Braiders Challah Faces of the Community

Dina Ulitsky

Please tell us about your family background. My grandparents on my father's side are from Kherson, Ukraine. My grandfather, Pesach Kaganov, was, as his last name indicates, a Cohen. Judaism was observed in their family, but not exactly in the way we observe it now, being members of the Lubavitcher community. They had kashrut, holidays, traditions.

I know very little about my grandparents on my mother's side. My grandfather died at the front at the beginning of the war, and my grandmother died when I was still young.

The following story illustrates the role of Jewish tradition in my grandparents’ family.

My parents were ordinary Soviet Jews, without an external traditional component in their life. My father was an architect. My mother worked in a drawing bureau. When my husband and I were at the first stages of our return to Jewish observance, we were planning to attend the kaparot ritual on the eve of Yom Kippur, which entails waving a live chicken above our heads before it is is slaughtered. I called my mother and said that we had to get up very early to go somewhere. To which she exclaimed: “Ah, so you are going to wave the chicken!” I was very surprised and asked: “How do you know about this?” She replied: “Well, every year dad brought home chickens and roosters and waved them over the heads of the whole family.” For context, the family did not reside is some random town but in the city of Leningrad. This means that in the family of my grandfather (whom everyone called Boris, but, as it turned out, his Jewish name is Benzion), Jewish traditions were observed. I always thought that my mother's name was Elizaveta Borisovna. But as a teenager I saw my mother's passport open and saw that her real name is Leya Bentsionovna.

How did you come to start keeping Jewish traditions?

One day I happened to come to the Kabbalah Center. The mysticism of Kabbalah was intriguing to me, and I succumbed to persuasion to buy a whole set of twenty-six for $500. My husband, Arkady, was surprised by my interest in Kabbalah. He advised me to contact the rabbi of the community, Rabbi Zaltzman, to find out his opinion. It turned out that the rabbi knew about this center, and their practice of insisting people purchase numerous expensive books.

From that time on, Rabbi Zaltzman became our weekly guest, and we would share long, intimate conversations about Jewishness, and about the Rebbe. Through these encounters, Jewish truths were brought before us for the first time. In preparation for the next visit to the rabbi, my husband (and he is a physicist by profession who worked with NASA) opened a book by Stephen Hawking (an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and astrophysicist) related to the theory of the formation of the Universe (the Big Bang), and prepared a list of questions. Rabbi Zaltzman said that he was not a specialist in the field of physics, and advised my husband to speak with Professor Herman Branover, an Israeli physicist from Ben-Gurion University, a worldclass scientist who would be vositing Toronto for a series of lectures. After meeting with Professor Branover, Arkady understood the answers to questions related to the topic of “Science and Religion.”

And then I called a taxi, gave the driver all the books I bought at the Kabbalah Center, and asked him to take them back.

In one of our later meetings, Rabbi Zaltzman spoke about the need to convert our kitchen to a kosher kitchen. We answered him: “Rabbi, our food is already kosher – we don’t eat pork, we don’t mix meat with milk, because we don’t consider it good for health.” After a brief explanation of the essence of kosher, we realized that our understanding of this concept was far from the truth and made the important decision to kosher our kitchen. As I began separating the meat plates from the dairy plates and shifting them from shelf to shelf, I became increasingly confused. By that time, Rabbi Zaltzman had already told us a lot about the Rebbe, about his relationship with every Jew. A small portrait of the Rebbe stood in our kitchen. And so, looking at the portrait, I mentally turned to the Rebbe, asking for participation in this process. When all the cabinets and drawers had already been emptied of dishes and thoroughly washed, I decided to check one of them. Despite the fact that the box was previously cleaned, I noticed some kind of shine in the far corner. Reaching out, much to my surprise, I found a dollar coin. Holding this dollar in my hands, I thought in confusion: “How did he get there, because everything was already removed.” I remembered Rabbi Zaltzman talking about the Rebbe giving every Jew a blessing along with a dollar for to give to charity. The question arose: I started the path to Jewishness together with my husband, so where is the dollar for him? Obeying an incomprehensible impulse, I looked into the same mystical box. Something flashed again in the corner, and I took out a second dollar coin. Everything that happened just went beyond reality. But that was not the end! An unknown force again drew me to the box. I open it, and in the same corner I found a small card that was usually distributed by Lubavitcher organizations at the time that was called “The Good Card.” So I felt the presence of spirituality and connection with the Rebbe was manifesting in this process in a real way. To be continued.