Mrs. Devorah Groner
5 September 2024
We had been married for more than a decade, with five children and one more on the way. After our marriage in 1946, we had been working at the Chabad school in Providence, Rhode Island, and then spent eight years in Buffalo, New York, teaching and working with the local community, until we had to leave when the school there closed down. Throughout this time, my husband, Rabbi Yitzchak Groner, had made a couple of trips to Australia and New Zealand, connecting with local Jews and raising charity for recent immigrants from Russia. On his second trip, the community in Melbourne asked him to stay on as a rabbi, but he had responsibilities and we weren’t yet ready to make such a move.
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Instead, in 1956, we came back to New York, where my husband would work as a fundraiser for the Chabad yeshivah network under the direction of Rabbi Shmaryahu Gurary. The Rebbe approved only reluctantly: “To Australia, you don’t want to go; in Buffalo, you don’t want to stay; but you need to support your wife,” he remarked to my husband. “So you may as well take the job.”
But life in New York was also challenging, and the Rebbe often sent my husband away to speak in and report on out-of-town schools in Boston, Worcester, and elsewhere. Then after a couple of close calls with our little children – Miriam was nearly run over by a truck and then Yossi bumped into a taxi when he was out with his uncle – I began to feel uneasy, like we weren’t supposed to be in New York.
That year, 1957, my husband had a personal audience with the Rebbe, where they discussed various ideas for his future fundraising and outreach work. It was late, and at one point, the Rebbe stopped and gave a heavy sigh.
“Reb Yitzchak,” he said to my husband, “We are caught up in such trivialities.”
A few months before Reb Moshe Zalman Feiglin – a pioneer of Jewish life in Australia whom my husband knew from his travels there – had met with the Rebbe to discuss communal matters. Later, we found out that at that moment in Australia – just as the Rebbe had been sighing – Reb Moshe Zalman had been hit by a car. He was already in his eighties by then and passed away a week later. (more…)
