10/22/2024
How will we dance this Simchas Torah? I recalled the moving story of the boy and the soldier on Simchas Torah in Vilna in 1945 & found my answer.
If you don’t know the story, google it. It’s a worthwhile read. But here's a very brief summary and my answer to the above question.
Vilna’s once great shul had been stripped of almost everything, including its Torahs. It had no sifrei Torah left to dance with.
Vilna had once been home to 100,000 Jews; now only 3,000 survived. A ragtag group of Jewish soldiers, refugees, and survivors stood in the ruins that Simchas Torah.
A young Jewish man wearing a Soviet Army uniform could not take his eyes off a young boy. He approached father and son. “Is this a Jewish child?” he asked. “Yes,” the boy’s father said.
This young Jewish soldier had been drafted into the Red Army early on in the war, and lost his entire family to the N***s. He could hardly believe his eyes. After traveling thousands of miles, passing through countless devastated communities, in all the months of his travels, he had not seen one Jewish child alive.
“Could I dance with him on my shoulders?" he asked the father, who nodded permission. The soldier hoisted the boy high onto his shoulders. "This is our Torah scroll!” he cried. With tears streaming down his cheeks, and a heart overflowing with joy, the orphaned soldier joined in the dancing, yelling between sobs, "This… this child is our Torah scroll!"
To everyone in the sanctuary, young Avraham represented the rebirth of the Jewish people. They danced with him as the living Sefer Torah that they desperately longed for.
That night, after being held like a trophy by emotional strangers, young Avraham told his father that he loved the “Jewish monastery” and that he wanted to be Jewish.
He recalls that Simchat Torah as “the beginning of my life as a Jewish person.”
*That single Simchas Torah dance changed, and charged, both the boy and the soldier’s lives forever.*
Avraham came to be known as Abe Foxman, the former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, and the League's national director emeritus. Mr. Foxman lived a richly Jewish life, fighting antisemitism, and defending the future of the Jewish people.
The Soviet soldier became Rabbi Dr. Leo Goldman -- a rabbi, chaplain and educator -- who devoted his long life to communal work, teaching and comforting Jewish people in Oak Park, Detroit. For decades, his home was the go-to address for Holocaust survivors and Russian Jewish immigrants.
I do not know how they danced in Vilna in 1945. But, dance they did. I do not know how we will dance this Simchat Torah. But, dance we must. **One thing that I know for sure: we must not deprive our children and grandchildren of that dance. It has the power not only to change, but to charge their lives forever.**
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