within an hour there would be nothing left. She had been traveling for 48 hours—under the prevailing difficult conditions. She hadn’t been able to sleep at all in her extremely cramped seat. After arriving at the station, she had dragged herself more than a kilometer through the mud, and was now so exhausted that she had no strength to remain standing in the mud to wait for me. I asked the young son of a non-Jewish neighbor to direct her to our home, while I proceeded on my way.

After completing my errands, I returned home only to find she wasn’t there. The boy had sent her in the wrong direction, taking her far from our home, and I had to go out looking for her.

Working to save us

When Mendel Rabin—who had been staying with us, as I’ve mentioned—arrived in Alma-Ata, he and his brother Hirsh told their acquaintances about his visit to us. With tears in his eyes, he described our plight and the important steps they had taken to help us with what we needed, how for many reasons it was important to hurry and to find someone to bring us the documentation.

Obtaining all the necessary documents had been very difficult and had cost a fortune. They were “bought” and obtained only after extensive intercessions in various government offices. The funds for all this had been contributed privately by good friends. Some had donated tens of thousands of rubles, a large portion of their wealth.

The release documents were already signed by the government officials of the republic, so the task of bringing them to us could not be entrusted to just anyone. Nor would just anyone accept such a mission; being discovered with documents confirming an exile’s release before the end of his sentence would spell extreme danger for the courier and those who had worked to obtain them. At various train stations—some of them on the line to where we lived—NKVD agents would board the trains and ask to see what the passengers were carrying on their person. Disobeying was never an option.

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